It is commonplace these days for visitors to be swept away by the breathtaking energy and dazzling high- rise vistas of Shanghai and Beijing. Even for Sinophiles like myself, who have been watching China for decades, the amazing development of this erstwhile People’s Republic can have an intoxicating way of obscuring the contradictions beneath.

The small Royal Jordanian Fokker F-28-4000, which makes daily trips to Baghdad, sits out on the tarmac away from the jetways as if some airport official feared it might prove to be an airborne IED (improvised explosive device, a US military acronym). Those of us on this hajj to the global epicenter of anti-Western and Islamic sectarian strife are an odd assortment of private security guards, military contractors, US officials, Iraqi businessmen, and journalists; a young man in a sweatshirt announces himself as part of the “Military Police K-9 Corps” (bomb-sniffing dogs).

In recent history, there have been few wars more difficult to report on than the war in Iraq today. When I was covering the war in Indochina, journalists went out into the field, even into combat, knowing that we would ultimately be able to return to Saigon, Phnom Penh, or Vientiane where we could meet with local friends or go out to a restaurant for dinner with colleagues. Although occasionally a Viet Cong might throw a hand grenade into a bar, the war essentially was happening outside the city. I had arrived here in Baghdad naively expecting that as an antidote to their isolation from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up something of a fraternity among themselves. What I discovered was that even the most basic social interactions have become difficult. It is true that some of the larger and better-appointed news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried to organize informal evening dinners with colleagues. But while guests were able to get to an early dinner, there was the problem of getting back again to their compounds or hotels by dark, when the odds of being attacked vastly increase. The only alternative was to stay the night, which posed many difficulties for everyone, especially Iraqi drivers and guards.

"Ladies and Gents," the South African pilot matter-of-factly announced over the intercom. "We’ll be starting our spiral descent into Baghdad, where the temperature is 19 degrees Celsius." The vast and mesmerizing expanse of sandpapery desert that has been stretching out beneath the plane has ended at the Tigris River. To avoid a dangerous glide path over hostile territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire, the plane banked steeply and then, as if caught in a powerful whirlpool, it plunged, circling downward in a corkscrew pattern.

When on May 26 the editors of the New York Times published a mea culpa for the paper’s one-sided reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the Iraq war, they admitted to "a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been". They also commented that they had since come to "wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining claims" made by the administration of US President George W Bush.

Why is Taiwan’s relationship with China so intractable an issue? Why, when they share common economic interests – 1 million Taiwanese live in China, working in some 50,000 firms in which Taiwanese have invested over US$400 billion – does China aim 500 short-range missiles at Taiwan? The run-up to the presidential election tomorrow is one current source of tension. President Chen Shui-bian has initiated a referendum process that might someday be used to ask Taiwanese if they want to formalize today’s de facto independence. This infuriates China.

”China’s New Order,” three essays on recent development in that country by Wang Hui, is an interesting and comprehensive critique of China’s Promethean reform movement and its unique form of Leninist capitalism. Mr. Wang, editor of the journal Dushu (Reading) and a research professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, is one of the few Chinese intellectuals to have openly challenged the presumption that economic reform is sufficient without political reform. But be warned. As bold and as path breaking as Mr. Wang’s critical voice is, his overly academic and theoretical approach makes this a tough read.

"People say to me, ‘You are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps,’ " Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is quoted as telling a University of Warwick researcher six months ago. "I reply, ‘Let our cities be our swamps and our buildings our jungles.”’ How did the sands of the Iraqi desert turn so suddenly into a quagmire? How did an Iraqi military that we pictured in fixed positions on Kuwaiti border or arrayed along "highways of death" (as in 1991) awaiting incineration by Apache helicopters and F-16s suddenly morph into an incipient guerrilla force?

The attacks on the World Trade Center and our subsequent military involvement in Central Asia shocked Americans into a fleeting recognition of how dependent we actually are on the news media to keep us informed about complex global issues. Now at the brink of a war against Iraq and with the United States trying to redefine its leadership role in the world, we are reminded how crucial it is to have fair and accurate news media at home, especially as we find ourselves dealing with unprecedented national security concerns, resurgent patriotism and increasingly vituperative party politics.

As Congress debates granting President Bush the power to wage war against Iraq, many in the Bay Area have expressed confusion and concern at what they perceive as a lack of adequate public discussion on the subject. Over the next days and weeks, The Chronicle will feature voices from a variety of perspectives, seeking to highlight some of the key questions and issues involved.

As the welcome but brief surge of intelligent news coverage precipitated by Sept. 11 fades, the war in Afghanistan winds down and the near- death experience of "Nightline" becomes just another dispiriting spasm of TV history, a momentary but deceptive calm has settled on the media/entertainment front. But we still must be alarmed at the erosion of broadcast news and we are left to wonder if there is any remedy.

In explaining why he felt that an analyst should sit unobtrusively behind his patients’ couch, Sigmund Freud explained that he did not want analysands to be influenced by his physical reactions and facial expressions. What is more, he added, "I cannot stand being stared at eight hours a day (or longer) by others."

Dear Comrades: It may strike you as presumptuous for an uninvited outsider to address the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo. Through long experience in China, I am well aware of the sensitive reaction to foreigners appearing to "interfere" in "internal affairs."

Since the Chinese Communist Party leaders will not allow themselves to be criticized in the press or on television, critics have had to find other means to express their political grievances. Historically speaking, one of the most telling ways to make a protest known has been to bring it to Tiananmen Square, long the epicenter of political power in China. Indeed, there is an almost religious belief among Chinese that if the advocates of a cause can only gain entrance to this sanctum sanctorum of political rule, or come close to it, quasi-mystical political legitimacy will be conferred on them. Again and again, from the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the present, Chinese protesters have been drawn to the square, sometimes suicidally.

April 25 started as a normal Sunday in Beijing. But before the day was out, thousands of ordinary people in drip-dry shirts had mysteriously appeared outside Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound of the Chinese Communist Party near the Forbidden City. Here they formed a mile-long line around its walled perimeter and then finally flooded out onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace, where they calmly sat down with an eerie orderliness in front of the compound’s main gate and peacefully began to meditate. There were no political banners rippling in the wind, no headbands proclaiming freedom and democracy, no bullhorns amplifying provocative slogans as during the student movement of 1989.

As I watched the demonstrators in front of U.S. diplomatic missions in China last month, after NATO’s accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, I couldn’t help but think back to my first visit to the People’s Republic in 1975. Then, under Mao Zedong, the Cultural Revolution continued to hold sway, and almost every public surface was emblazoned with revolutionary exhortations such as “Down with American imperialism and its running dogs!”

In her recent Salon piece, “Advice from a J-school dropout,” Lea Aschkenas has a point. Journalism schools are not for everyone — evidently, at least, not for her. Indeed, whether I myself was cut out for a journalism school was also a question I wrestled with before becoming dean at the University of California at Berkeley two years ago. I had not gone to journalism school and yet still managed to make my way. Of course, there are a great variety of journalism schools. But much of what I knew of their mélange of mass communications, advertising, public relations and journalism had not always impressed me as creating the optimal environment for some smart, energetic and able person who wanted to become a first-rate journalist, especially someone not attracted to newspaper reporting. So what am I doing here at Berkeley?

The prospects for Tibet entirely depend on how things go in China. China has been very obdurate, emphasizing the reunification of what they view as the motherland, which is really the previous dynastic aggregation of Han Central Chinese with Manchus, Mongols, Muslims in the west, and Tibetans. This is the last part of the Revolution’s program not yet repudiated, and the part that speaks to Chinese nationalism, pride, and the regaining of its territorial sovereignty. So China is not in a very charitable mood when it comes to independence movements and even movements towards autonomy. In Chinese leadership circles, these issues just do not play very well.

To stand, in early May, atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which guards the entrance to the Forbidden City, and look across the vast crowd of people jammed into Tiananmen Square was to have a historically new sense of what Mao called “the broad masses.” It was to this ancient gate that Mao himself came on October 1, 1949, almost forty years before, to greet the adoring “broad masses” upon the defeat of the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and the founding of “new China.”

WHEN Mao Zedong died, in 1976, and his wife, Jiang Qing, was arrested as the leading spirit in the Gang of Four, the Great Helmsman’s legacy presented Deng Xiaoping, his reform-minded successor, with a dilemma. To de-emphasize Mao’s legacy in China, as Khrushchev had tried to "de-Stalinize" the Soviet Union, would have shaken loose the keystone of the ideological arch that still held up the Chinese Communist Party’s right to rule unilaterally in the name of the people. However, to continue emphasizing Mao’s militant class-based ideology would have collided with the kinds of economic reforms that Deng, who had himself been accused of being a "capitalist roader," and had suffered grievously as a result of Mao’s whimsical dictates during the Cultural Revolution, viewed as essential for the transformation of China into a modern country.

Each day as lunchtime approaches, the faithful begin to hive toward the old Bank of China building overlooking Statue Square in Central Hong Kong. Files of young men carrying smart leather briefcases and sporting double-breasted Italian suits converge with clutches of svelte young women with flawless makeup and the latest European businesswear fashions at a side door. Here, a single elevator takes members up to the China Club, the beating heart of Hong Kong for this new up-and-coming generation of entrepreneurs. Here in the club’s private dining rooms and banquet hall, nouveaux Chinese taipans and ex-pat moguls-in-the-making dine, see and be seen, and clinch the kinds of deals that have made Asia the world’s boomtown.

WHEN I first visited Cu Chi, in 1962, I was a young journalist who had driven the 21 miles from Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) with a South Vietnamese Government official to ”inspect” the area’s strategic hamlets, newly built fortified villages into which peasants had been forcibly moved. The idea was both to protect them from the National Liberation Front and prevent them from helping guerrillas topple Ngo Dinh Diem and reunify South Vietnam with the Communist North.

WHEN Mao Zedong died, in 1976, and his wife, Jiang Qing, was arrested as the leading spirit in the Gang of Four, the Great Helmsman’s legacy presented Deng Xiaoping, his reform-minded successor, with a dilemma. To de-emphasize Mao’s legacy in China, as Khrushchev had tried to “de-Stalinize” the Soviet Union, would have shaken loose the keystone of the ideological arch that still held up the Chinese Communist Party’s right to rule unilaterally in the name of the people. However, to continue emphasizing Mao’s militant class-based ideology would have collided with the kinds of economic reforms that Deng, who had himself been accused of being a “capitalist roader,” and had suffered grievously as a result of Mao’s whimsical dictates during the Cultural Revolution, viewed as essential for the transformation of China into a modern country.

On the anniversary of the “June 4” incident, we again express our gravest concern for the fates of those who have been persecuted for their support of democratic progress in China. We hope that the Chinese government can abide by the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, which acknowledges the citizens’ rights to assembly, association, and freedom of press and expression, and immediately release all prisoners of conscience, including Wang Dan, Ren Wanding, Wei Jingsheng, Wang Juntao, Han Dongfang, Liu Xiaobo, and many others.

On June 4, the day after the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the citizens of Beijing, the distinguished Chinese astrophysicist and dissident intellectual, Fang Lizhi, reluctantly sought refuge in the American embassy in Beijing with his physicist wife, Li Shuxian. They did so because they feared for their lives. With a warrant out for their arrests accusing them of “counterrevolutionary instigation,” they have now spent six solitary months as refugees within their own country. They have become symbols both of China’s crushed democracy movement, and of the deteriorated state of Sino–US relations. In fact, so agitated has the Chinese government become over Fang, that it is highly unlikely that relations between the two countries will be able to return even to a semblance of normalcy unless Fang and his wife are released. But with hard-line leaders in China continuing to claim that by sheltering Fang and Li the US has been interfering in their country’s “internal affairs,” and that “he who ties the knot must untie it,” Fang and his wife do not seem likely to be liberated soon.

During the student demonstrations that swept China toward the end of 1986, the brilliant astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who was then vice-president of the University of Science and Technology, emerged, through his speeches to student groups, as the country’s most forceful advocate of democracy and human rights. The letters that are published below along with Fang’s introduction were written to him during this period. After his speeches circulated throughout China and were harshly criticized by Deng Xiaoping, Fang was dismissed from his job and expelled from the Chinese Communist party in January of 1987. But even after his fall from official grace, he carried on research and he continued to speak out, not only giving voice to the disaffection of other intellectuals and students, but articulating a program for democratizing China’s political system. In doing so, he was at the forefront of efforts by intellectuals to expand the boundaries of what Chinese dared to think and say. In the process, however, he more and more deeply antagonized China’s aging leaders, who, although they presented themselves as ruling in the name of the “people,” had never really taken seriously the notion of the right of citizens to express independent views, much less to make unsolicited demands on the government, or accuse it of corruption.

When I returned to Beijing in the fall of 1986, after an absence of six months, it was hard not to feel disoriented by the sudden change in political climate. During the previous spring and summer, political and intellectual life had begun to thaw to an extent unprecedented since the Chinese Communist Party had come to power, in 1949. Following on the heels of a bold program of economic reform and of opening up to the outside world, which China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, had launched in 1978, this relaxation of Party control over economic, intellectual, and political life had filled the Chinese with a heady new sense of possibility. The increasing tolerance of individualism and freedom of expression reflected the surprising but growing conviction among China’s new generation of reform-minded leaders that their country would never be successful in its efforts to modernize unless some dramatic way could be found to re-energize its people and win their willing participation in a new drive toward economic development. Political reform and democratization became their new rallying cries.

EVERY TIME I RETURN TO BEIJING AND SEE its skyline growing with cell-blocklike high-rise apartments, drive through its charmless streets and have to breathe the polluted air, I am reminded of how far the city has drifted from its past and wonder how the myth of Beijing as a beautiful city redolent of history has managed to survive its modern esthetic impoverishment.

From the inside of a 23-foot 3-inch-long blue-black Fleetwood Brougham Cadillac stretch limousine with a 5-liter V-8 engine, vinyl roof, whitewall tires, air-conditioning, push-button (and tinted) windows, color television, AM-FM radio, dual refrigerators, bar stocked with Gorham lead-filled crystal glasses, lace antimacassars on the backs of the red plush seats, driven by a young chauffeur in a new blue uniform with bright brass buttons, the Peoples’ Republic of China seems like a different country.

LETTER FROM CHINA about the boom in illicit publishing and the opening commercial Radio & TV channels in China. WriterJia Lusheng, survivor of Tiananmen Square crackdown, is in the forefront of a new style of Chinese journalism, known as baogao wenxue (“literary reportage”). This is also the name of an influential journal. Jia’s muckraking articles and books reveal China’s underclass of beggars, prostitutes, etc. China’s official publishing system is controlled by the State General Press and Publications Administration.

Each evening a middle-aged woman in a simple print dress sits down at a large grand piano set to one side of the hotel lobby and begins to play Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin from sheet music that is so aged that small pieces of yellowed paper break from the edges and drift down onto the keyboard every time she turns a page.

”It’s not necessary for you to be saying, ‘Grazie, grazie, grazie,’ all the time,” Adriano Carrettin is saying to a pretty young painter from Kansas who is struggling to arrange for a room in Italian. ”You see, it’s us men who should be saying ‘thank you’ to all the women like you for just being beautiful.” Laughing, Mr. Carrettin reaches across the small marble bar in front of him and clasps the flustered young woman on the shoulder.

In the spring of 1979 these eleven men and women, all professionals and leaders in the human rights movement in Czechoslovakia, were arrested: Otta Bednarova—journalist, television editor; Jarmila Belikova—psychologist; Dr. Vaclav Benda—philosopher, mathematician, Charter ‘77 spokesman; Albert Cerny—actor; Jiri Dienstbier—journalist, broadcaster, Charter ‘77 spokesman, Vaclav Havel—playwright, Charter ‘77 spokesman, co-founder of the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted (VONS); Dr. Ladislav Lis—attorney; Vaclav Maly—Catholic priest; Dana Nemcova—psychologist; Dr. Jiri Nemec—psychologist, philosopher; Petr Uhl—engineer, economist.

Each day I work with Master Chang toying copper coils into large D.C. electric motors at the Shanghai Electric Motor Factory. We arise at six, begin the work day at 7:00, have an hour for lunch in the factory canteen at 10:45, return to work until 3:00. In the evening there are study groups, sports, evening classes or time to be alone with your family. Workers usually retire around 9:00. The work pace in the shops is very relaxed. There is no frenzy, no complaining and little of the tension which surrounds most American workers. There is always time to stop and chat. It is not uncommon to see people standing now and again in small groups around the floor of the shop talking and smiling. Since each worker sees his piece of equipment through many stages of production (both manual and automated), there is no assembly line pressure. Master Chang works slowly and thoroughly.