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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