By Carlos Barria

“They’re not scared of you. They’re scared of what you represent to them.”
“Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.”
“Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.”
– from the movie Easy Rider

A girl arrives at the parking lot wearing tiny leather shorts and sits on the back of a bike with a horse power of more than 1,000 CC. Next to her a man gets ready to ride, wearing a skeleton mask. It’s more than a fashion show, it’s an extravaganza on two wheels along Chinese roads.

Last weekend, around 1,000 Harley Davidson enthusiasts from all over China met at the exclusive resort of Qian Dao Lake, in Zhejiang Province, southeast of Shanghai, to celebrate the 5th Harley Davidson National Rally in China, as part of the company’s 110-year anniversary.

Riders told me that for Chinese consumers, owning a Harley is more than a symbol of freedom, as conceived in the 1969 movie Easy Rider. In China, they said, Harleys confer status and turn heads.

“For me (it) represents freedom, total freedom,” said Phillip Chu, from Shanghai. “And actually it is a tool, a tool that offers you attention. You attract a lot of attention from others when you ride, even when you start the engine and the sound. People around you will note it .. ah, this is a Harley Davidson.”

SLIDESHOW: China’s Easy Riders

When Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper were talking about freedom as they rode across the United States, they probably couldn’t have imagined that one day their bikes would have an enthusiastic following on the other side of the planet, or that these aficionados would have to contend with a whole different set of obstacles as they sought freedom on the open road.

Major Chinese cities ban motorcycles from circulating on highways and major avenues. Harley Davidson motorbikes are considered by Chinese tax authorities to be luxury items, so they are taxed at extremely high rates — sometimes the taxes alone are equivalent to the bike’s U.S. price tag. Traffic and transportation authorities have also weighed in, putting Harleys in the same category as electric bikes, horses and bicycles, meaning that they can’t be on highways and major avenues. Some Chinese owners argue that Harley Davidsons should be treated as a transportation vehicle, like cars, because Harley engines are the same or sometimes more powerful than cars.

In a statement over the weekend the company said, “As a member of China’s motorcycle industry, we call for a re-examination of the current motorcycle regulations, so as to ensure an appropriate position for motorcycles for urban consumers, in their commuting and leisure activities. As Harley-Davidson China Company, we call for a differentiation of respective regulations, between motorcycles for transportation, and for leisure riding,” the statement continued.

For its part, the company sees China as an important potential market if regulations ease. Unlike the United States, where a large number of owners are close to retirement age, or have already retired, in China the brand attracts younger people looking for adventure on the open road. As China’s young, middle class continues to boom, that could mean a long and lucrative ride.

By Carlos Barria

Feng Qing Ji, 69, and his younger brother Yu, 61, look at themselves in a mirror. Li tries to help Yu with his pose. He tells him to straighten his back.

They are not in a park, hanging around with other Chinese seniors, who typically meet up to play Mahjong or dance. They are covered in oil and wearing tiny speedos as they prepare for an amateur bodybuilder competition in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province.

Bodybuilding is not a very popular sport in China, despite the efforts of sport supplement companies that have promoted bodybuilding here by touring stars like Ronnie Coleman, winner of eight Mr. Olimpia titles.

In a suburban area of Shaoxing, enthusiasts compete in categories that range from “Mr. Fitness Man” to “Grand Old Man” — the latter a category for male participants over 50. The Feng Quig brothers started training 10 years ago and now take their place among some 100 competitors from clubs around that city.

While competitors are stretching and perfecting their poses in front of a mirror, a young girl in her 20s approaches Li and asks him for some advice on her own postures. Silence falls over the room as other contestants turn around to listen. Mr. Li, the oldest competitor in the tournament, gently corrects the young lady before she hits the stage.

Then it’s time for the “Grand Old Man” category. People in the audience stand and applaud as four men over age 50 enter and alternate between poses, then line up together for a final pose-off. After 15 minutes of grimaces and grins, the judges have a winner.

Jin He, 57, takes first prize. He receives a medal, a certificate, and 1,000 RMB ($160 US) in cash. After he collects his award, this champion of muscle changes back into his street clothes and flip-flops, and jumps onto a bus to go home.

By Carlos Barria

There was not much emotion left after crossing central China on a 50-hour train and bus journey. Just a soft touch on the face and a forced hug was all that Li Jiangzhon and his sister Li Jiangchun got from their parents after a long year of absence.

They are just one story among millions of Chinese migrant workers, who have to leave their loved ones behind to look for a better future for themselves and their families.

Every year millions of migrant workers travel to their hometowns during the Chinese Spring Festival, a massive movement of people that is considered the biggest migration in the world in such a short period of time. Public transportation authorities expected to accommodate about 3.41 billion travelers nationwide during the holiday, including 225 million railway passengers, according to Xinhua news agency.

FULL FOCUS GALLERY: MIGRANT MIGRATION

The 2013 Spring Festival will begin on February 10th, marking the start of the Year of the Snake, according to the Chinese zodiac.

Li Anhua and Shi Huaju met twelve years ago, after they migrated to Shanghai and took their place among the millions of Chinese migrant workers that play a key role in today’s second largest economy. After working for a few months in a restaurant they decided to work together as street food vendors in the suburbs of Shanghai. Every day they push a wooden cart with two wheels to street corners where students from a local university buy their food.

Life is hard on their combined monthly income of 2000CNY (USD320) — just enough to send a little money home to support their two children, who live with their grandmother and for them to rent a room just three meters by three meters in an old apartment far from Shanghai’s city center. Shanghai is one of the most expensive cities in China.

The Trip

Preparation for the trip began early this year. They managed to buy their train tickets online (116CNY each, or about USD19), which saved them the headache of fighting for a place in hours-long lines, as in previous years, among a swarm of workers and bulky packages.

They got good seats, basically a place for each of them, which is considered very lucky. Many migrants can’t get a seat on the train and have to travel standing or curled up in any free space they can find.

They left their home on a cold Sunday night. Ahead of them: 50 hours of hard traveling conditions and cold, followed by the reward of spending 30 days with their children. Li and Shi have been doing this trip every year for the last twelve years, following the birth of their son Li Jiangzhon. Back then the couple decided to leave the boy with Li Anhua’s mother in a rural village south of Luzhou, 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of the provincial capital of Sichuan province.

At the Shanghai South Train station, travelers rushed to gate five as the speakers announced the departure of train L633 with final destination Chongqing. The couple sat on hard seats in a sleeper train. They would share the next day and a half with four other people in front of them and two people next to them.

As the train departed after midnight, the freezing cold, the noise and the smoke of cigarettes made it almost impossible to sleep. Shi Huaju tried to lean over her husband’s shoulder looking for some warm place to rest for a few hours.

Sleeping is a challenge for those with seats. They look for any free inch of space to rest their tired bodies, and the spaces between cars are the most valuable.

Passengers played cards, some listened to music, others spent their last minutes of battery on their mobile phones, texting or surfing the internet.

Occasionally a vendor came by selling toys for children, battery chargers, food and beverages. For those who want to watch the landscape as the train crosses industrial stretches, farm country and polluted rivers it’s not very easy; the windows haven’t been cleaned in a while.

Li Anhua went for short walks to stretch his legs along the aisle and stopped in the space between cars, designated for smokers. After two cigarettes he returned. Next to the couple, a young man ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor. As the hours passed, more and more food ended up on the floor. An old man cleaned the area with a rudimentary broom; in a few hours he would do it again.

After the train arrived in Chongqing, Li Anhua and Shi Huaju rushed to the next terminal where they waited in a jostling line to buy bus tickets for the three-hour journey to Luzhou, near their hometown. A Chinese action movie on a television terminal made Li laugh. He looked happy as they got closer and closer to home.

In Luzhou, loud taxi drivers offered their service at the bus station. The couple picked one and started the last 30-minute leg of their trip. At a dark intersection, on a dirt road, the taxi suddenly stopped. Li looked around but he couldn’t remember the way to their house. He couldn’t recognize the way with all the new construction around. He said, “This factory area was not here last year.” Finally a small sign indicated the road to Dayan village.

As the taxi stopped in front of a three-story building a little girl screamed, “mammy, mammy,” and the couple got out of the car. For her and her brother, their most cherished present of this Chinese New Year just arrived.

The family will spend 30 days together, after that they will do the same journey back to Shanghai for another working season.

By Carlos Barria

China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition was for me a great opportunity to photograph an event that, although it all happens behind closed doors, still offers an interesting kind of visual access.

GALLERY: PANORAMAS FROM THE CONGRESS

For example, the 18th Party Congress, where China ordained its new leadership, was a unique opportunity for journalists to wander around – with fewer restrictions than normal — in the Great Hall of the People. As a first-timer, I found the building itself imposing, and full of details and un-explored corners.

I thought it would be interesting to try using a panoramic format this time, to give a sense of the officialdom surrounding the event, and the large, intimidating spaces where it was all happening. Panoramas also helped me to see more than one scene in a single picture.

The rigid and secretive atmosphere, contrasted with the warm light of the Hall’s interior, gave the place a strange feeling. There were watchers sitting erect in dark suits, guarding access to doors, walkways and elevators, as if they were part of the décor.

One very cold morning, soldiers stood in the emblematic Tiananmen Square in front of the Great Hall. It was empty and heavily secured. As the sun rose, a long line of buses transporting party delegates arrived and the show began. Delegates from every corner of China walked into the building to attend an opening speech by outgoing President Hu Jintao.

As I walked into the building I felt small. There were tall ceilings and long red carpets as visual introductions to the place where heavy decisions were being taken, affecting 1.3 billion Chinese.

A man in his 50s cleaned a black Audi in a parking lot where dozens of cars and drivers waited for high-ranking party members who were attending the opening session. Standing out in the sea of black, was a white sedan.

The Congress lasted a week and on the final day delegates chose the 350-member Central Committee, and made an amendment to the party charter.

The next day, after months of speculation and anticipation, the all-powerful seven-man Politburo Standing Committee silently took the stage, and China’s new leadership line-up was finally unveiled.

Eight years ago, Chen Mingzhi quit his factory job and became a shoe designer. But it was slow going at first, so he passed the time honing his skill by making smaller and smaller shoes.

A couple of years later, a neighbor challenged him to do something outside his comfort zone — to create a giant shoe.

Chen accepted the challenge and started right away. “I wanted to prove that I could do it”, Chen said later.

At the time, his wife Li Liping was pretty much against the idea. She argued that with two children to support, the family couldn’t afford the 2,000 RMBi (about $320) it would cost just to meet a neighbor’s challenge.

But Chen didn’t listen to his wife and after two months of work he put the finishing touches on a 1.9-meter (more than 6 feet), 38kg (83 pounds) leather dress shoe for a non-existent right foot.

During our visit, we told Chen about the Guinness World Record for the biggest shoe, but he was unfamiliar with the Guinness World Record certifications. So we showed him some pictures of today’s record holder, a shoe by National Fonds Kinderhulp in Amsterdam. They created a shoe that measures 5.5 meters by 2.11 meters, (or roughly 18 feet by 7 feet). It’s 2.9 meters, or about 9.5 feet, high.

Chen marveled at the pictures and immediately threw out the idea of making another big shoe, to beat the one in Amsterdam. But his wife gave him a sharp look and said: “You can’ t do it right now. Money is a problem. We have to pay for our sons’ education, at least until they graduate.”

He Heping, who runs a factory that makes plastic Christmas trees in Yiwu, talks with one of his employees as they finish up a massive order destined for the Netherlands.

He started this business more than ten years ago after an uncle encouraged him to produce plastic Christmas trees. His company had been making knives, but the uncle had visited Serbia at the end of the Balkan War, and came home convinced that a product related to seasonal good cheer represented a better business prospect.

SLIDESHOW: CHINA’S CHRISTMAS FACTORIES

Christmas comes but once a year, but for Christmas decoration factories and retailers in China, it starts as early as July and ends in late September, when massive orders from around the world arrive in Yiwu, located 300 km (185 miles) south of Shanghai in the prosperous Zhejiang province. Yiwu is considered a bellwether for China’s low-cost exports, especially exports destined for emerging markets. Orders come from places as far away as Europe, the United States and South America.

This year, European demand for Christmas goods has dropped sharply, local vendors said. He estimated European orders were down 20 percent from last year, while Shi Kuan Hua, another vendor, said that his European orders had fallen by 40 percent.

At one shop, Peter Nazodze and his wife Natalia rushed to order the latest Christmas decorations for their clients back home in Georgia. “I will buy two containers,” he says. “We live in a little country with just 4 million people.” For Nazodze, Christmas is a good time for business. In Georgia, he says, tradition dictates that people buy new decorations every year, rather than unpack old ones.

At He’s factory, workers take a break for lunch. They work hard to complete their European orders in time to ship them. Markets that are closer by– like India, Japan and Korea– will be next on the roster.

Workers here don’t celebrate Christmas. China’s most important holiday is the Chinese New Year, which comes a little later. But they will have some time off at the end of the year since He will travel to the United States to look for new clients, just as Santa Claus is climbing back up the chimney.

Occasionally, along with covering the news stories like the economy, politics, sports and social trends, we (Reuters photographers) have time to do something really fun.

Weeks ago, over a couple of beers, a friend from the BBC had the idea of putting a camera on the hood of a car and shooting a time-lapse sequence for a story he was working on. I’d never done a time-lapse project myself, so when I was asked to come up with an idea for Earth Hour on March 31— when cities across the world switch off their lights at 8:30 pm— my colleague Aly Song and I thought we’d give it a try. We decided to shoot sequences during the three days leading up to Earth Hour, ending with the dimming of the lights in Shanghai’s city center.

(View a full screen version here)

It was also a good opportunity to buy some new toys at Chinese prices, such as suction cup camera holders used to secure the camera on top of a car or any other surface.

Reuters photographer Aly Song sets up a remote camera in the front of a taxi

We used a total of seven cameras between two photographers on this project, shooting over 14,000 pictures, for a final time-lapse sequence that lasts one minute and 40 seconds.

That’s quite labor-intensive, but I think the video offers a glance at the frenetic energy and fast-pace of change that characterizes so many Chinese cities today.

For viewers in China, you can watch the timelapse below.

A year ago I went to Japan to cover the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the country’s northern coast.

At the time I was shocked by the scale of the destruction and felt I needed to show the magnitude of the disaster. I tried to fill my pictures with as many elements as possible. I even took a series of panoramic-format photographs, for a wider view.

My pictures at the time showed spaces filled with pieces of houses, twisted cars and people’s belongings– the debris of daily life.

Then two weeks ago, I returned. I found myself walking in some of the same spots I visited originally. Things hadn’t changed too much; little seemed to be rebuilt. But all those spaces were clean and somewhat empty this time. It was hard for me to visualize houses or other buildings standing there, as they once had.

People had organized and separated the debris. There were piles of plastics, metals, wood and clothes ready to be recycled. The debris of daily life was still there, but broken down and re-allotted according to its most basic components. I started to separate and organize debris in my mind, looking for textures, colors, forms, materials. I saw blue hues in the metal piles, and orange scratches of oxidization. I saw mountains of circles in car tires, and crisscrossed strands of rebar.

I thought about people recycling all these elements, and asked myself how Japan would recycle the past to create a new future. Then one afternoon, I saw two kids playing basketball in one of those empty spaces. The surrounding buildings were gone. There were no more nets or backboards. But the court was still marked on the ground, and that’s where they played.

Two-year-old Jugderdem Myagmarsuren opens the door of his tent to play with his plastic scooter in the backyard. He is accompanied by sheep and cows. This is not an ordinary backyard. It’s the Mongolian steppe, and his closest friends might live more than two kms (1.2 miles) away.

While the world’s population reached 7 billion on October 31st, 2011, Mongolia remains the least densely populated country on the planet, with 2.7 million people spread across an area three times the size of France. Two-fifths of Mongolians live in rural areas spread over wind swept steppes.

According to the National Population Center census of 2010, Mongolia’s population density increased by only 0.2 percentage points– to 1.7 persons per square kilometer—from the last census in 2000.

In Shivert, 200 kms (124 miles) northeast of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, Javzansuren Choijiljav, 72, and his wife Javzanpagma Adiya, 70, shepherd their animals out of a coral ahead of a long day on the steppe. As a nomad family, they are accustomed to packing up and moving their tent four times a year, but as they grow older they spend less time herding their cows and sheep, and more time working around their tent. They have contracted another younger couple to help them with their animals as the winter approaches.

Javzanpagma heats fresh cow milk on the stove. She says it’s harder and harder to find young people interested in working in the countryside because so many have moved to the city.

Every year between 30,000 and 40,000 Mongolians migrate from the far steppes to the fast growing capital Ulan Bator— the country’s most dense city.

Bordering Russia to the north and China to the south, this former satellite state of the former Soviet Union relies on its natural resources as an engine for economic growth. Its gold, copper and coal have attracted foreign investment.

Today more than half of all Mongolians live in the capital, including eight of Javzanpagma’s children, drawn by the promise of a better life. However, unemployment stands at more than 15 percent.

As Javzansuren continues his work (building shelters for his animals and storing potatoes underground where the freezing earth will preserve them) the horizon darkens under gathering clouds, which announce the coming winter. They hope the spring will come quickly so their animals will survive, and they can pack up and move again, continuing the cycle of their nomadic life, even as more and more of their fellow nomads move away for good.

When I was a kid in the south of Argentina, we used to say that if you dig a very deep hole to the other side of the earth, you will end up in China. In my case, China was literally on the other side of the planet; about as far from Patagonia as you can get. Thirty years later, I made it here. I didn’t come through a tunnel, but on a plane that flew over the North Pole.

I moved to China one year ago in the position of staff photographer in Shanghai, China’s biggest and most cosmopolitan city. The challenge was enormous: a foreign culture, and a very foreign language.

I spent my first couple of days walking around the city, just wandering; something I hadn’t done in a long time. Before coming to China I lived in Miami, where I didn’t have much of an urban experience, unless you count sitting in traffic for long periods of time.

But in Shanghai, I didn’t need a car. The city’s public transportation system is one of the best in China, and that give me the opportunity to go back to something I love; street photography. I started to really enjoy the urban scenery. I walked around with just one camera and one lens, taking it all in, like a little kid alone in a candy store.

I had a preconceived notion of China as a country of factories and farms. I hadn’t thought much about the cities. But walking through the streets of Shanghai, I began to familiarize myself with a more modern society, one characterized by a large, growing and unstoppable middle class.

China also struck me as a country that was changing incredibly fast, with huge migrations to the cities, and more and more foreigners living here. Soon after arriving, for example, I was invited to photograph a wedding between Rebecca Kanthor, an American woman from upstate New York, and Liu Jian, a folk musician from China’s central province of Henan. They chose to have a tradition rural wedding in Liu Jian’s hometown. The groom arrived on a horse while his bride was carried around town on a sedan chair. Liu Jian was the first person from his village to marry a foreigner.

On my walks through Shanghai, I saw how residents were interacting and adapting to their fast-changing environment. One night, from my first apartment on the 30th floor, I saw people playing tennis at night, surrounded by high-rise buildings. For me, this image was an example of how people were trying to find balance in the midst of China’s furious growth.

My assistant once told me, “It’s very difficult for a foreigner to think like a Chinese person.” Perhaps I will never get that far, but on my long walks through Shanghai, I think of an expression Rebecca taught me as I covered her wedding:

“Man, man, lai.” One step at a time.

(View a large format showcase of images in China rising)