Beijing

It is not often this newspaper has the chance to applaud government regulation in a Communist country. New rules for architectural correctness promulgated by the Beijing Planning and Construction Committee deserve the praise of everyone who wants to see national and city character preserved.The international "match-box" look is out. Traditional Chinese architecture, married to modern building techniques, is in. The goal is for Beijing to look like Beijing well into the next century.This is a lesson for Paris, which allowed too many high-rises before getting serious about its heritage; for London, which did the same and now can't fill them all; and for Washington, which craves statehood if only to overturn a congressional height limitation that keeps the Capitol pre-eminent and preserves the city's unique character.

Ever wonder what life in the United States would be like without a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency? The people of China have gotten a whiff of what happens when there are minimal pollution controls, and they are choking on it. That the air in Beijing is badly polluted is not exactly a new development, but this is: Now, it's gotten so bad that the complaints are showing up in state-run media where the crisis is not only recognized but the...

LAST SEPTEMBER, there was an encouraging moment in Hong Kong's struggle to realize China's 1997 promise of autonomy under its takeover principle of "one country, two systems." It came after Beijing had tried over the summer to impose a tough new internal security law on the so-called special administrative region. More than 500,000 Hong Kong residents - almost one in 10 - turned out in a stirring street protest. Just two months later, China abruptly relented, putting the security law on hold - perhaps to avoid turning this year's legislative elections in the territory into a referendum on Beijing's rule.

LONDON - In a turnaround that left Michael Phelps and his teammates in stunned silence Sunday night, the 400-meter freestyle relay gold medal that the U.S. had in its grasp slipped away in a late surge by the final French swimmer. Ryan Lochte, swimming the anchor leg for the U.S., touched .45 of a second later than Yannick Agnel. The Russian team won bronze, ahead of the Australians, heavily favored going into the race with their self-described "weapons of mass destruction team.

ONE OF Mao Tse-tung's many famed aphorisms - the one about political power growing from the barrel of a gun - was a truth gleaned from staging a revolution and founding a new China more than 50 years ago. More and more, however, his successors are finding that success at building national economic power ultimately hinges on the free flow of information. And to put it in Marxist terms, therein lies the central contradiction for China's receding totalitarianism. The latest glaring example of this is the lethal flu-like epidemic that Chinese authorities essentially unleashed on their own people and the world by keeping secret its initial outbreak in Southern China last fall.

The imprisonment of Harry Wu, the Chinese human rights crusader with U.S. citizenship, is no reason for Hillary Rodham Clinton to boycott the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing Sept. 4. The conference is about women, not China. Going there would be doing no favor to Chinese Communist rulers. They have figured that out and are trying to keep people away.The Chinese government has hobbled the U.N. conference by throwing obstacles at the related Non-Government Organizations Forum starting Aug. 30. By banishing the NGO forum to Huairou and delaying visas and reservations to foment maximum confusion, Beijing is muzzling NGO reps and denying them access to the conference.

Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader who pried open China's closed doors, fended off fears of Western influences among his more conservative peers with a now-famous adage about open doors naturally letting in a few flies. Large parts of the world's largest nation are now thick with McDonald's outlets, Internet cafM-is and all manner of economic ties with the West. But Mr. Deng's heirs, aided by America's top technologists, have become adept at filtering out such cyber-flies as online references to democracy and human rights.

THE THING about the Chinese is, that they are so, well, communist.At the U.N. conference on women, hundreds of Americans are getting an unsettling refresher course in communism, which events in Beijing remind us is not entirely dead after all. Not when it still retains its iron grip on one-quarter of the world's population.A delegate who left her hotel room for a stroll was ordered back by a policeman. Another, according to news reports, says she returned to her hotel room to find men with walkie-talkies going through her belongings.

McDonald's Corp. opened its first drive-through in Beijing yesterday, launching a partnership with a major Chinese oil company to exploit the country's growing taste for cars and Western fast food.

BEIJING -- China's threat to pin new charges on its best-known dissident, Wei Jingsheng, is a sign of strength and of weakness.With it, the Beijing regime sharply defies U.S. pressure to improve its human rights record and just as graphically demonstrates its lack of confidence in its control.Mr. Wei, 44, who was freed in September after 14 1/2 years in jail, has been detained twice in the last month in an apparent effort to stifle his lobbying for democracy. His whereabouts have not been known since he was picked up Friday by police.

If you knew what actually happened to Georgia Gould in 2008 as she regained consciousness on a stretcher in California, IV sticking into her arm, your first question might be a lot like Georgia's. What happened? She knew she'd blacked out on the mountain biking trail in Santa Barbara during the Santa Ynez Valley Classic professional race. She knew she'd come to at the finish line, transported there by medics. She'd been told she'd been in a bad crash. She just couldn't remember it. But if you knew what actually happened to Olympian Georgia Gould, you would know that she couldn't remember the crash because she didn't crash at all, that she'd stepped off her bike in midrace, delirious with heat stroke, and had passed out on a hill.

First, the spot she won on the Olympic team for the Beijing Games was taken away and given to a competitor. Then, after making this year's team, she learned her sport would be dropped from the Games after London. Somehow, Farrah Hall, the sole American woman in the upcoming Olympic RS:X windsurfing competition, always finds herself fighting her sport as much as her competition. And yet, if there's anything the 30-year-old Annapolis native knows how to do, it's navigating rough waters.

Omaha, Neb. — Michael Phelps ' eight gold medals in eight tries in the 2008 Beijing Olympics might never be duplicated. On Monday, someone who could have been able to do it — Phelps himself — announced that he wouldn't even try. On track after his performance in the U.S. swimming trials to enter the same eight events in this summer's Games, Phelps said he would drop one to conserve energy for the others, including the always crowd-pleasing...

Surging to one of his trademark late-breaking finishes, Michael Phelps won his final event - the 100-meter butterfly - at the Olympic qualifying trials Sunday night, and heads to London likely to swim the same eight races that produced his record-breaking gold-medal haul. "It shows I can do an event program like this at a high level again," said Phelps, who qualified for five events in London and is expected to be named to three relay teams as he was in Beijing. "I think we were struggling over the last couple of years doing one event at this level.

Scott Parsons keeps going. Long after the older brother he idolized growing up in Ohio quit his own competitive kayak racing career, long after the best friend he met through their kayaking families did the same, Parsons is like Peter Pan in a wet suit, tucked inside a polyethylene hull, paddling away on the Potomac River. Parsons, 33, will be going to his third straight Olympic Games this month in London, trying to build on the sixth-place finish in the men's K-1 slalom competition in Athens eight years ago while hoping to erase the disappointment of failing to qualify for the final in Bejing in 2008.

Great rivalries are the zesty spice of sports. Arnold Palmer had Jack Nicklaus. Muhammad Ali had Joe Frazier. Magic Johnson had Larry Bird. Bjorn Borg had those twin head cases, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Chris Evert had Martina Navratilova. We couldn't get enough of those matchups. It was must-see TV every time they squared off. There are still some great rivalries out there, although not as many as before. Tiger Woods has Phil Mickelson - well, whenever both are playing well at the same time, which happens almost never.

BEIJING-- --The Summer Olympics will start at 8 p.m. on Aug. 8 next year. That's 8/8/08, if you don't have a calendar nearby. As you might suspect, eight is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture. But make no mistake, no one here is about to allow luck or chance to determine the success of these Olympics. Still more than nine months out, it's already an absolute certainty that we're on the brink of experiencing an Olympic Games unlike any other. Already, you simply cannot escape the Games.

BEIJING -- Let's get one thing straight from the start: This is not another harangue from a pampered foreigner on how trying it is to drive in the Third World. I love driving here. Really.The traffic in some other Asian capitals -- Bangkok, Taipei, Manila -- may be worse, but this city offers unique challenges.Beijing has some of China's best roads, many of them wide, Soviet-style boulevards with separate lanes for bicyclists. It has sidewalks, traffic lights, crosswalks, pedestrian signals, traffic police -- all the trappings of order.

On Saturday, Michael Phelps will turn 27. No surprise, he'll spend the birthday where he's spent much of his previous 26 years: in a pool, chasing gold. This time, it will be in Omaha, Neb., where the Olympic qualifying trials begin Monday and where Phelps will begin to answer a question that has trailed him for the past four years: How will he possibly top his golden, eight-for-eight performance of Beijing? "What Michael has done is insane. I think people now take gold medals for granted," said fellow swimmer Natalie Coughlin, herself among the most decorated Olympians ever.

Up to 40 million Chinese people still live in caves. That's more than the populations of Texas and Illinois, combined. In fairness, a fraction of these caves are apparently pretty nice, complete with electricity and well-compacted dirt floors. But that's grading on a curve because, well, they're still caves. Meanwhile, 21 million Chinese live below what the Communist Party calls the "absolute poverty" line. That sounds pretty good if you have in mind our poverty line, which is just under $11,000 per year for an individual and roughly $22,000 for a family of four.