Our Newstour to China

By Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor

As the leather-faced old man intently folded his pink ballot and slotted it into the box, I felt a slight lump in my throat. I'm a sucker for the rituals and realities of democracy, and here we were in the remote Chinese village of Liujiachang watching a thousand citizens in a schoolyard listen to campaign speeches and then vote for mayor. The incumbent, a slick young man elected three years ago, promised to lower taxes and improve irrigation. The challenger, older and more earthy, promised to open the village books for inspection and eloquently described how his own success as a farmer and former mayor would make him a better choice. "I'll bring you down the road I have walked already," he said. In the end, the challenger won by a narrow margin.

The visit was part of a two-week Newstour across China, from westernmost Kashgar to Beijing, by Time Warner executives, board members and journalists. We had to remember that this fledgling show of democracy is permitted only at the village level and is, so far, more symbolic than substantive. Government and party officials wearing Motorola beepers wandered the fringe of the crowd, much like the ward leaders at the elections in Louisiana I covered as a cub reporter.

But it was also important not to be too cynical. China is undergoing yet another awesome transformation, one marked by a pragmatic expansion of economic and individual freedom. We could sense both its promise and its limitations wherever we went: at a discussion with religious leaders in a mosque in Kashgar, at meetings with engineers and then environmental activists as we sailed the Yangtze and toured the mind-boggling Three Gorges Dam construction site, at a FORTUNE Global Forum of international CEOs in Shanghai's new convention center and at events surrounding the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Chinese revolution in Beijing.

The complexities of this change are often missed by those who pontificate from afar. "It is better to look at a thing once than to hear about it a hundred times," President Jiang Zemin told our group in a meeting in Shanghai. And for those of us who had marveled at being able to use the Internet in cafes in Kashgar, he updated that old Chinese saying for the digital era his country is now embracing: "You can know everything from the Internet, but it cannot replace personal experiences with people." This was, indeed, the prime purpose of our Newstour. "It's hard to appreciate the changes in China," says Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, "unless you experience them intimately and emotionally as well as intellectually."

President Jiang faces a tricky balancing act these days, made more so by the Clinton Administration's egregious failure to accept a World Trade Organization agreement in April. His speech to the FORTUNE forum included some hard-line words about Taiwan and about America's penchant to preach and meddle. "Every country has the right to choose the social system, ideology, economic system and path of development that suit its national conditions," he said. But the significant message he stressed in his talk was that economic and political liberalization would continue. "The Chinese people," he said, "will firmly and unswervingly follow the path of reform and opening up."

At the dinner where Jiang spoke, I sat next to Liu Mingkang, a former Chinese central banker who now heads a large financial corporation. He knows well the vagaries of Chinese freedoms; during the Cultural Revolution, he spent 10 years banished to the countryside, where he learned English by listening to the Voice of America on his secret transistor radio while working in the paddies. Now he is planning for his company to set up an online system for stock trading and banking transactions. "As economic freedoms expand," he says, "we are inevitably securing more social freedoms and the ability to exchange the information and ideas we need to grow. "

As journalists, we are naturally partial to the concept that the free flow of information and ideas is integral to economic growth and freedom. That is why TIME remains committed to covering all issues, including China's continued suppression of dissidents. Indeed, when we arrived in China, we discovered that our latest issue--which included articles by the Dalai Lama and the dissident exile physicist Fang Lizhi--had been banned from the newsstands.

Traveling through China reinforced my belief that attempts to restrict information and control dissent are not only counterproductive to a healthy economy and society, they are also, in the age of satellites and the Internet, futile. Among the most common sounds in Shanghai now is the chirping of cell phones. And last week I kept bumping into folks--from Yahoo's Jerry Yang and AOL's Steve Case to my dinner companion Liu Mingkang and Beijing Internet cafe founder Edward Zeng--who are launching digital-information services.

This is why the story of China's intriguing evolution is so much more nuanced than it looks from afar and why our Newstour was so valuable. I like to think that our founder Henry Luce, who was born in China and whose open-minded curiosity eventually overcame his missionary impulses toward that country, would agree.

Walter Isaacson, Managing Editor