White Horse Village - changing China

The long road to a good story
By Warwick Harrington
BBC Newsnight

The power of the river has been harnessed at the Three Gorges dam

White Horse Village isn't in the middle of nowhere, but it's pretty damn close.

Getting there is a story in itself and takes you through many different realities of modern China.

Leaving Beijing behind, a three hour flight takes us to the city of Wanzhou high above the raised banks of the river Yangtze.

This is China's previous industrial revolution. It's a long way from the vast new urban future being created in the capital.

Arriving in Wanzhou at night is like descending into a swarming, floodlit quarry. Arc-lights and neon shine between tower blocks, factories, building plots and cranes.

The hot and humid night air is thick with building dust, smoke and more pollutants than it's worth thinking about.

This is a city on the move, literally. Wanzhou used to be down in the Three Gorges, nestled between the banks of the river Yangtze and the steep mountain sides that contained its mighty power as it snakes its way through central China.

Now that the river's power has been harnessed at the Three Gorges dam, the entire river system behind has been flooded.

Villagers were always eager to see what had been filmed

So Wanzhou is being rebuilt on higher ground. A city of two million people relocated further up the mountain sides.

But we are headed east to the town of Wuxi. It's only 100 miles away but the mountains are so steep and the roads so poor that it will take us eight hours to get there.

The journey is spectacular, the scenery straight from a Hollywood storyboard about the Middle Kingdom.

Mist hangs on jagged peaks above, rivers forge deep chasms hundreds of metres below. If the cast of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon appeared round the next blind corner, it wouldn't be surprising.

This is our third trip on these roads and it doesn't get any easier. On our first trip to White Horse Village, our driver Mr Chen drank two litres of Tsingtao, the national beer, before attempting the climb over the mountains.

Warwick with his constantly changing story structure

He was good company but he didn't inspire confidence. On the way back his brakes failed. We hired a different driver for our second trip.

And, like a lot of China, the entire route seems to be only half built. Stretches of road are just rubble, others hard concrete. I spend much of the journey in silent appreciation for the wonders of tarmac.

Every now and again we meet isolated bits of a future motorway under construction.

Huge concrete struts poke up from the valley floor and half-built bridges reach over canyons, teasing us with the promise of a smooth journey. One day this road will connect White Horse Village to the outside world.

And when we finally arrive, the town of Wuxi is on the move too. They are rebuilding the old county capital on the fields of White Horse Village. And that's where Newsnight's work begins. It's just such a long way to go for a good story.