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One by one, the little girls walk to the wooden blocks and extend their legs into the splits, one callused foot balancing on each block, their straining bodies hovering just above the ground. Coach Yang Yaojun, his sweatpants hiked high over his belly, ambles over to the girls, smiles and hands the nearest one a stopwatch. The girls, who are six and seven years old, do not smile back. Teetering on the blocks, they wait as Yang straddles each leg in turn, resting his 70-kg frame on their outstretched limbs. No matter how tough the girls are, no matter how much resolve they have mustered, the tears come within seconds. They do not cry out, though. They just well up soundlessly and stare at the seconds ticking down on the stopwatch. After half a minute, Yang stands up and lifts the girls off the blocks. They stagger with the first step, their oversized thigh muscles visibly twitching. By the second or third step, the tremors and the tears are gone. When a child does this six days a week all year long, save a short holiday at Lunar New Year, there are only so many tears she can shed.

This assembly line of pain at the Weilun Sports School in China's southern Guangdong province asks an extraordinary amount from its 1,000 full-time students. Here, in the cavernous gymnastics classroom, the girls are drilled again and again as if they were in competition, with judges monitoring their frozen smiles. They must not show weakness, no matter how grueling the exercise. "Big smile, little friend," yells Yang as the girls go through 50 reps of leg kicks with weights tied to their calves. Yang's wife, also a coach, observes: "Maybe to foreigners, this looks cruel. But it's because we start kids very young and train them hard that we have become so successful in gymnastics." Says her husband, who has been coaching since 1983: "The Chinese race knows how to endure hardship. Our job is to push these kids to their limits, so they can perform gloriously for our nation." Behind him on the wall, below oversized Olympic and Chinese flags, giant red lettering summarizes the motto of the Weilun school, proud breeding ground of eight athletes at this month's Athens Olympics: "Patriotism, Unity, Struggle and Devotion."

The cold war may have ended, but the echoes of that struggle linger in China's athletic-training program. Across the nation, nearly 400,000 young hopefuls in 3,000 sports schools toil to bring glory to their motherland. Most are plucked from elementary school and sent to train at these state-run sports academies before the age of nine—regardless of their interest in athletics. Given such a concerted culling of China's 300 million youngsters, it's perhaps no surprise that in less than two decades of Olympic participation, China—which stayed away from the Games in previous decades in protest of Taiwan's participation—has transformed itself from a sporting afterthought with just five gold medals in 1988 to a juggernaut with 28 golds in 2000. By Sydney, China had climbed to No. 3 in the overall medals tally, trailing only the U.S. and Russia.

China's Olympic prowess, though, is hardly a reflection of a nationwide passion for sweaty competition. Unlike Americans or Australians, the vast majority of Chinese are not sporty people who tote racquets or join gyms. China's international athletic success is about nationalism; it is the physical expression of a resurgent country, a rebuttal to its history as the "sick man of Asia" exploited by colonialists during the waning days of the Qing dynasty. The average Chinese—for whom supporting the motherland in athletic competition is one of the few instances in which mass, spontaneous celebration is allowed—is conditioned to see sporting victories as a metaphor for China's ascendance. "Our current national sports policy is called 'Winning Pride at the Olympics,'" says Hao Qiang, head of the State General Administration of Sport's Competition and Training Department. "By being successful at the Olympics, China will erase our shameful past of being humiliated by foreign powers."

Now, with Beijing set to host the 2008 Games, China wants not only to bury the past but to set the tone for the future. The Beijing Olympics "is about more than just sports," says Ren Hai, a professor at the Beijing Sport University. "In 2008, China's development will be acknowledged and accepted by the world." Chinese sports czars have announced that 2008 will bring the nation an unprecedented number of Olympic laurels, based upon a "gold-medal strategy" approved by no less an authority than China's Cabinet.

Indeed, to ensure that the country averts a face-losing performance on home ground, China's leaders are again revving up the sports machine, ending a reformist era during which the mainland began to take a more humanistic approach to sports. In the mid-1990s, amid a greater societal push for individual freedom, China reformed a punishing training system that had forced millions of children into athletic servitude just like the Soviet machine, which was its model. Chinese athletes were given extra help in attending university after retirement, and financial incentives offered the nation's sports stars a reason beyond patriotism to struggle for the motherland.

But after Beijing won its Olympic hosting bid in 2001, further reforms stalled. An effort to induct only children with an interest in sports—instead of targeting those with promising physiques—was scrapped. "When we got the Beijing Olympics, people realized we couldn't give up a system that had produced such good results," says Zhao Yu, a sports historian whose book, Superpower Dream, critiques China's Olympic efforts. He adds, "Sports is really the only way in which socialism has been successful in China." The nation's obsession with sporty achievements dates back to Chairman Mao Zedong himself, who once demonstrated his vitality by swimming a stretch of the Yangtze River. Soon after the founding of the People's Republic, the Great Helmsman ordered a nationwide hunt for perfect physical specimens to embody the new China.

Mao's legacy endures today, as scouts trawl China's vast countryside and jam-packed cities every year to find the best athletic prospects. Kids with tiny hips and flexible limbs are funneled into gymnastics or diving, children with lightning-quick reflexes are destined for table tennis or badminton, while beefier types are tagged as weight lifters. At nearly every elementary school around the nation, amateur anatomists measure youths' bones to predict their future heights, and the tallest are reserved for provincial volleyball, basketball or handball squads. "Just name the sport," says Xu Guangshu, former principal of the Shichahai Sports School in Beijing, another Olympic cradle. "If you give us enough money for proper training, we can create Olympic stars. We have so many children to choose from."

Two years ago, "talent-selection officers" spotted Xu Jiamin, the now-12-year-old daughter of Guangdong farmers, and recruited her for her long legs, short torso and large hands—ideal attributes for a weight lifter. Xu had never heard of weight lifting when the scouts approached her, and she says her parents weren't sure a career lifting barbells was what they wanted for their little girl. But the officers impressed upon them that weight lifting could be Xu's ticket out of rural poverty. Besides, with Beijing 2008 coming up, Xu might one day represent her nation on home turf.

Poor Chinese farmers don't tend to disagree with government officials putting on a hard sell, so Xu's parents relented, allowing her to be sent to a district-level sports school, where she cried for days at the prospect of constantly lifting heavy weights. Xu transferred to Weilun last year, where she now trains six hours a day, six days a week. She sees her parents once a year. During the school year, Xu also attends a couple of hours of class a day, but she admits she's often too tired to pay attention during the evening academic sessions. On a scorching summer afternoon, Xu is wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Barbie doll, and her hands are covered with calluses and blisters. "Weight lifting isn't too much fun, but it's my job," she says. "My coach tells me that no matter how many times you fail, if you succeed once, that's good enough." Watching Xu shuffle up to the barbell, rub chalk onto her torn hands and clean-and-jerk 40 kg above her 33-kg body, Lin Zhiyi, a former swimmer and current Weilun administrator, shakes his head. "Weight lifting is terrible for these girls' bodies, especially their backs," he says. "But as long as it earns China medals, their sacrifice is worth it, isn't it?"

The relentless professionalization of sport is, of course, not just a Chinese phenomenon. Aided by exhausting, full-time training programs, the latest in technology and, on occasion, banned substances, performances in virtually every sport have improved by literal leaps and bounds over the past quarter-century. Hallowed records such as Bob Beamon's long jump have fallen as top-level athletes train so single-mindedly that the idea of Roger Bannister's breaking the four-minute mile in 1954 as a diversion from his medical studies seems almost absurdly quaint.

But even in this brave new world of hyper-athleticism, no country systematically trains its kids as young and as hard as China does. Wu He, vice director of Guangdong's table-tennis association, has been involved in the sport for 46 years, first as southern China's champion and then as a coach. When he started out, most kids were 12 when they were picked by talent scouts for municipal-level sports academies. "Today, children must start, at the very latest, at six years old," he says. "Otherwise it's too late." To increase the level of play, China lowered the minimum age at municipal table-tennis competitions from 10 years old to 8 a decade ago. And even younger kids are often allowed to compete, if they are good enough. "Personally, I feel that kids shouldn't begin training so young," says Wu. "But we have no choice."

By incubating a huge pool of tender-aged athletes, China has struck gold particularly in sports like gymnastics, diving and table-tennis that the slender, lithe physique of the average Chinese tends to complement. China's table-tennis team swept all golds at both the Atlanta and Sydney Games—a dominance unmatched by any country in any other sport. But China's sports system has also been successful by deliberately focusing on Olympic events that were underfunded and unappreciated in the West. When China fully rejoined the Olympic movement in 1984, the country discovered that many women's sports were languishing overseas. Already steeped in a socialist mantra that preached equality between the sexes, China invested heavily in women's sports far before Title IX—the U.S. government mandate to end gender discrimination in collegiate sports—began leveling the playing field in America. "In addition to good training, our women can eat bitterness more than women from other countries," boasts Wei Hongquan, a publicity official with the State General Administration of Sport. "That's why we are so strong in women's sports." Case in point: when women's weight lifting became an official Olympic sport in 2000, China captured four out of seven available gold medals, while the Chinese men won only one gold. In Sydney, China's women topped Chairman Mao's famous maxim that "women hold up half the sky" by capturing 60% of the nation's total medals.

China has also entered the winners' circle by building up expertise in little-known sports that offer a profusion of Olympic medals. Shooting, which has 17 golds up for grabs, was targeted early on—and China's first Olympic gold came in the unheralded 50-m pistol event in 1984. In 1995, China noticed that the recently added Olympic sport of Taekwondo attracted few top-class athletes outside South Korea, and cobbled together the nation's first Taekwondo squad. Less than five years later, China won a gold medal in the discipline in Sydney.

For Beijing 2008, the country is concentrating on canoeing/kayaking, with its 48 Olympic medals, and baseball, even though China has never before fielded an Olympic baseball squad and hasn't qualified in the sport for this year's Games. The need to create insta-stars was what brought Xu Damin, a 16-year-old from China's northwestern Xinjiang province, to the Weilun school's Taekwondo program. "I'd never heard of Taekwondo before entering sports school," he says. "But now my whole life is dedicated to this sport." Dripping with sweat, he announces that he, like so many other sports-academy youngsters, dreams of competing in Beijing 2008. Xu may be gifted but his coach, Qian Yongling, remains skeptical about his Olympic potential. "He'll never make it," Qian says later. "It's no use wasting your time talking to him."

Indeed, only a few hundred of China's athletes will ever get to participate in any single Summer Olympics. The cruelty of a system that enlists so many children and brings success to so few has led even the victorious to question the nation's obsession with Olympic glory. Xiao Jian, a lanky 30-year-old with an overgrown buzz cut, came to the Guangdong Sports Technology Institute—one rung higher on the sports hierarchy than Weilun—as a fencer back in 1989. At last year's national games, he was the men's épée champion. But he was left off this year's Olympic roster due to what he says are complex disputes between his home province of Guangdong and Jiangsu, which has the best provincial record in fencing and therefore first pick in forming the roster. So instead of heading to Athens, Xiao is spending this summer futilely training in Guangdong. Having spent more than half his life in the sports system, there is nothing else for him to do. He and his wife, a former fencer herself, have a 10-month-old son. But the last thing either wants for their child is for him to be press-ganged into the system. "Any career has pressures," Xiao says. "But athletes have to start so young, before they really know what they want to do. We lose our childhoods and for what purpose? Most of us never make it, and we're left with not very much at all."

Then, almost apologetically, Xiao stands up and announces he has to go to the institute's cafeteria. Dinner lasts just half an hour—as it has for the past 15 years of his regimented life—so he mustn't be late. After that, Xiao will head to the dormitory and turn in early. Tomorrow, he will have to get up and do it all over again, just like hundreds of thousands of other cogs in China's sports machine.

• Hannah Beech | Guangzhou
• The path to glory is long and painful in China's athlete factories