From the current issue of Newsweek: Melinda Liu on her 30-year journey in China:

My eldest brother was 7 years old when the Communists seized power in China. Our parents, who named him Guangyuan—"Distant Light"—had entrusted him to relatives in Suzhou while they visited America in the 1940s. Papa and Mama expected to be gone only long enough to complete their university degrees, and they didn't want to uproot him. Perhaps they also didn't fully appreciate what was happening to their homeland. Then Mao Zedong marched into Beijing in October 1949, and the world changed. Returning to China became too dangerous.

Guangyuan grew up in the care of our mother's parents in Suzhou, a city celebrated for its elegant gardens where emperors, courtesans and poets once dallied. I was born and raised in the American Midwest, along with two more brothers, and I dreamed of one day meeting the sibling the communists had stolen from our family.

My chance finally came on Jan. 1, 1979, the day Washington and Beijing restored full diplomatic relations after 30 years of hostility. No one could be sure the honeymoon would last, so I wasted no time in getting a visa. On the evening of Feb. 20, I lugged a heavy suitcase (filled with gifts for long-lost relatives) aboard Train 119, heading south from Beijing. Through the gloom and swirling cigarette smoke of a no-frills "hard sleeper" carriage, other passengers peered at me in wonderment. Many of them had never seen an American before. They carried their belongings in cheap travel bags and squares of worn, patched fabric. Some had only old-fashioned cloth slippers to protect their feet from the icy weather. A People's Liberation Army soldier lay snoring in a nearby berth, bundled up in a military greatcoat. It's funny, the things that stick with you; I remember he had sacked out without removing his mud-encrusted combat boots. "Maybe he just got back from Vietnam," someone joked. A border war had broken out less than a week earlier, and thousands of casualties were reported on both sides—tens of thousands would die before it was over—but no one in the carriage seemed to care. Everyone clamored to hear about life in America.

The train took more than 21 hours to cover the 700 miles from Beijing to Suzhou. My brother, then 37, lived on Jade Phoenix Lane with his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law. The 5-year-old began running in circles as soon as she saw me, whooping that Auntie was "a foreigner." Their home was a single rectangular room, divided by a massive wardrobe into two areas, each 12 feet square, and their toilet was a chamber pot. But Guangyuan, a bookish, soft-spoken optimist who worked the graveyard shift at a silk factory for the equivalent of $26 a month, considered himself lucky: his home had a wooden floor, a ceiling overhead and a small courtyard where he could keep a few chickens. His big regret was his loss of the family library during the anti-intellectual rampages of the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution.

Now Mao was dead, and the strongman reformist Deng Xiaoping had unleashed forces of a different sort. The previous summer, party bosses had invited foreign reporters to a groundbreaking ceremony just across the border from Hong Kong, where I was working as a reporter. Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village, home to only 17 original families. But Deng chose it to be his laboratory for a vast experiment: Shenzhen would become a quasi-capitalist, export-oriented "Special Economic Zone." Western journalists with me that day looked askance at the patch of mud that was supposed to be China's future. Many thought the idea was a joke. Thirty years later Shenzhen is a metropolis of 12 million people, and still growing fast. The huts have been replaced by rank upon rank of office blocks like the 69-story Shun Hing Plaza, currently the world's seventh tallest building at 1,260 feet. Townspeople say another high-rise is coming soon that will top it by more than 50 feet.

Now try to imagine such explosive transformations happening all across a country of 1.3 billion people. The China that will appear on the world's TV screens in 2008 may (as the Chinese never tire of telling you) be centuries old, but it's been made anew in just the last three decades. Thirty years ago China was an immense ruin of enforced ignorance and abject poverty, the psychic rubble that remained after Mao's misconceived attempts to reshape Chinese society. The distance from there to the present is even greater than it seems, since the trajectory has been anything but straight. That journey is usually described in hard figures: dollars and cents, millions of people, tons of concrete. But the changes are even more startling when you look at them in human terms.

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Beijing is blossomed with Christmas-related paraphernalia in stores and along streets, lightening up the city a bit.And we had the year's first snowfall, a light dusting. But the coal-burning heaters which keep many Beijingers warm still manage to shroud the place in haze when there's no wind to dissipate the pollution. Those noxious, old-fashioned coal-bricks are being replaced by natural gas as a source of fuel, but not quickly enough to help dispel pollution worries during the 2008 Summer Games.

But, hey, in the name of holiday cheer, how about taking seriously the government's promises to create a "Green Olympics" -- or at least give it a good try, thus improving the city's environment in the process?

At least that's how Nicholas Parker, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Cleantech Group, would have it. Last week Beijing-based Cleantech held a forum in Beijing to encourage networking among "investors, innovators and influencers" in the world of environmentally-friendly technologies. They're certainly focused on the bright side of the future. Clean technologies are attracting 10 percent of total venture capital (VC) in China, third only to information technology and communications.

If the current trajectory holds true, cleantech's share of VC funds will only grow — to as much as 40 percent within the next investment cycle, reportedly. Within the first three quarters of 2007, eastern China landed a spot among the world's top-10 regions in terms of cleantech investment. It is the only region to do so in the developing world—and next to Western Europe, the only one outside the U.S.

China's expected to overtake the U.S. as the leading global emitter of greenhouse gases by the time the Olympics take place -- a decade sooner than expected. And many 2007 goals for cleaning up pollution and promoting sustainable development  have not been met.

Still, worries about a pollution-shrouded Olympics have penetrated official consciousness, and we'll no doubt see an increasingly ambitious raft of clean-up of measures -- such as reducing industrial production in neighboring areas -- in advance of the Games. The country's 11^th Five-Year-Plan outlines comprehensive measures which gear the country toward sustainable development, alternative energy (as opposed to fossil fuels) and cleaner technologies. The impact of those policies won't be felt before the Olympics take place. But as part of its legacy, the Games may leave a greener city than Beijing might otherwise have turned out to be.That's not a bad gift, Christmas or otherwise.

By the way, my friends in the know say many Beijing establishments -- at least in the expat-rich area of Chaoyang where I live, and where the 2008 Games will take place -- have run out of Guinness. While this isn't as serious a crisis as, say, running out of flu vaccine, it's causing  consternation and angst.

Rumor has it the Guinness imports are held up due to newly stringent government requirements for product-safety testing, using sophisticated gas chromatography which costs importers something in the neighborhood of five figures (in greenbacks, that is) and can take weeks or even months to complete. My last blog described the highly coincidental timing in which last week's important international food-safety conference in Beijing was preceded by a high-profile media visit -- pulled together by the city's Olympics organizers -- to a number of quality-control sites.

Included was a quality inspection site in Chaoyang with a display room showing various imported goods that've been tested for elements such as heavy metals. I saw some well-known labels there, including Revlon hair coloring, Del Monte ketchup, Ballantine's and Perrier.  Is the sudden dearth of Guinness related to Beijing's recent surge of interest in product safety inspections? If so, it means China and the EU are beginning to hit where it hurts in their tiff over quality control.

What do the Beijing Games have to do with this week’s diplomatic hissy-fit between Chinese and European Union senior officials over product safety? Following months of export scandals and Western recalls of flawed Chinese goods, the Beijing Olympics media center laid on a Nov. 12 press visit to a string of chicken-processing, pig-butchering and product-inspection facilities to emphasize the city’s commitment to food safety.

Among other things we saw neat assembly lines of pig carcasses being sawed, sliced and cut into bits. While graphic, the scenes bore little resemblance to how we imagine most meat gets processed in China, evoking the Chicago abattoirs of Upton Sinclair’s time. Chinese factory officials bent over backwards to assure us their high standards guaranteed food safety for ALL Beijing citizens, not just visiting Olympians. That was to deflate rumors that secret pig-raising centers had been established to guaranteed hormone-free “pampered” pork for Olympic athletes – gossip which blogger Andrew Lih dubbed “the Olympic pig conspiracy.”

The timing of that media event seemed quite the coincidence when, this past week, Beijing opened a big international food-safety conference. That’s when the high-level catfight erupted. First EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson tore into Chinese authorities for their record of unsafe exports and “tidal wave” of counterfeits. “During the summer some Chinese officials pointed out that less than 1 percent of China’s exports to Europe had alleged health risks,” he declared, “But Europe imports half a billion euros worth of goods from China daily, so even 1 percent is not acceptable.”

Mandelson’s rant was “unfair” and “inappropriate for today’s occasion”, maintained Wei Chuanzhong, deputy director of China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (one of the organizations that featured during our little press trip, by the way). Chinese vice premier Wu Yi-- Beijing’s top trade official, nicknamed the “Iron Lady” -- was even more miffed. She declared herself “extremely unhappy” with Mandelson’s remarks and defended China’s efforts to improve quality control and crack down on pirated goods.

Later that same day, Mandelson riposted that Wu should not have taken exception to his statement that four-fifths of the counterfeit items pouring over Europe’s borders originate in China. “We must seek truth from facts,” he said, citing a phrase identified with Beijing’s late strongman Deng Xiaoping.

What exactly are the facts surrounding China’s food-safety record, and why are Western officials so concerned? Here’s an interview my colleague Han Songmei conducted with Dr Roger Skinner, who’s investigated China’s food safety system as a consultant for the World Health Organization. The London-based specialist is lead author of a report on suggested reforms that was sponsored by China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), the World Health Organization and the Asian Development Bank. Skinner was remarkably candid; check out these excerpts: