How Chinese children are taken away from their families and brutalized into future Olympians

After the amazing triumph of 16-year-old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwan, right, DAVID JONES examines the state sports programme of the Communist regime in Beijing. He finds children are plucked from schools and installed in camps where they endure a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons. Children in a gymnastics camp are pictured centre and left.