We all by now know the story of the new China.

A confident, powerful, even threatening nation to some, taking its place at the head table. A permanent member of the U.N. security council, W.T.O. member, inward investment magnet and now a country who's own money and people are spreading across the world. And at its center is Beijing.

I've been coming here for about 12 years and the changes have been extraordinary. A city of bicycles is now a city of cars, bumper to bumper along 12-lane roads lined by monumental new buildings. A city of glass and steel. An architect's playground where money is no object in creating something new, something different.

The Bird's Nest national sports stadium, the Watercube swimming center are not only centerpieces of the Olympic Games but symbols of the revival of a country no longer locked behind a bamboo curtain.

But there is another side to Beijing. The hutongs. Not the well-worn tourist areas where beautifully preserved century-old houses have been turned into high-class restaurants and offices for attorneys, but the older, more careworn parts of town.

The name hutong literally means alleyway. In Beijing they are more like a maze. Winding, tree-lined streets of cobblestone, bitumen or gravel, many too narrow for a car, where life goes on pretty much undisturbed by the blossoming city around them.
Brick houses with tiled sloping roofs and tiny cluttered courtyards, carved pillars and painted oak doors. In one courtyard we looked into, plump ripe grapes were growing across an arched entrance.

They are not all pretty, some look close to ruin. Some don't have running water and the residents share public bathrooms and toilets. But it's real. There's a sense of timelessness in the hutongs. And it's a welcome contrast to the new city that is rising up to engulf them.

I went to the Quanmen hutong area, barely a mile from Tiananmen Square. It could be a thousand miles away judging from the pace of life there.

But it, like many others, are disappearing. The government say it wants to preserve just a handful of hutongs to make way for high-rises with modern facilities. Fair enough perhaps, except many of the hutong dwellers don't want to go and the payout offered by the government (about $U.S.1,000 per square meter) is not enough to buy one of these new apartments.

They are being shunted to the outskirts of the city, the only place they can afford.

Even the hutongs under protection are not necessarily safe, says activist Hua Xinmin. She's been fighting the demise of the hutongs for the last 10 years. She says corrupt local city officials and property developers are in many cases ignoring protection orders.

Beijing is not the first city in the world, and it won't be the last, to bulldoze over history in the name of progress, but the sheer speed of development in the capital means that these areas are disappearing fast.

So my advice to you, if you are planning a trip to Beijing, is try to get off the main tourist track and visit some of these hutongs. Because once they are gone, they are gone forever.

-- From CNN Anchor/Correspondent Andrew Stevens

At 4 a.m. we hurtled along gloomy deserted streets toward our first live location for CNN’s week-long look at Beijing’s preparations for the Olympic games. In a rented van, whose locks don't quite work and only sometimes starts, we peered through the tinted windows at the murky Chinese capital rolling by us.

For a city, that by day is a swarming, sprawling megalopolis of modern skyscrapers and ancient imperial monuments, it's extremely peaceful before the dawn. Only construction crews, lost taxis parked at intersections and the occasional mysterious fire on the pavement give any hint that there is any life here at all.

Myself, one of our cameramen Scot Clotworthy and our Engineer Richard Stokes tried to sleep on the way there, expecting the journey to last the one hour it usually takes in daytime, but after 20 minutes our subject for the day loomed out of the morning mist. The national stadium, or "Bird’s nest" as it’s popularly known is an extremely impressive sight. It's enormous. Just enormous. Yet somehow our driver failed to see it and shot right past the turn-off.

Once he doubled back and negotiated some particularly vicious pot holes, we arrived at our location which was 18 floors up on a terrace overlooking the Olympic site. We immediately met up with our colleagues from the Beijing Bureau, Xiaoni Chen (Olympic Producer) and Wen-Chun Fan (Cameraman) we made contact with the building management, and started hand carrying the 500 kilos of TV equipment upstairs.

Live TV on location is a tricky business. It requires a lot of heavy "stuff" that you have to lug around, a lot of dedicated people who don't mind changing weeks of planning the day before, and a great deal of patience when dealing with governments and private enterprises to get permission to broadcast from their countries or properties. China is difficult. There are multiple layers of bureaucracy and you’re never really sure if the person who is telling you "no" is actually the right person to be speaking to in the first place.

Still we had all permissions in hand for our first location and we showed up knowing that everyone knew what we needed and had assured us that it would all be in place. Imagine our surprise when we arrived on the 18th floor to find it pitch black with no lights and no power.

It took a little phoning around to find the building engineer to come upstairs and unlock the electricity box that would power our gear. Job done? Not quite. The wiring in the box was back to front. The "earth" and "live" wires were switched over in the sockets which could have been a potentially dangerous problem. Thankfully Richard has worked in enough places not to assume that sockets are wired correctly, so he checked it, found the problem and immediately went to work re-wiring the building electricity with a large group of local maintenance men behind him taking notes.

Meanwhile Wen-Chun and Scot were placing the cameras and lights in position while worrying that the dreadful pollution in Beijing that morning might actually obscure our view of the bird's nest less than half a mile away. I was laying the cables for the camera signals and mics while setting up my monitors so I could direct the show.

Once Richard got the power situation sorted out, we turned everything on only to discover that we were not getting any kind of video out of the vision mixer. The vision mixer is the bit of kit that allows you to select which camera you want to put on TV, and if that's not working, then you have a bit of problem.

All the gear on the roof had been tested twice. Once back at our base in Hong Kong, and again the night before at our hotel in Beijing, so it was a complete mystery as to why this vision mixer had chosen this particular moment, 45 minutes from our first live show, to be entirely uncooperative.

Richard had to go and work on the satellite feed, and Scot and Wen-Chun were having their own problems with a rented light that wasn’t coming on, so I went to work on trying to fix the vision mixer. After every conceivable button had been pushed, and every cable connection checked, and then checked again, I resorted to the last gasp engineering solution, "re-seating the boards," which roughly translated means "give it a thump."

Much to my eternal relief and surprise this worked. We had a working vision mixer! "Giving it a thump" works sometimes if there is a small piece of debris inside the equipment housing that is lying across some crucial circuit. A hefty thump COULD dislodge this debris. On the other hand it COULD also completely break the gear or make the problem worse so it's definitely a last-gasp method.

Anyway, the mixer was fixed, the lights came on, the power was stable and the show went ahead as planned with all the zip and vigor we have come to expect from Kristie Lu Stout as well as some cracking shots from Wen-Chun and Scott.

Everyday on location throws up problems like these that if they go unresolved can jeopardize our input into the shows. When I first joined CNN eight years ago a producer with 20 years' experience told me over a beer that "it always works somehow, we don’t know why, but it always works somehow."

In many ways he’s right, we always seem to find a way, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Without the right people being in place behind the camera, the people in front of the camera wouldn’t be able to tell the stories that we all feel need to be told.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow?

-- From Mat Booth, Director, "Countdown Beijing"

Baghdad’s stock exchange is unlike any other in the world.

Surrounded by concrete blast walls, razor-wire and armed guards, and stuck firmly in the pre-digital age. It resembles a British betting shop (we call them “bookies”) – full of chain smoking men, clutching cheque books and nervously watching the action. Only here the action consists of a few brokers, writing prices on dozens of white-boards. But the noise is deafening, as eager investors yell their buy and sell orders. Baghdad’s stock market is about as basic as it gets. Potential share-buyers have to come, in person, and then squint across to the board that gives information about the company they want to buy into and yell out their interest to a broker. It’s the rawest form of capitalism – supply meeting demand on the walls of this small room.

But this is also an attractive target for those who are fighting the establishment of free-market democracy. It’s why I keep my flak jacket on while filming, even though everyone seems relaxed and welcoming.

Most of the people here are older men. When I ask, they say the market has been picking up and that new rules were introduced a few days ago which mean foreigners can now invest in the various banks, insurance companies and even hotels that are being traded. And they show me a new trading floor next door, where dozens of brand-new PCs are sitting, still in their plastic wrappers, ready for a switch over to a new digital system. It’s all been paid for by the United States, which hopes this will be a key building block in Iraq. It’s due to be switched on in a couple of months, once it gets the rubber stamp from Baghdad’s bickering politicians. It will certainly speed up trade – I just hope that it won’t dilute the boisterous atmosphere of shouting, laughter and cursing, which makes Baghdad’s stock exchange so unique.

Watch my report

-- From Dan Rivers, CNN International Correspondent, in Baghdad.