merican businesspeople, journalists, and politicians accustomed to running up and down the East China coast, from glistening boardroom to humming twenty-first-century factory floor to the front end of the airplane, should take a deep breath now and then and go west, or inland--or even just get out of town. It is a refreshing experience, in many ways invigorating, and in some ways very sobering.

I was lucky to have had that chance recently. From a speaking engagement in Tianjin, whose famous Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Area houses advanced production facilities for some of the world's most sophisticated companies, I headed to Sichuan, China's most populous province, home to 130 million people.

In the provincial capital of Chengdu, I passed through a new airport that compared splendidly with the new airports of the coastal cities. I marveled at the extent of the urban development that has swept over this inland provincial capital since the days, 15 or 20 years ago, when Sichuan was a regular stop on my China itineraries. I visited a proud business owner whose brilliantly lit five-story emporium sold only high-end furniture and accessories made in Spain. Then I hit the road to see things I really hadn't seen before.

And what a road. Heading north from Chengdu to Mianyang, "the road" was a gleaming, four-to-six-lane superhighway, perfectly graded and paved. When we hit 170 kilometers per hour, my eyes widened, not just out of fear, but out of a realization that, until a year or two ago, the Chengdu to Mianyang trip was a matter of endless hours and frustrations. Mianyang itself, with broad boulevards, beautifully tended public spaces, the massive Changhong Electric Co. television production facility rolling block after block through town, and a booming downtown commercial core, has been firmly "launched," no matter how far from the coast it lies.

On the other side of Mianyang, the superhighway ended, and we exited onto another road--National Highway 108, to be exact--which connects the great southwest (as far as Yunnan) to the northwest and ultimately to Beijing itself. Kilometer posts showed numbers in the 2,000+ range, the distance to the national capital. Occasionally the road could be called two-lane; most of the time it was "suck-in-your-gut" width.

Now the land heaved up; we entered the foothills of the Qinling, the great hill barrier that traditionally isolated the densely settled Sichuan Basin from the old imperial capital of Chang'an to the north (now the northwestern metropolis of Xi'an), and, indeed, from all of North China. We seemed to step back in time. The road was pitted and slow, overwhelmed with heavy trucks moving cargoes in and out of Sichuan on the only cargo route through the mountains. Country buses lurched and swayed, carrying peasants and traders from town to town, from county seat to outlying market villages, in this inaccessible region. Road maintenance was under way mile after mile--by hand. Sunburned men and women shoveled piles of river rock out onto the highway, sprinkled shovelsful of asphalt over them, and waited for the passing traffic to pack the highway surface. When overloaded trucks ruptured their springs, dozens of vehicles waited--with a good-natured patience utterly unknown in Washington, DC, I might add--to inch by the impasse. I was reminded of the first thing that used to be said about Sichuan in the last century: "Jiaotong bubian"--"Transportation is difficult."

The countryside was utterly gorgeous. Tiny fields of golden wheat alternated with rape or small plots of fruit trees. There were no large fields at all, no expanses of paddy, no plains of wheat, soybeans, or sorghum. The steeper mountainsides showed wild evergreen and deciduous growth. In market towns we passed warehouses where huge sacks of Chinese medicinal herbs from the mountainsides are collected and traded.

Roadside signs revealed that we had entered a region of poverty and announced programs for local government assistance to the impoverished. Aside from our highway, roads were scarce; the hills, bigger than the Appalachians but smaller than the Rockies, stretched out in layers to the horizon. People living in them walked to town. Yet children heading home from school were vividly clothed, their school bags ornamented with cartoon animals in bright colors. I wondered if there were other children for whom bright clothes--or school itself--were impossible.

We passed through the great Jianmenguan, a breathtaking narrow pass through towering vertical rock faces. We were on "The Road to Shu," (as Sichuan was anciently called), formerly a stone track no wider than a single person, immortalized in Tang poetry as "more difficult than ascending to Heaven itself." Steam poured from the engines of overheated trucks on their way up to the pass and out of Sichuan. Then we headed down, a racing river just below the side of the road. Now steam jetted from the hissing brakes of the heavily laden trucks struggling to navigate the twists and potholes on the steep descent.

By the end of the day, we had reached our destination: Guangyuan County Seat, essentially the last stop in Sichuan. The borders of Shaanxi Province, and of Gansu Province, gateway to Central Asia, lay a few miles further up the road.

In bustling Guangyuan, I learned from the mayor and his colleagues:

Urban construction had recently blossomed, much of it funded by investors from the uniquely entrepreneurial city of Wenzhou in the East China province of Zhejiang.

The military plants uprooted from East and Central China and flung into the inaccessible interior by Mao Zedong in anticipation of war with the Soviet Union 35 years ago had picked up and moved out, either back east or to more accessible locations.

I was the second American visitor to Guangyuan in memory.

There was now a new airport, with daily flights to key Chinese cities and connections through Xi'an and Chengdu to just about everywhere.

Everyone was excited about China's World Trade Organization (WTO) membership and hoped that it would bring opportunity to smaller and more distant communities like Guangyuan.

Wahaha bottled water (the traveler's friend in the scorching Chinese summer) had set up a bottling plant in none other than Guangyuan itself--living proof of a bright future!

But, most staggeringly, I learned that the superhighway that had taken me from Chengdu to Mianyang in an hour and a half would be completed all the way to Guangyuan by year's end: by 2003, Chengdu would be three hours' drive from Guangyuan County Seat. And the mountain communities through which we had labored would face a different future.

On the way back to the United States, I read intently about China's rural economy and the problems it faces: declining crop prices; rising taxes and fees imposed on farmers by parasitic local-level government bodies filled with cousins and in-laws "eating imperial grain" (as they say about those paid with taxes and fees extracted from the peasants); rampant usurious lending to these peasants by bottom-rung cadres struggling to secure the money that must be sent up the administrative chain to meet tax and fee obligations; out-migration of millions of rural inhabitants unable to survive on the land and hoping for better times in the neon-lit cities and humming factories of the coastal enclaves; the difficulty of implementing centrally directed economic, political, and social reform in the face of entrenched holders of local privilege; and the potential power of modern expose journalism. It was a reminder that much remains unsolved in this gigantic, fascinating, and sometimes incredibly lovely land.

For me, living in the world of favorite seats on 747s, busy business people, US and Chinese diplomats and government leaders, journalists and polemicists, congressional investigators, Washington trade diplomats, nongovernmental organizations, human rights campaigners, WTO trainers, and US and PRC think tanks, a couple of days on the road were more than a pleasant diversion. They were a reminder that all of us who engage with China are part of a human drama that we can only perceive in fragments, and that what we do in business and diplomacy connects to a big chunk of China's life in ways that we'll probably never fully grasp. Even so, I have a hunch we all ought to be thinking about what's happening outside of town.