Above the harsh noise of Communist China's bold new effort to reduce an entire people to the level of robots came the nightingale song of Radio Peking: "The people's communes are paradises. Manpower and material resources are more than in heaven. Industry and agriculture leap forward together, and one year equals thousands of years in the past."In Shantung, boasted the New China News Agency, 200,000 common messhalls and 190,000 nurseries have freed 6,700,000 mothers for work in the fields. In Honan 7,000,000 more women are now ...

Red China's leaders these days no longer talk of the great leap forward, but of the "law of undulating progress." It means, presumably, that every economic leap is inevitably followed by a backward stagger. Most of China's hapless millions were wondering when the staggering would stop and the leaps begin. In Shanghai last week the rice ration again was slashed—from an average 22 Ibs. per month to 17.6 Ibs. Vegetables were rare, and fish was hard to find; no meat ...

Even for a country known for completing massive infrastructure projects with frightening speed, China's nuclear-power-plant building spree boggles the mind. China has 13 reactors in operation now and is currently building another 27 — nearly half of the total under construction worldwide. Fifty more are planned and another 110 are in the proposal stage. No other country has a strategy even remotely close in scale. Yet not even China was immune to the crisis that unfolded ...

In January, The Bank of China quietly announced a startling new bank account available to U.S. citizens. At a Bank of China branch in New York City, an American can walk in, open an account and convert grubby dollars into renminbi , the currency of the hottest and perhaps most important economy in the world. To get a better sense of what this is all about, I went to the Bank of China's main branch in New York City at ...

There are fresh concerns about the safety of China's food supply after the country's largest meat processor was last week reported by CCTV, China's state TV broadcaster, to have produced and sold pork tainted with a banned drug. The drug, clenbuterol, also known as "lean meat powder" is a fat-burning animal feed additive that causes nausea and dizziness if consumed by humans. A total of 158 pigs from nine farms in central China's Henan Province have been ...

MAO AND CHINA: FROM REVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION by STANLEY KARNOW 592 pages. Viking. $15. One of the best-known characters of Chinese folklore is Monkey, who is forever running amuck and terrorizing celestial Establishment figures like the Jade Emperor. As Stanley Karnow notes in his account of the Cultural Revolution, Monkey also happens to be one of Mao Tse-tung's favorite characters. He has even likened himself to Monkey in a poem, wielding the great cudgel of "class struggle" against his enemies ...

When Starbucks coffee rolls out its new logo in stores in early March, you might notice something missing from your coffee cup: the words Starbucks Coffee. The company says removing its angular text from the logo allows for more flexibility overall. And Vikas Mittal, a Rice University professor who studies logo redesigns and brand commitment, believes it will have an added benefit as Starbucks begins to expand in Asia. In a paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer ...

The rise of China as an economic and political juggernaut has become a familiar refrain, but now there's another area in which the Chinese are suddenly emerging as a world power: education. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment comparative survey of the academic performance of 15-year-olds around the world — an authoritative study released every three years — Chinese teenagers from Shanghai far outscored their international peers in all three subject matters that were ...

China Census Aims to Chart Shifting Population China began tallying its population on Monday for the first time since 2000, an arduous task at best, likely to be made tougher by the need to count scores of millions of migrant workers in the nation’s big cities. The government said it has sent more than six million census-takers out to survey 400 million households, including the shantytowns and dormitories that often house rural men who have flooded into the cities to work in ...

China Lifts Ban on Visitors Who Are H.I.V. Positive Days before travelers worldwide are to begin arriving for Shanghai’s world exposition, China  has lifted a two-decade ban on travel to the country by people who carry the virus that causes AIDS or who have other sexually transmitted diseases. The action also removed a longstanding ban on travel to China by people with leprosy. The government approved amendments to a 1986 law governing quarantines and a 1989 law regulating entry by foreigners, removing prohibitions ...