A neighborhood of Zibo, China, that has boomed over the past 30 years. Residents left an old brick house standing to remind them of what times used to be like while building the columned village headquarters and other new houses.

I left behind manicured Olympicland, better known as Beijing, Thursday afternoon to take a look at what "the real China" looked like.

To my relief, the One World, One Dream billboards and ubiquitous Olympic volunteers disappeared within 10 minutes of leaving South Beijing station by train.

What I found was a more honest picture of the country than the giant flashing TV screens and cutting-edge architecture custom made for Olympic Beijing.

The train sped me into a heavily industrialized China filled with housing cranes and sooty, brick-smokestacked factories, now paralyzed as part of the government's effort to clean up Beijing's smoggy air for Olympic visitors.

Out here, people experience the Olympics like they do anywhere else in the world. It's something to be seen on television when one feels like it. Still, as I wrote here, many people were still obsessively following the medal count, usually by Internet.

But what most people were focused on was making money. This was the new go-go capitalist Communist China, and a good example of it was a neighborhood I stumbled across in the industrial city of Zibo in coastal Shandong province.

Just three decades ago, this was a village of wheat and corn growers eking out a living. After China's Communist Party opened the country's doors to capitalism in 1978, however, village leaders decided to go into business.

And they did so with a vengeance. The village pooled its money together and opened a brick factory right beside their houses, which sent pollution all over the region.

The village switched to making roofing tiles in 1987 and later expanded into the production of everything from paper to plastic. In 2004, the villagers closed the tile factory and began producing less-polluting fibrous building panels.

By the late-1990s, the villagers had torn down their old brick houses and built pastel-colored townhouses and apartment buildings. The village president built even himself an immense office fit for Donald Trump filled with fish, a huge jade sculptor and a statue of Mao Zedong.

Yet I got the feeling Mao wouldn't have approved.

The old class divisions also came back, with the village president lording over the place while I was there and the rest of the neighborhood wordlessly serving and scraping. While the village president drove around in a gleaming black Audi, the workers made do with old bicycles on the dirt roads outside of the neighborhood.

It reminded me of my last visit to China in 1984, when our government handlers took us to a statue garden filled with top-grade Communist propaganda. One depicted the hard-hearted landlord kicking out the peasants. Another was of proud workers striding into some glorious Communist future.

This village president with his Audi zooming around the bicycle-riding workers would have fit right in. And I'm not sure this was the future those workers were supposed to be striding into.

But it was clear the whole place was better off than before, even as it struggled with pollution and other problems. The center of Zibo on Friday night was full of folks playing some kind of shuttlecock game and others burning fake money for their ancestors in little makeshift sidewalk altars as part of a kind of Chinese Day of the Dead observance.

While the Chinese government has spent billions of dollars sprucing up Beijing for visitors, I would have rather spent my August in a place such as Zibo. You got your shuttlecock, your factory and your Olympics on TV.

The Chinese dream.

-Jack Chang