In my column last week, I lamented about the lack of coverage by national media organizations of what is really going on in rural China, especially the fresh experience in the new countryside programme - rebuilding community medical care, spreading education and all that.

Then a few colleagues laughed, and told me that, basically, I should turn to the Internet for more pictures of China's countryside. Plenty of the seamier side stories are well documented by such-and-such websites.

Thank you very much, but I do not think I need the education of that part. Having spent nearly a whole decade in re-education in Xinjiang's desert and elsewhere, during Chairman Mao's great social experiment of the "cultural revolution (1966-76)," I know pretty well how bad the bad things can be. I myself, and my skin, still carry the memory of many stories, or scars reminding me of them.

What I want is not just hearing about other people's new difficulties. I believe all Chinese rural citizens, even young boys and girls, can tell about their hardships in getting some basic things in their lives, from drinking water to accessing useful public services.

But you can always hear them say they want a change of their destinies, and the opportunities with which to start their struggle for different lives, even if they are not sure they can get better lives in the end.

Those who care about the countryside can do many things to help the change. But one kind of crucial help which I think is lacking is to spread the good stories, along with exposing the cause of people's difficulties, about how change is being actually made. No social process can be possible without information of this sort.

It is not enough, as the full-page article I read last weekend signed by a scholar whose name frequently appears in all highbrow publications did, to simply point out that farmers should be the chief beneficiary of the new countryside campaign, and that bureaucracy should be prevented from meddling with the new countryside programme.

Nor is it useful, as frequently seen in the front-page reports of the national press, to just announce that yet another amount of money or resources, denominated by a near astronomical number has been released. Money allocated from the government's accounting book is just the beginning. And no matter how big, it can hardly compete in inspiration with the details that rural citizens have worked out in running their villages and townships.

Fortunately, what I have read for this past weekend is different from one week ago. It is a book entitled "What has happened in Zhejiang: Democratic life during an era of transition," but in English, simply Democracy in Zhejiang.

And from the title in English, one can immediately tell what the author had in his mind. It was the young French man, Alexi de Tocqueville, who documented politics of the early United States in "Democracy in America."

The author, Zhang Jingping, is a journalist who graduated from university in 1998. Unlike Tocqueville's aristocratic background, his Chinese admirer of more than 150 years later is a young man from an apparently obscure background. He tells us his mother is almost illiterate.

But Zhang is privileged in some other ways. He is from East China's Zhejiang Province, a hotbed of entrepreneurship with more than half of its gross domestic product contributed by the private sector of the economy. So in the last few years, when reporting for a national business newspaper, he had an opportunity that many other journalists do not. That was to document the elections, appeals, recalls, fights for local financial power, bribery and even political murder in his native land.

But as the author tells us, despite all the problems it has encountered, grass-roots autonomy still stands a good chance of healthy growth in this relatively affluent coastal province. And it is not just a small part of China. It is important because it has a 47 million population, much larger than the early United States, and also has perhaps the largest group of private entrepreneurs in China.

I think anyone who cares about China, or about its future role in the world, would have interest in reading about investigations of this sort - the real changes in the countryside in Henan, in Anhui, in Sichuan or in Yunnan.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 04/17/2006 page4)