My sister, Xiao-hong, is the only one of us still in China.

She works in the administration of the Chengdu College of Chinese Medicine. When a private sector was first allowed in the 1980s, she took a two-year leave of absence to help set up a clothes design company, which was something she had set her heart on. When her leave was up, she had to choose between the excitement and risk of private business and the routine and security of her state post. She chose the latter. Her husband, Specs, is an executive in a local bank.

Communication with the outside world has become part of everyday life. A letter gets from Chengdu to London in a week. My mother can send me faxes from a downtown post office. I phone her at home, direct dial, from wherever I am in the world. There is filtered foreign media news on television every day, side by side with official propaganda.

Major world events, including the revolutions and upheavals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, are reported.

Between 1983 and 1989, I went back to visit my mother every year, and each time I was overwhelmed by the dramatic diminution of the one thing that had most characterized life under Mao: fear.

In spring 1989 I traveled around China researching this book. I saw the buildup of demonstrations from Chengdu to Tiananmen Square. It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger. Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire. Back in London, I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw the killing on television. Was it really ordered by the same man who had been to me and to so many others a liberator?

Fear made a tentative comeback, but without the all pervasive and crushing force of the Maoist days. In political meetings today, people openly criticize Party leaders by name. The course of liberalization is irreversible. Yet Mao's face still stares down on Tiananmen Square.

The economic reforms of the 1980s brought an unprecedented rise in the standard of living, par fly thanks to foreign trade and investmenc Everywhere in China officials and citizens greet businessmen from abroad with overflowing eagerness. In 1988, on a trip to Jinzhou, my mother was staying at Yu-lin's small, dark, primitive apartment, which was next to a rubbish dump. Across the street stands the best hotel in Jinzhou, where lavish feasts are laid on every day for potential investors from overseas. One day, my mother spotted one such visitor coming out of a banquet, surrounded by a flattering crowd to whom he was showing off photographs of his luxury house and cars in Taiwan. It was Yao-han, the Kuomintang political supervisor at her school who, forty years earlier, had been responsible for her arrest.

May 1991 The End