Hands of Pride, China

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 Much of China today is about modern and money, admirable for its singular focus and determination to make up for lost time. Yet the public reality of progress in the cities masks an elusive and often passionate China of the countryside, a land of hard work and strong opinions. While there have been tremendous improvements in people's lives, many of the visible realities of labor in years past have been simply buried by an avalanche of cars, steel, and concrete.

In most places, labor and farming remain powered by pride and the human back - pickaxe and flat shovel are the tools, four men to push a cement container and twenty-five to dig a trench are the machines. Away from major cities, only the most telegenic projects benefit from contemporary building techniques. Here, at least, only a job impossible to do by hand seems to be done mechanically. Deliveries of bricks to building sites are still done by donkey cart. If they go home, one can see crews of exhausted men, some clad incongruously in suit coats and thin canvas shoes, bicycling out of town long after dark, or if they don't, worker's laundry drying on the skeletal upper floors of an office tower under construction.

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