Xiaoping

BEIJING -- Chen Yun, one of China's most powerful Communist Party leaders and a leading opponent of the scope and pace of economic reforms in recent years, died yesterday at the age of 90, government officials confirmed today.A spokesman for the Chinese State Council said Mr. Chen, patron of China's hard-line Premier Li Peng, died in a Beijing hospital yesterday afternoon.The tough, outspoken Mr. Chen, a former typesetter in Shanghai and leader of the 1927 Shanghai insurrection, was a longtime ally of Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

BEIJING -- China is showing no sign of leniency toward Wei Jingsheng, its most prominent political prisoner, despite the passing today of the 13th anniversary of his arrest.The Committee to End the Chinese Gulag, a U.S.-based human rights group that includes exiled Chinese dissidents, appealed last week to U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III to press China for Mr. Wei's release."At a time when the Chinese leadership is espousing renewed emphasis on economic liberalization, it is crucial to advocate such a humanitarian measure," the group wrote to Mr. Baker.

BEIJING -- Having stifled potential urban unrest for now, Chinese Communist Party leaders are turning their attention to shoring up their traditional base of support among the more than 800 million peasants in China's vast countryside.Ending a five-day plenum in Beijing yesterday, the party's Central Committee called for stepped-up party-building and socialist education efforts in rural areas, as well as increased investment in rural economic development and critical water control systems.

* Hu Qiaomu, a hard-line Marxist theorist who played a key role in purging liberal Chinese intellectuals during the past 10 years, died yesterday at age 81. The Chinese state-run Xinhua News Agency said he died of an unspecified illness. Mr. Hu recently declared: "The bourgeois politicians have clamored: Marxism is dead and so is socialism. Let them clamor and boast their victories and seek comfort in their dreams. We are holding high the banner of Leninism and triumphantly developing the socialist cause."

WHETHER IT likes it or not, China has now become the world's leading defender of hard-line socialism, with North Korea and Vietnam, who espouse communism and depend heavily on the Soviet Union for economic and military aid, close behind. Inevitably, China and the like-minded governments in Asia will attempt to further close ranks against the international tide of political reform.With its ups and downs the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping has steadily pursued reforms and liberalization in many aspects of Chinese society since the death of Mao Tse-tung.

Joao Baptista Figueiredo, 81, the blunt outspoken president who oversaw Brazil's transition from military dictatorship to civilian rule, died yesterday morning from heart and respiratory failure in his Rio de Janeiro home.During his 1978-1985 presidency, Mr. Figueiredo sped up the transition to democracy begun by his predecessor, Ernesto Geisel, and granted amnesty to those accused or convicted of political crimes, allowing hundreds of exiles to return.Jiang Hua, 93, who as chief judge of China's highest court oversaw the trial of Mao Tse-tung's widow and other members of the radical "Gang of Four," died yesterday in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

MCLEAN, Va. - In all their years selling high-priced homes to the rich and famous, they said they had witnessed nothing like it: a sale for $1 million more than the asking price.Jaws dropped in real estate offices throughout metropolitan Washington as word spread in February that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, had agreed to sell their suburban Virginia estate for nearly $6 million after asking for only $4.975 million."It's unheard of," said Pamela Yerks, a Weichert Realtors agent who specializes in multimillion-dollar homes in McLean.

KUNMING, China -- North of here, lush valleys rise to depressing knobs of red earth, bare mountaintops long stripped of their tree cover.South toward China's border with Laos and Myanmar, almost 40 percent of a unique resource -- the only rain forest in the world that lies in the north tropics -- has been sacrificed to rubber plantations, logging and the pressures of feeding a rapidly increasing population.Yunnan Province, once dubbed "China's plant and animal TC kingdom" for the abundance of its biological treasures, has lost much of its crown jewels during the four decades of Communist Party rule.

LIANG VILLAGE, China -- Thirty years ago, during one of the most brutal upheavals in Chinese history, Communist zealots inspired by Mao Tse-tung rampaged through this dusty town, killing scores of innocent people and destroying places of worship.But when locals recently erected a new Taoist temple, it wasn't consecrated to the victims of the decade of mob rule known as the Cultural Revolution. Instead, villagers and local Communist Party leaders chose to honor Mao, worshiping the very man responsible for the havoc in their community three decades earlier.

BEIJING - Forget about the space race, the gold medal chase and the almighty gross domestic product. China is finally catching up to America in a crucial category: the celebrity sex scandal. Zhao Zhongxiang, a television broadcaster for 44 years and this country's closest thing to Walter Cronkite, is embroiled in a scandal that has whet the public's appetite for unflattering celebrity gossip - in this case, allegations of an extramarital affair with his physical therapist, who is suing him. For weeks, the Chinese news media and Web sites have feasted on each development and nuance: the sex, the lies, the dirty telephone chatter caught on tape (available for downloading)