Sichuan

When the dinner gong sounds on Tuesday at the Chinese Cultural and Community Center in Chinatown, it will mark not just the eve of the new year, the Year of the Rooster, 4703 on the lunar calendar, but also the center's 50th anniversary and the renewal of a New Year's banquet tradition that started here in 1960 at a dinner honoring author Pearl S. Buck. The banquets, on hold since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks curtailed efforts to bring guest chefs here from China, are back on track.

Last Train Home , Lixin Fan's compelling documentary portrait of the human sacrifice behind China's economic miracle, begins with a startling statistic. At Chinese New Year, 130 million migrant workers journey from factories in industrial cities to make their way back to rural villages and towns for an annual visit. It is the world's largest human migration, unfathomable in scope, engorging trains, buses, and boats to the degree that America's Thanksgiving commute looks like an easy hop. The jostle and bustle is not the point of Fan's emotionally involving film, which is to show the enormous gulf between the workers and the families left behind, the collateral damage of industrialization.

A pesky bug - the six-legged hemlock woolly adelgid - is sucking the life out of thousands of hemlock trees in Pennsylvania. "The adelgid sucks the sap out of the twigs," said E. Michael Blumenthal, a forest entomologist with the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. "It causes the needles to turn yellow and fall off," which causes the trees to wither. Eventually, the trees can die. So what's a state entomologist to do? Go to China. Blumenthal and a researcher with the U.S. Forest Service recently journeyed to the remote Chinese province of Sichuan, just east of Tibet, and up into mountains near the Himalayas as part of a federal scientific exchange program.

Every day when I sit down at my desk, I look straight at the Tankman. The Tankman is the unbelievably brave Chinese man who stood before a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, as the Chinese government moved to crush pro-democracy demonstrators in June 1989. An estimated 2,000 unarmed people were killed. The Tankman - whose fate isn't known - was immortalized in a famous black and white photo. It hangs, as a poster, on my office wall. This week marks the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacres.

EXTRA! EXTRA! NEWSSTAND OPERATOR HELPS SAVE THE DAY Newsstand operator Richard Stanger got involved with a breaking story Tuesday and got his mug on Page One yesterday. Seems he and another New Yorker threw themselves against a bank door and trapped a stabbing suspect in the lobby. It all happened near Bloomingdale's on New York's Upper East Side, one of the Big Apple's safest areas. An assortment of other people also comported themselves heroically in the incident.

China didn't just walk onto the world stage, it soared over it. In its long-awaited role as Olympic host, China opened the Summer Games in spectacular fashion yesterday with an extravaganza of fireworks and pageantry dramatizing its ascendance as a global power. Disasters, environmental problems and human-rights disputes preceded the games, but for one evening, at least for the 91,000 people packed into the National Stadium, it was an interlude of fervor and magic, capped by the spellbinding sight of a skywalking, torchbearing gymnast floating around the stadium's top rim before sending a torrent of fire upward to light the Olympic flame.

Deng Xiaoping, the tough old revolutionary whose political life spanned 70 tumultuous years and who led China to the brink of a new century, leaves a legacy as complex as it is momentous. He didn't dominate the landscape, as his predecessor did. Mao Tse-tung's image hung on virtually every wall in China; Deng's was shown sparingly. Millions of citizens didn't mass in public places to chant Deng's name. Schoolchildren did not bow to his portrait in every classroom, as their parents had before Mao's.

BEIJING - Vice President Biden waxed glowingly about China's vice president Thursday at the start of a five-day visit that will give them some serious bonding time. Xi Jinping, the country's expected future leader, seemed to return the warm feelings, with both men emphasizing the importance of personal ties in international relations and the need for their countries to work together on the world's problems. Thursday's meetings between the two, followed by a formal banquet, began to reveal a bit about the personal style of a man who has so far given little indication of how he will rule the world's most populous country, the No. 2 economy, and a powerful potential rival to the United States.

DUJIANGYAN, China - The mothers and fathers come to the wreckage of Juyuan Middle School every day to grieve, to rage, and to try to ensure that justice comes for the hundreds of students who were killed in the earthquake on May 12. Survivors said the concrete school seemed to crumble within moments of the quake. All the apartment buildings surrounding the school still stand. Parents are demanding answers, loudly and without restraint. On Friday, more than a hundred of them confronted local education officials in a heated meeting in a building adjacent to the school's outdoor basketball court.

"CROUCHING Tiger, Hidden Dragon" star Zhang Ziyi says that she's outraged by what she says is ignorance about the recent earthquake in China. Zhang said in several Chinese-language blog entries over the past week that she has been busy raising money for relief efforts after the deadly quake struck the Sichuan province, killing more than 60,000. Zhang said that she has made a pamphlet about the quake to show foreigners and has donated $144,000 to the cause. She has also received a pledge of $100,000 from Wendi Deng, the Chinese-born wife of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

BEIJING - China may make its neighbors nervous with its robust military buildup, but it is also increasingly using the army as part of its charm offensive abroad. The People's Liberation Army, in a cultural shift for an institution known for strident nationalism and unbending loyalty to the Communist Party, is expanding overseas aid missions and military exchanges in a major way. It sent 50 medics to flood-hit Pakistan recently and dispatched a hospital ship in September on a 105-day trip to poor nations in the Caribbean - right in America's backyard.

BEIJING - Vice President Biden waxed glowingly about China's vice president Thursday at the start of a five-day visit that will give them some serious bonding time. Xi Jinping, the country's expected future leader, seemed to return the warm feelings, with both men emphasizing the importance of personal ties in international relations and the need for their countries to work together on the world's problems. Thursday's meetings between the two, followed by a formal banquet, began to reveal a bit about the personal style of a man who has so far given little indication of how he will rule the world's most populous country, the No. 2 economy, and a powerful potential rival to the United States.

Last Train Home , Lixin Fan's compelling documentary portrait of the human sacrifice behind China's economic miracle, begins with a startling statistic. At Chinese New Year, 130 million migrant workers journey from factories in industrial cities to make their way back to rural villages and towns for an annual visit. It is the world's largest human migration, unfathomable in scope, engorging trains, buses, and boats to the degree that America's Thanksgiving commute looks like an easy hop. The jostle and bustle is not the point of Fan's emotionally involving film, which is to show the enormous gulf between the workers and the families left behind, the collateral damage of industrialization.

This small village on the Zouma River - inside the municipal boundaries of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province - is the site of a fascinating effort to fight one of China's biggest problems: the dangerous levels of pollution in its rivers and streams. "In the last 30 years, China's economic miracle has helped pull millions from poverty, but has put tremendous pressure on its ecosystems," said Ma Jun, whose 1999 book China's Water Crisis has been compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

ANLONG, China - This small village on the Zouma River - inside the municipal boundaries of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province - is the site of a fascinating effort to fight one of China's biggest problems: the dangerous levels of pollution in its rivers and streams. "In the last 30 years, China's economic miracle has helped pull millions from poverty, but has put tremendous pressure on its ecosystems," said Ma Jun, whose 1999 book China's Water Crisis has been compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring . "Sixty percent of our rivers are polluted," and "300 million rural residents have no clean drinking water.

BEIJING - With all the media focus on "Rising China," another side of China gets far less attention. Call it "the other China," the bulk of the country's population that hasn't fully shared in the astonishing economic boom of the last 30 years that has transformed the country. I'll be looking at "the other China" as part of a two-week Gatekeepers Editors' Trip to China sponsored by the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

China didn't just walk onto the world stage, it soared over it. In its long-awaited role as Olympic host, China opened the Summer Games in spectacular fashion yesterday with an extravaganza of fireworks and pageantry dramatizing its ascendance as a global power. Disasters, environmental problems and human-rights disputes preceded the games, but for one evening, at least for the 91,000 people packed into the National Stadium, it was an interlude of fervor and magic, capped by the spellbinding sight of a skywalking, torchbearing gymnast floating around the stadium's top rim before sending a torrent of fire upward to light the Olympic flame.

Every day when I sit down at my desk, I look straight at the Tankman. The Tankman is the unbelievably brave Chinese man who stood before a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square in Beijing, as the Chinese government moved to crush pro-democracy demonstrators in June 1989. An estimated 2,000 unarmed people were killed. The Tankman - whose fate isn't known - was immortalized in a famous black and white photo. It hangs, as a poster, on my office wall. This week marks the 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacres.

DUJIANGYAN, China - The mothers and fathers come to the wreckage of Juyuan Middle School every day to grieve, to rage, and to try to ensure that justice comes for the hundreds of students who were killed in the earthquake on May 12. Survivors said the concrete school seemed to crumble within moments of the quake. All the apartment buildings surrounding the school still stand. Parents are demanding answers, loudly and without restraint. On Friday, more than a hundred of them confronted local education officials in a heated meeting in a building adjacent to the school's outdoor basketball court.

"CROUCHING Tiger, Hidden Dragon" star Zhang Ziyi says that she's outraged by what she says is ignorance about the recent earthquake in China. Zhang said in several Chinese-language blog entries over the past week that she has been busy raising money for relief efforts after the deadly quake struck the Sichuan province, killing more than 60,000. Zhang said that she has made a pamphlet about the quake to show foreigners and has donated $144,000 to the cause. She has also received a pledge of $100,000 from Wendi Deng, the Chinese-born wife of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch.