In China, farmers are too busy to notice the Olympics

Harvest is main concern on countryside

EDWARD CODY/WASHINGTON POST Amid China's stunning economic boom, Yi Feng - and millions of others like her - remain tied to farming villages. (EDWARD CODY/WASHINGTON POST)

FAN SHEN, China - Pausing to catch her breath, Yi Feng let the two nylon bags stuffed with fresh-picked tea leaves settle to the ground. She took off her straw hat and used it to fan away the perspiration dripping down her weather-lined face.

"The Olympic Games?" she asked, apparently perplexed that anyone would bring up such a subject at harvest time on these prime tea-growing slopes in coastal Zhejiang Province. "With all I have to do these days, how could I pay attention to the Olympic Games?"

Yi, 54, has always spent her days in Fan Shen, part of a timeless China dominated by the seasons of the year, the rhythms of farm life, and the joys and sorrows of raising a family. For her, and for many of her generation in the vast Chinese countryside, the Olympic Games have proved a distant echo, another propaganda theme from the central government that has little to do with getting in the crops on a hot August day.

About two-thirds of China's 1.3 billion people have remained tied to farming villages, despite the economic boom of the last 30 years. Focused on their land and their crops, many of them have felt little in common with the glitter of the Olympics, the $40 billion makeover of Beijing and the nationalist pride of their countrymen as China strides onto the international stage and take its place as a world power.

"It is tea-drying time," said Yi Song, 55, chuckling contentedly as fragrant green leaves were fluffed and warmed in a wheezing array of ovens that rotated ceaselessly behind him. "We don't have time for that."

Most foreigners in China, particularly those participating in or attending the Olympics, have come into contact with a recently emerged modern nation of skyscrapers, traffic-clogged streets, and increasingly outward-looking people with money to spend. But most Chinese have yet to enter that world. Theirs still revolves around the land, leaving, as Yi said, little time for Olympics festivities promoted by the Communist Party.

Auditing firms announced that up to two-thirds of the Chinese viewing public watched the Olympics' opening ceremonies. The state-controlled Chinese television system sent the ceremonies out live across the country on multiple channels, leaving little choice. But the elderly farmers and tea merchants here apparently went to bed early that night. Most said they had skipped the extravagant pageantry that was beamed around the world and cited as a window on Chinese culture.

"This time of year, we're just too busy," said Wen Xing, 44, who was selling watermelons and squash from a truck bed alongside the main road running through the village.

Some Fan Shen residents, the eldest among its 600 families, did not recognize the Mandarin Chinese word for Olympics when asked about their interest in the goings-on in faraway Beijing. When it was translated into their Zhejiang dialect, they smiled and nodded but showed no particular sign of enthusiasm.

An elderly woman shearing leaves off a well-tended row of tea bushes on a hillside high above the village, for instance, smiled toothlessly but silently at repeated questions about the Olympics. Finally she cut off the attempt at conversation and turned back to her work, saying, "I don't understand you, and you don't understand me."

It is not that Fan Shen, surrounded by neatly terraced hillsides just inland from the East China Sea, has not enjoyed its share of benefits from China's meteoric economic progress.

Previously known as one of Zhejiang's poorest and most remote backwaters, the hills around here have become more prosperous since the government built a concrete road connecting with the highway to the nearby port of Ningbo, allowing trucks to carry tea down to market more easily and buses to carry tourists up to scenic overlooks.

Since then, the green tea from Fan Shen has found more customers in Ningbo, Shanghai, and beyond. The tea has gained a reputation as some of the finest in a country where people rank their teas and recognize their origins the way Frenchmen do wine or Yemenis do coffee.

Many houses here long ago installed running water and most now have electricity. Some tea plantations have been connected to the village by concrete steps, easing the climb from terrace to terrace.

Although human waste is still used for fertilizer, stored in decorated cauldrons that are deployed at intervals around the terraces, a dam has backed up water in the deep ravine below Fan Shen, guaranteeing a supply of water for irrigation.