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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