HOW does one recycle a million or more bicycles? Whoever in Beijing knows the answer must be doing a roaring trade, for almost overnight the millions of bicycles that used to commute on the streets of Beijing when it was still Mao’s Peking have been replaced by metal ribbons of motors cars, buses, trucks and heavy trailers. Endlessly, they ply along the city’s broad avenues and curve into the six ring roads that girdle modern Beijing.

The China that innumerable Chinese dynasties shaped and squandered, the China that Napoleon predicted, that Mao Zedong liberated from its archaic past and his successor Deng Xiaoping catapulted into the 21st century with his socio-capitalist reforms, is on the move. It surges sleeplessly into the 22nd century, and if by chance it does encounter any red light, it pauses only long enough for the light to turn green again so that it can rush further forward.

Modern China is becoming rapidly a skyline of skyscraper statistics. Once, the only figure above a billion known about China was the number of its burgeoning population. Today, those 1.3 billion people are self-sufficient in food.

Chinese agriculture feeds 22 per cent of the world’s population from only 10 per cent of the world’s arable land. Its GDP rate of growth in 2005 was 9.9 per cent. It has exports of over 760 billion dollars. It has foreign exchange reserves of almost one trillion dollars. Every year, it adds to them another 160 million dollars — ten times what we in Pakistan have been able to accumulate over the past six years.

Today’s China has given ancient numerology a new twist: one out of every two cameras in the world is being manufactured in China, one out of every three televisions, out of every four washing machines, and one out of every five refrigerators.

Eight out of every ten pairs of shoes imported into the United States originate from China. China’s achievements over the past decade are, as its planners say, ‘extraordinary.’

The current 11th Five Year Plan which China follows as it once did the fine print in Chairman Mao’s little Red Book has set even more ambitious targets for the country. It anticipates a consistent annual GDP growth rate of 7.5 per cent and per capita GDP of yuan 19,270 (1995: 13,985 yuan). It aims at increasing expenditure on research, for example, from 1.3 per cent to two per cent and to invest in the service industry.

However, in certain key essentials, China leaves nothing either to chance or to its population.

The total population is capped with a one-child family policy. They have been warned to reduce water consumption per unit of GDP by 30 per cent, and to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP by at least 20 per cent. China consumes more energy than Japan and is second only to the oil-voracious United States.

China relies heavily on coal (64 per cent) at the moment, and its energy security plans include expanding its electricity generation capacity by more than 15,000 megawatts per year. Sceptics who doubt China’s word should read the opening chapter to its 11th Five Year plan: “Major development targets of the 10th Five Year Plan were achieved ahead of time.’ China intends to be both the socialist tortoise and the capitalist hare simultaneously.”

Meet anyone in Beijing and the only name you will hear extolled as the prime mover of its phenomenal economic growth is Deng Xiaoping. Go anywhere in Beijing and the only person you will find still wearing a Mao jacket is the embalmed figure of Mao Zedong himself.

He may no longer be the pulsating heart of modern China but he lies enshrined at the heart of it, in Tienanmen Square which he continues to dominate.

At the southern end, in the grand mausoleum built for him, his body is kept on display reflecting, almost radiating, an eerie yellowish glow. At the northern end, his gargantuan portrait hangs above the central doorway of the Gate of Heavenly Peace that leads into the Forbidden City. Only emperors could use that entrance; today, only Mao has a right to the space above it.

When he was alive, Mao would appear on public occasions on parapet of the Gate of Heavenly Peace and receive delegations of the party faithful.

Having shaken his hand, they would return privileged and glassyeyed to the masses waiting in the square below. Within seconds there would be a concentric ripple of movement as each person tried to touch the hand of the person who had touched the hand of the person who had shaken the hand of Chairman Mao.

A once living icon has now been replaced by a showcase, and his formidable aura by showcases crammed with flashy Mao badges and shiny memorabilia. To find a used Mao badge in China, one needs to go to a curio dealer.

To the youth of China, Mao is a valuable relic, just as the Great Wall is a tourist money-spinner. Fifty years ago, any mandarin who wore his traditional finery might have found himself summarily executed or sent to a correction facility; today tourists are encouraged to dress as Chinese overlords and to balance unsteady headgear dangling with ornate pendants.

Perhaps the most telling reversion in both China and Russia to pre-revolution days was a poster for an exhibition arranged in a gallery within the Forbidden City of artifacts from Russia.

The advertisement showed not the Red Star nor of the hammer and sickle, nor the teeming, toiling proletariat. Instead the single image used was of a bejewelled golden Easter Egg, made by the court jeweller Carl Faberge for Tsar Nicholas II to mark the anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.

Although China has, like Russia, privatized many of its state enterprises (60 per cent though still remain under state control), it has not created a hyper-class of multibillionaires. Moscow, for example, boasts that thirty of the world’s richest 100 live in Moscow itself. In China, wealth has yet to catch up with power, and power for the foreseeable future rests in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Deng Xiaoping had once said, defending his policy of liberalisation, that he did not care what the colour of a cat was so long as it could catch mice.

His cats remain ideologically Red and lean, unlike their Russian fat-cat counterparts.

Sentiment — even a nostalgia for Marxism — has little place in China. Smaller blocks of flats are giving way, like bicycles have done to heavier traffic, to high-rise apartment buildings and glitzy office blocks. Roads are being widened, hotels constructed, infrastructure expanded.

While most cities have a 20:20 vision, Beijing sees its future as through the singularity of a telescope. It has one objective: the Olympic Games in 2008.

Overtly the Chinese are constructing almost an entire city containing state of the art sports facilities. An Olympic stadium that from the sky looks like a bird’s nest, an Olympic pool that on its outside walls shimmers like reflections of water, and a huge Olympic village that after 2008 will be auctioned to lucky Beijing citizens.

Covertly the Chinese are training contestants for every Olympic sport, from ice skating to hockey. China does not intend simply to host the 2008 Olympics; they plan to sweep them and win the maximum number of gold medals.

And if the Asian Games 2006 being held in Doha are a dress rehearsal for the Olympics, and the performance of the Chinese is any indicator, smaller nations like Pakistan should consider cancelling their bookings to Beijing and practice instead for the 2012 London Olympics.

Understandably, China’s dramatic emergence has created as many Sino-watchers outside China as there are Chinese living within. An early voyeur was Lord Montgomery of Alamein who toured China in 1960. He recalled being taken into the canteen of a people’s commune where the staple diet was balls of rice with a little vegetable filling. Men received two, women one and a half, and children one ball each. “Don’t you want anything more?” Montgomery asked one of the workers.

“Of course,” he replied. “But we eat like this so that our future generations can eat better.”

Beijing is not rural China. Nevertheless, the present generation is the beneficiaries of that earlier sacrifice when in Beijing, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and McDonald burgers are almost as commonly available as noodles or rice balls.

A span of only 47 years separates Montgomery’s visit from modern China. Will another forty-seven see a transformation in the United States economy, where a gas-starved US will bicycle to the nearest McDonald and be rationed two burgers for every man, one and a half for every woman and one for every child? It could happen.