Brian Palmer, Subway, Beijing, 1997 To most Americans, China is a giant, vexing puzzle. But beyond its daunting linguistic and cultural barriers, China is a strikingly ordinary place. The Chinese people prosper and go hungry; raise families and live alone; barely make ends meet and spend lavishly on flashy consumer products; run their own businesses and punch time clocks at big factories; defy authority and go along to get along; celebrate life and suffer depression; and die. The China I first visited in 1984 is gone. The People's Republic has become one of the world's largest and fastest growing economies, has raised the standard of living for much of its population, and has launched countless satellites into space. Economic reforms that were introduced in the provinces during the late 1970s and early 1980s were made official policy by the Beijing leadership and have opened new realms of autonomy for many. But much in China is the same as it was in 1984. Most citizens still live in the countryside. Most Chinese are poor by any standard. An immensely powerful bureaucracy sharply defines the limits of personal freedom. Decades of political campaigns have undermined the faith of the people, and individualism, for good and for ill, has supplanted communalism. While people tend to direct their lives inward, the older Chinese still take pride in reminding youngsters that during the worst of the Mao years, they "ate bitterness," figuratively and literally, as they often choked down bitter weeds and animal feed to survive. If hard times return, they tell their grandchildren, they can do it again. These days, however, urban Chinese kids have taste buds more suited to McDonald's fries than bitter dregs. The economic reforms authored by Deng Xiaoping have altered society and the Chinese people so thoroughly that there is no turning back. China in 1999 is packed with fundamental contradictions, the biggest of which is between its lofty economic aspirations and the scant rights of its people. China's history, its recent past, and its venerable antiquity show that while there's no predicting when it will arrive, change is inevitable. -Brian Palmer BRIAN PALMER graduated from Brown University in 1986 with a degree in East Asian Studies. After traveling and photographing extensively in Asia, Palmer returned to New York where he earned a M.F.A. in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, and worked as a staff photographer for the Village Voice and U.S. News and World Report. He moved to Beijing in 1996, and served as Bureau Chief there for U.S. News and World Report.