CHEAP SHOTS: The shabbiness and small size of Jijie village's sole basketball court do not keep the children from having a ball. -- ST PHOTOS: SIM CHI YIN

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But nothing, it seems, distracts the boys from Jijie (literally 'Chicken Street') Primary School from their daily game of basketball in this south-eastern corner of China's Yunnan province.

Amid shouts of excitement, they shuffle their bare feet or cotton shoes and dribble the ball this way and that before attempting a shot at the lone, battered hoop hanging above rusty metal beams.

It may be shabby, but this mountain-top basketball court, the sole sporting facility in Jijie, is the village's pride and joy.

This is a world away from Beijing, where new, space-age stadia will greet visitors during the 2008 Olympics, a showcase of the Chinese capital's pre-Games US$40 billion (S$55 billion) transformation.

The world's top athletes, powerful politicians and well-heeled corporate bigwigs have started to converge in Beijing for what the organisers are billing as a celebration of 'One World, One Dream'.

RELATED LINKS  Wenshan Prefecture

Villages like Jijie, however, are vivid reminders that, for many ordinary Chinese, the Games are just that - a dream.

There was not a shred of Games-related paraphernalia in sight when The Straits Times visited Jijie in May and the single-storey school that is the heart of the village. Few pupils seemed to even know of the Fuwa, the cuddly animal-like Olympic mascots that are a hit with city children.

'We are just too remote here,' said school principal Luo Yuanwen, 45, sounding a touch apologetic. Jijie, home to about 5,800 farmers and migrant workers in Wenshan prefecture, is near the border with Vietnam.

Like in most of rural China, teachers at the Jijie school had only clippings from the local newspaper and state TV programmes with which to tell their 120 pupils a little about the biggest sporting event the country has ever hosted.

In contrast, schools in the Chinese capital have their own 'mini Olympic Committees', running penpal programmes and home-stay exchanges with children from the foreign countries whose Olympic athletes they have been assigned to cheer during the Beijing Games.

The disconnect was portrayed most vividly by a survey of 34 rural schools across 12 provinces last year.

The results showed that more than half of the 1,270 primary school pupils polled could not identify the Olympic mascots - Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini - whose names spell out 'Beijing welcomes you' in Chinese.

In the same survey, done by a Beijing-based research outfit, almost 7 per cent of the students put a tick next to the sentence 'The Olympics are relevant only to the people in the city; the Games are very far from us'.

Almost 4 per cent said the Games had 'nothing to do with me whatsoever'.

It is not for a lack of interest though, said Mr Luo, who plans to gather the children in front of the school's three television sets to watch the grand opening ceremony, beamed in 'live' from Beijing on the night of Aug 8.

'At a village school like ours, the kids are certainly interested in the Olympics but they do find the Games very far removed. Some children even wish aloud that, if they could, they would go to Beijing to watch the Games,' he said.

An hour's drive away, at Shuanglong ('Double Dragon') Primary School, the children had the same wistful enthusiasm.

A chorus of wide-eyed 'wah' broke out when teacher Niu Yongling, 29, showed the pupils crowding around him photographs of Beijing's Olympic stadia that The Straits Times had brought. They jostled a little and surged forward to get their hands on the A4-sized photos for a closer look.

Some pupils shouted out 'niaochao' ('Bird's Nest') at a picture of the iconic main stadium.

Yet all but one could not say what the running track was used for when shown a picture of the stadium's interior.

They would not have seen one in their lives.

Xichou county, where the two village schools are, does not have a 400m running track, sports stadium or proper football pitch for its population of 250,000, said Mr Che Ming, the local education bureau deputy head.

Across the county's 13 secondary schools, students take their annual compulsory fitness test by running the 25m perimeter of a basketball court: 20 rounds for boys, 18 rounds for girls.

Asked if the county has ever produced any sports stars, Mr Che almost scoffs and offers a flat 'no'.

The likes of megastar hurdler Liu Xiang and NBA basketball player Yao Ming are not sprung from poor and far-flung counties like Xichou, apparently.

'Some of our children show potential in basketball or table tennis, for instance. They get some extra coaching from teachers to become even better. But there are few opportunities to go beyond that,' principal Luo said.

His teachers take their pupils through their twice-weekly, 40-minute physical education (PE) lessons by having them take turns to use the 20 skipping ropes and three basketballs, or the handful of bats to play a game of table tennis with at a table fashioned out of a stack of bricks and cement.

But these teachers also run language, mathematics, science, music and art lessons. There are no dedicated PE instructors at this school - nor at any other village school in his county, said Mr Che.

While schools in towns and cities typically have specialised PE teachers, about 80 per cent of rural schools in the poll last year did not. Some 47 per cent of them also had no sports fields and supplies of sporting equipment were found to be woefully inadequate.

Mr Che explained: 'We lack funds here, relying on donations. And we distribute the sports gear - basketballs, mats, exercise bars - to schools under our charge. But often, by the time we get to the village schools, we have nothing left.

'PE lessons are quite dry as a result.'

At Jijie School, when the much-used basketballs go bald every two months or so, teachers get on their motorcycles to make the two-hour bumpy ride into town and back to get new ones. They buy two new balls at a time for 65 yuan (S$13) apiece, strap them onto the back of the bike and ride back up the 1,000m-high mountain.

On the special occasion of Children's Day on June 1 each year, Shuanglong's teachers put in extra effort to come up with simple games for the children, improvising with materials they have.

For a 'fishing' competition, for instance, teachers put paper clips and string at the end of a wooden stick and get pupils to hook as many empty ink bottles as they can out of a tub.

'We make do with what we have,' said Mr Niu, beaming as he pointed to all the school's sporting glory displayed in its third-floor office: dusty plaques for finishing third in a village tug-of-war contest or first in the local girls' basketball competition.

For most rural children, though, it may remain difficult to work up a real appetite for the Games when daily needs are so clear and present.

In between his daily after-school chores of feeding the family pigs and cows, though, 11-year-old Yang Fei manages to indulge in half an hour or so of his favourite sport, table tennis.

Dressed in his dusty denim cargo pants and T-shirt, he smashes the ball across a cement ping-pong table with the swagger of a pro and an eight-yuan bat he had saved up to buy.

Yang Fei could not name the five Fuwa, but said: 'I will watch the Olympic ping-pong competition on TV. In future, I want to be like Deng Yaping.'

Even if he had that untapped talent, it may take something of a miracle for him to make it from his village to the big league like his idol, a Henan native who won four gold medals in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics.

But, as school principal Luo sees it, every child should dream, however remote the chances are of it being fulfilled.

To all those who wish aloud to go to Beijing to watch the Olympics up close, he has told them: 'Study hard so that, in future, you can get good jobs and travel to Beijing or to other cities where I, your teachers or parents, haven't been.'

He said: 'I use that to spur them on.'

simcy@sph.com.sg