Op-Ed Columns

Like 70 million others, the opening Olympic ceremonies in Beijing hit me with a wow, Wow, WOW fantasia of synchronized Chinese, fireworks and ultra-modern graphics. And, yes, I too got goose bumps when the crowd cheered our team.

But, incongruously, my mind shot back to a delegation of so-called journalists from Radio Peking who came to visit us in the early 80s. They were country bumpkins, guided by a lovely, articulate, educated young woman.

For dinner, we served turkey, which is not part of Chinese custom, on old Chinese plates. The rough, loud male members of the delegation looked furtively at their guide for clues on which silverware to use.

They had come to get a view of life in the U.S. "interior," so I took them to one of the institutions that define community for me, my friend Jimmy Turner's Courthouse barbershop. One of them got a shoeshine — an outrageously capitalist act for a good Communist, much to the hilarity of the other men.

They were tough enough to have gotten ahead during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when excessive devotion to Mao Zedong was prized at the expense of education, talent and experience. I wondered if their guide had suffered during that violent upheaval. I know her colleagues embarrassed her.

She is revalued in the China the world sees now. She is New China.

We, Josephine and I, were fortunate to experience New China in its infancy on a fascinating, if sometimes tough, trip in 1984 as guests of Xinhua, the New China News Agency.

I had met the father of New China, Deng Xiaoping, in Atlanta during a State Visit with President Carter and been amazed at how tiny the Chinese leader was, barely taller than a midget, but his imagination was colossal.

We were to see the fruits of his market reforms on a visit to the old mission station of my grandfather, Dr. T.W. Ayers, in Huangxien, a small county in poor northern China's Shandong Province.

After a 20-hour train trip from Beijing, sleeping in our clothes with two Chinese bunk mates on a "first-class" car, and a bumpy three-hour drive (three days by ox cart in grandfather's time, 1901), we were greeted by officials and a TV crew at the guest hotel.

We were pleased that our room had a private bath with pedestal toilet, and were moved by meeting seven old people who gave us a sense of grandfather as an energetic young man with a lively bedside manner.

And we were impressed by the county's progress. Some numbers tell the story. The per-capita income in 1978, when market incentives were introduced to Chinese agriculture, was $386 a year. It had risen to $1,256 by 1983.

The new prosperity was evident in a building boom a visitor could see from the road, and in the 100 percent increase in appropriations to a county high school. They had never — never in 2,000 years — had it so good.

At the time, we thought that hard-line party ideologists who yearn for the purity and clarity of the old Maoist days and seek to turn China inward would have to turn 1 billion Chinese at a 90-degree angle.

China was a'changing, but back in Beijing at the monstrous old Peking Hotel, the streets were still filled with hundreds of thousands of bicycles. In the lobby restaurant we did find a delicacy — a can of Tab.

In Shanghai on that trip we felt comfortable in the old, colonial Peace Hotel, which used to be filled with English guests, whose aged maitre'd served Josephine chicken a la king in the traditional style. I was rescued from a painful collision by a young American diplomat when I looked the wrong way stepping into the street and did not hear a phalanx of bicycles bearing down on me.

The bicycles were gone three years ago when we were in Shanghai. In their place are ribbons of superhighways packed with autos and a trillion-dollar, supersonic train to the massive new airport.

Traffic jams have replaced bicycles in Beijing, too. In addition to the mysterious sprawl of the Forbidden City is fabulous new architecture: the "bird's nest" stadium, the gem-like museum island in a lake, the gigantic assembly of Lincoln logs that is the Xinhua headquarters.

China today is so modern, so Western, yet so different. It can take pride in the staggering progress it has made since the death of Mao in 1976, and in its past, too. It was once "the middle kingdom" surrounded by vassals.

So how do we define so-called Communist China today? I can't think of a better answer than the one I gave back in 1984:

How "red" do you color China? Think of it this way: China was a unified nation with a bureaucracy reaching down to the county level 200 years before Christ was born, when America was a virtually unpopulated wilderness.

The 35 years of Communist ideology on this ancient subcontinent is the thinnest of veneers. Thinner still is China's experience with pure democracy; are there any historians who would claim Chiang Kai-shek's regime to be democratic — or the 2,300-year dynasties before him?

China is unique. It does not fit any American-made label. What then do you color China? Neither "red" nor "red, white and blue." Color China the brown of its loess mountains, the silver of its rice patties from the air, the green of its grain fields and yellow, the imperial color and the color of its great river.

Color China Chinese.