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In the south west regions of Chongching and Yunan, the glamour of Beijing and Shanghai is 2,000 kilometres away.

China's future depends on the success of its particular form of capitalism. While the scale and pace of change is perhaps the fastest any society has had to cope with, its benefits have been uneven. The glamour of the east coast continues to outshine the poorer regions of the interior.

Now millions of farmers who once were forbidden are being encouraged to move into rapidly growing provincial cities. But for jobs and social services to also "go west", private investment will have to follow them.

In this special report, Radio Australia's Karon Snowdon travels 'Beyond the Boomtowns', to discover a capitalist experiment China can't afford to have fail.

China's capitalism has more than one face.

In Beijing, showrooms selling luxury cars vie for business on streets where people still pedal bikes to go to work.

In hilly Chongching, the shoulderpole man still gets paid a few cents to carry loads in baskets strung from a pole across his shoulders.

Chongching is home to some of the most important cultural heritage areas in China.

And its near the world's largest dam...the Three Gorges project - one of the foundations of China's future prosperity according to its national leaders.

Millions of people are on the move - some forced to relocate by the rising waters, some looking for a better life.

Chongching was separated from the enormous Sichuan province in 1997.

Since then its been a centrally administrated area and the beneficiary of Beijing's "Open Up the West" policy to develop the western provinces.

The upper Yangtze river, home to the city of Chongching. [Karon Snowdon, Radio Australia]

The Mayor of Chongching, Wang Hongju says achieving a balance between economic growth, environmental protection and higher living standards is his most difficult task.

"Chongching is the experiment area approved by the Central government for a coordinated urban and rural development," he said.

"I'm very pleased to tell you that since the great western development program started, these three sectors are developing quite smoothly in a coordinated way.

"In the past nine years, the growth of GDP per capita is 11.3 per cent. Last year, the growth was 15.3 per cent - even in today's China, it's a very high speed.

"At the same time, the environment situation has not worsened, in fact it has improved. For instance, the air quality reached a standard of excellent and good, in the year 1999...[on] 172 days, however last year it was 292."

With 36 million people, Chongching is the world's most densely populated municipality and the plan is to make it even bigger.

Four million people will be encouraged to move from its rural areas into a city already home to 6 million.

Its part of the most ambitious, rapid program of urbanisation the world has known. Political Economist Chris McNally is a research fellow at the East West Centre in Hawaii.

"Success is in a way difficult to define - on the one hand, one of the purposes of the policy was to bridge the increasing gap in per capita income, as well as total provincial GDP between western provinces and eastern provinces," he said.

"And in that sense it has not been successful, because eastern provinces have continued to grow very rapidly, and although west has grown even more rapidly, it has not been able to catch up.

"In other ways, the west has received a lot more policy benefits, but Chongching has just benefited also by its autonomy, by being able to chart its own course, and having actually a some what more enlightened government, especially since 2000-01, and government officials such as the mayor and now especially the party secretary are very well connected with the central government."

Most of the farms remain unmechanised, making the city a collision of old and new. [Karon Snowdon, Radio Australia]

Nine new expressways meet in Chongching, a new rail network means Shanghai is only 8 hours away, 10,000 ton freighters will be able to travel up the Three Gorges waterway.

Chongching's Mayor, Wang Hongju, says they will not allow slums to occur in Chongching as have happened in other metropolises.

"Chongching is becoming, and eventually will be the most important transport hub in China," he said.

There's a new German designed opera house. Communications are central - 100,000 kilometres of optical fibre have been laid - with more to come.

"The speed on the optical fibre system is 300,000 kilometres per second, so even between Chongching and New York, there's no distance," Wang Hongju said.

As we heard from the shoulderpole porter, life can be better in the city than on the farm. Its still a poor province but in ten years average per capita income has grown from $US400 to $US2000 a year.

On a stroll through the street market, a trader rents about one metre square of footpath for 100 yuan or roughly $15 a month.

She says she is doing well now because the city is more affluent and people have more money to spend.

But despite all the planning , can the Go West policy fail or fail to live up to its promises?

"I would say, if this fails, probably China itself has failed," Chris McNally said.

"Probably as long as the east, which is a much larger chunk, in terms of overall GDP, can continue to boom, the central government will have the resources to try to distribute it partially to the west.

"Probably a failure of the western strategy implies that China's overall development strategy has failed. And then we'll probably see all the other things that we see when a country which has enjoyed high growth for something like three decades all of a sudden slows down.

That could include everything from social unrest, pressures for political change, large unemployment; and it could cause real problems - not only for China, but for the whole world, because China's become such an important part of the global economy."

The city intends is to provide low income housing for those moving. [Karon Snowdon, Radio Australia]

Part of the plan for Chongching is to move or close down unprofitable and polluting state owned companies.

At the same time, the intention is to provide work as well as low income housing for all those moving to the city. But unemployment is high. When Hu Yunping found himself without a job in 1995, he started his own business.

With just one employee and a small loan to begin with, the Yuxin Pingrui Electronic Company now employs 600 and is the leading maker of electronic motorcycle parts in China. With the advantage of low labour costs, Hu Yunping says his can be a major international company in future.

The most visible effects of the Go West campaign being driven by Beijing are the large scale infrastructure improvements which will accelerate the region's intergration into the national economy.

Better transport also serves to physically link the more remote communities - one of the aims here is to promote unity in regions with many ethnic minorities and to make central political control easier.

As well, numerous large and small environmental programs are making a real difference.

There's a lot to do.

Cao Guanghui holds a powerful position as the head of the Environmental Protection Bureau.

"The [first] problem is air pollution, the second one is the problem is water pollution, and the third one is the relationship between economic development and environment protection," he said.

"Chongching in bygone times was basically one of the most polluted cities in the world. So starting in 2000, they basically tried to abolish all of the 200,000 coal furnaces in Chongching city and replace them with furnaces either generated by oil, or especially, natural gas. The local government of Chongching city is moving faster than what is required by the central government."

The development is being done with a focus on environmental challenges. [Karon Snowdon, Radio Australia]

All of Chongching's buses and taxis use natural gas and 70 per cent of the city's water now undergoes tertiary treatment where once waste poured directly into the river. Extensive replanting of forest is underway on severely barren mountainsides.

An even more powerful job is that of the Development and Reform Commission, whose head is Shen Xiaohong.

"The major organisation project that is going on in Chongching, which is trying to move about four million people - not all of them from the Three Gorges reservoir area - some of them into the environments of the city of Chongching," he said.

"Basically, if you drive one hour, that is going to be the new kind of limit of the larger Chongching urban area, and this will increase by about four million people."

An important change has been a relaxation of the hooku registration system which in the past restricted people's movements and access to health and education services.

"This is a very fragile environment," Shen Xiaohon said.

"It's also a very poor area, and so the hope is that by bringing incentives to the people there, they could encourage that parts of these people move within the one hour city limits.

They've basically done estimates looking at these regions, and how much population they can cope with in terms of ecology, and in terms of employment opportunities. So this policy is very different from the policy used in building the Three Gorges reservoir, that forced about 1.1-1.2 million people to move out of the reservoir area, and it is up to the people themselves whether they want to migrate or not.

"We just hope that we can use incentives to encourage people to move out of areas that are ecologically fragile, and that do not provide enough resources for employment, so that they themselves move into the Chongching area that can cope with a much larger population."

Not everyone is being asked to move.

With very little arable land, productive farmers are being helped to stay on the land.

A shortage of arable land means profitable farmers are being asked to stay. [Karon Snowdon, Radio Australia]

But some have been forced to relocate from the reservoir area of the Three Gorges Dam.

The relocated village of Muhe near Fulin, 120 kilometres from Chongching, is growing beautiful orchards and new entrepreneurs.

All over the west in Sichuan, Chongching, even Tibet rapid development amounts to an experiment of unprecedented proportions.

Yet incomes are unlikely to reach the heights of the boomtowns in the east and pockets of severe poverty remain. The wealth gap between the very rich and almost everyone else is growing.

But if a measure of development is improving people's standard of living, then China's Go West policy can be said to be succeeding.

Political economist Chris McNally says this has been helped by learning from the mistakes of the past.

"They've really mapped out a very detailed strategy that tries to combine green space, residential areas, industrial areas, infrastructure, very good public transport, that will really integrate the city and from the plans it seems somewhat more enlightened than what happened in southern China in the 1980s and 1990s.

"So in that sense, perhaps, Chongching is benefiting from being later in the game in China, from coming after the eastern areas that have developed before it, and from some of the knowledge that China has accumulated in the process.

"But nonetheless, it's a very, very ambitious project, and perhaps more in the human terms - I mean they can put in the infrastructure, they can build the buildings, but what are these people who come from very rural areas going to be able to do? Will they be able to receive good education? Will they be able to receive a good welfare system?

"They're thinking about these issues, they're aware of it, but it is very challenging."

Parallel to this economic development, a running debate is whether the opening of the economy will lead to the opening of the political system and a form or increasing democracy in China.

"The glass is half full, and its half empty on both accounts," Mr McNally said.

"The Chinese government has become a lot more accountable to the people - the Sichuan earthquake compared to what happened in Tangshan some 22 years ago - this already shows how this government has become much more accountable, much more open and much more responsible to its people in the way it behaves.

"But it's still a relatively authoritarian system, with some very rough edges around it, with enormous control over information and the media. Most Chinese, including me as a China scholar, would reckon that the political system is unlikely to undergo major change in the next decade. There will be gradual change.

"The government has made it very clear that in the next decade its goal is to establish a more equitable and just system, especially by extending a more comprehensive bare-bones social welfare system, but comprehensive in that it includes everybody, including farmers, including migrants to the cities - they've done a lot for the migrants already in terms of just easing the restrictions on them in terms of moving into the cities and then being able to find employment there. So in that sense, the system is becoming more equitable already, but they have to sustain this.

"And this is perhaps becoming one of the biggest challenges for the next decade."

This Program was made with assistance of a Jefferson Fellowship from the East West Centre in Hawaii, with thanks to the Centre's Chris McNally, to Dai Jun, from the All China Journalists Association and Pan Zhongming, Deputy News Director for the China Daily newspaper for help with the translations.www.radioaustralia.net.au