China

FORTY YEARS ago this week, France - overlooking the mounting horrors of Maoism - became the first Western power to open diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. True to that form, during a state visit ending today, the French fell over themselves to court Chinese President Hu Jintao - by declaring 2004 the "Year of China," decking the Eiffel Tower in red lights for Mr. Hu's four-day visit, dispatching none other than President Jacques Chirac to meet his plane and allowing the Chinese leader the rare honor of addressing France's parliament.

THE 21-HOUR journey of the first Chinese astronaut into space and his capsule's successful landing yesterday morning on an isolated Mongolian plain was a decidedly low-tech affair, a feat pioneered by the former Soviet Union and the United States four decades ago. But the taikonaut's 14 trips around the world inescapably symbolize that the new century may well be China's -- or at the very least that a rising China aims to contend with what it views as...

Beijing. -- Parts of China will experience a total lunar eclipse tomorrow. For Westerners, the timing of the celestial event couldn't be more symbolic.Today and tomorrow mark the fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the event that suddenly eclipsed many Westerners' visions of a bright future for themselves in China.This time four years ago, most Westerners were fleeing China amid bleak predictions of the nation descending into chaos and possibly even breaking up into several political entities.

CHINA'S ECONOMIC ascent - the most sweeping and rapid march to industrialization in world history - has much of the rest of the globe and particularly Americans reeling backwards in, shall we say, shock and awe. Even many who long have believed that the 21st Century could be China's suddenly find themselves overwhelmed by the current pace of the transfer of economic and political power from West to East. This shift may continue for years or decades. This dragon is largely real, as are its challenges to the developed world and, again, particularly to America.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was in Beijing last week warning that America could return to economic isolationism. Our question is, who is threatening whom? Protectionism remains a disastrous course for the world's dominant economy. Even Sens. Charles E. Schumer (a Democrat) and Lindsey Graham (a Republican) must know that. They're sponsoring legislation to slap a retaliatory tariff of 27.5 percent on all Chinese goods if Beijing doesn't allow its undervalued currency to appreciate.

The single most important thing that happened in Sino-American relations last week was not President Bush's third visit to Beijing, an all-too-limited exercise in bilateral diplomacy. It was not China's announced intention to buy $4 billion worth of Boeing aircraft at some point in the near future. Nor was it Chinese President Hu Jintao's somewhat vague vow to take steps to reduce Beijing's $200 billion annual trade surplus with Washington. Instead, the single most important bilateral development last week was China's quick, aggressive and unusually transparent response to outbreaks of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu among its residents.

London. -- How will it end? The battle between Beijing and Hong Kong's governor, Chris Patten, has reached an impasse. After months of suffering Beijing's bombastic refusal to negotiate, Mr. Patten has proceeded on his own to publish a bill that will democratize Hong Kong's politics.Might China respond by sending in the army to do a Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong, or even by quietly activating a fifth-columnist on the governor's staff to poison his soup?The far out is always possible in politics, but the more likely scenario is for Beijing to apply pressure by more conventional means -- by impeding construction of Hong Kong's vital new airport, for example, or by threatening the city's water supply or refusing to cooperate with police work against the blooming gangster and gun-running business fed by the mainland's underworld.

FEW CENTERS of political machination are more closely watched and still less known with certainty than Zhongnanhai, the central Beijing Kremlin where the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have tended to live and work. Yes, by fits and starts, China and its ruling party are moving - at times painfully - toward a bit more open governance. But even the best outside analysis often remains riddled with speculation. Take Sunday's major news at the end of CCP's annual secret party plenum: Immediate past party chairman and national president, Jiang Zemin, stepped down from his last important position as head of the party's powerful Central Military Commission - marking the final formal step by his successor, Hu Jintao, in taking over as head of China's party, state and military.

It is no surprise that the neo-Maoist regime of Deng Xiaoping is going ahead, do-it-now style, on the world's biggest hydro-electric project. The 600-foot dam on China's unruly Yangtze River will produce untold millions of kilowatts of electric power and change forever the majestic Three Gorges.It is no surprise that the decades-long argument for taming the Yangtze floods, harnessing its power and making its upper reaches navigable won out over fears of lost wildlife and farmland and geological instability.