Olympic China

And change, of course, is what allowed China to dream of hosting the 2008 Olympics, an event that has buoyed national spirits despite the human and economic costs. "Because this is about China," Xia says. "It has nothing to do with politics. The 1.3 billion people here, they want to see the best happen and this thing handled by themselves. I'll work for the Olympics for free, as a volunteer. This has been a thing with Chinese people for the past 30 years, when we see how all foreigners think China's a different world--strange place, strange people. Now we're going to show you what we can do. This is not about counting money in the pocket. It's about heart."

Xia Song's father has a room in his daughter's Beijing apartment. Each day the old man wakes up and squints out the 11th-story window and sees it: the Bird's Nest, glimmering in the haze. "It's very new, very modern, very original," Xia Guangqiang says. "After the whole thing got built I liked it."

He has been charting its progress for three years, this vision of China rising. The outside latticework is all but finished. The men hustling over its skin look like ants.

When the world comes to Beijing next summer, it will hear one phrase over and over from the Chinese crowds. "Jia you!" fans will scream at the diving well, at the table tennis competition, on the night of the 110-meter hurdles at the Bird's Nest. " Liu Xiang, jia you!" The phrase (pronounced jah yoh) is a colloquialism meaning Come on! Step on it!, but the literal translation is most appropriate for these times: Add oil!

Watching China work is not like seeing a sleek laptop process millions of bytes of information per second. It's like witnessing a giant turbine, circa 1965, belching smoke and shooting out sparks; you're not sure how close you want to get, but you can't take your eyes off the thing because it's whining louder by the second and the ground is shaking and--wow!--it keeps producing more and more money. After the recent spate of stories detailing nightmarishly lax food-processing standards and labor abuse, it was not unusual to hear Westerners compare the country to Upton Sinclair's turn-of-the-century America: China, the new Jungle.

So early one Friday evening you head over to the Bird's Nest again and slip through a fence to the workers' quarters. China is in many ways still a developing country, and, yes, you can smell the evidence: the stench of sewage wafting over the paths between the three-story temporary housing units. It's dinnertime, so some workers are lined up with tin bowls for the ladled stew. The rest squat on their haunches in the dirt, already eating.

Yet the men are smiling, laughing even, which you think must be because you're a foreigner and they don't want to make waves. You go up to room 426, where 12 men sleep in bunk beds on mattresses of plywood, earning $50 apiece for their seven-day, 63-hour workweek. "It was such a surprise to come here and work on the Nest," says Tang Yonggang, a steelworker who has been on the site for 2 1/2 years. "I couldn't believe it. It's the best job I've ever had."

Tang, 26, hails from Henan, one of China's poorest, most corrupt provinces. A decade ago he left a job harvesting wheat and corn in his hometown of Puyang and came to Beijing as part of one of the great migrations in history, the ongoing flow--120 million and counting--of Chinese workers from rural to urban areas. He has been home just twice to see his wife and baby daughter since he started working on the stadium but figures the $700 he sends back each year makes it all worth it. The Bird's Nest job, Tang says, is his first tenuous foothold, his first real piece of China's market economy. "For sure there's more opportunity," he says. "Everybody has to fight for chances in life."

Night has already fallen over Beijing, streetlights buzzing in the thick air. You drive back to your fine hotel, where one day you saw former U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke and the next you saw Yao Ming, and you pass the Silk Street Market, with its stalls of counterfeit goods and the massive mural that in English neatly subverts the official Beijing Olympic motto from "One World. One Dream" to "One Dream. One Shopping Paradise."

Next to the words are the photos of an unidentifiable hurdler and the Bird's Nest, and you think again of Tang's obvious pride, and how he said he'll be watching the opening ceremonies next August--maybe in Beijing, maybe back in Puyang--and thinking, All the world's athletes, and I helped make it. Part of the Olympics is mine.