Season 1
White Horse Village is a British documentary series which investigates the problems faced by a small village in China that is about to be sacrificed to the growing superpower's industrial expansion ambitions.
The three-part series premiered worldwide on BBC World on Tuesday 11 March 2008, at 22h30 (South Africa time). It forms part of BBC World's "Inside China" season theme.
Repeats
Wednesdays: 06h30, 15h30
Thursdays: 17h30
Fridays: 03h30, 10h30
Sundays: 06h30
Synopsis
White Horse Village is situated one thousand miles from Beijing and is the development spot for a new high rise county capital.
The hope is that this new metropolis will open up China’s interior, shifting the country's centre of gravity west and kick-starting an economic superpower.
Deep in Wuxi County in the west of China, a sleepy village is undergoing radical change - a symbol of China's economic revolution.
White Horse Village is symptomatic of one of the most important stories in China, the story of whether Beijing can take an ancient brooding hinterland of subsistence farmers and drag it into the narrative of a rising 21st century superpower.
Until now White Horse Village has been sheltered from the great convulsions of Chinese history, but location has been both curse and blessing.
Tucked in behind the mountains that rise to the north of the Yangtse's famous Three Gorges, it's always been too remote to play a role in China's triumphs or its catastrophes.
All that is about to change.
The Three Gorges project - the world's largest hydro-electricity project - is nearing completion. Its reservoir will bring ocean-going ships to the quays of the municipality of Chongqing.
The hope is that this gritty fogbound megalopolis can do for China what Chicago did for the United States in the 19th century: open up the interior, shift the country's centre of gravity west and kick-start an economic superpower.
The people of White Horse Village are some of the poorest citizens of this proud new city state. Until now, their only means of escape from subsistence farming was to move in search of factory of construction jobs on the coast, the muscle behind China's economic miracle.
Now the miracle is coming to them. Around 500 million farmers need jobs in services and industry according to Beijing, and coastal cities can't absorb them. Beijing's answer is that new cities must rise in the fields instead.
Within three years a motorway will run from Chongqing to Wuxi County. A new high rise county capital will be built, and White Horse Village marks the spot.
China's progress is unforgiving, the past not permitted to stand in the way of the future. Like many other nameless villages before it, White Horse Village must make the necessary sacrifice.
Emerald rice fields are disappearing under concrete and the houses the farmers built themselves, houses they were married in, houses their children were born in, are being demolished. Even the ancestors have to go - their very graves are being moved.
Will the farmers be persuaded to sign up for demolition? Will they get their compensation and what will they spend it on? How will they adjust to urban living and reinvent themselves as another workshop of the world?
In three special programmes, the BBC’s Carrie Gracie travels to White Horse Village: a portrait in miniature of China’s transformation.