My first memories of China go back almost 50 years. Sitting in front of our 10-in. Philco television, over milk and peanut-butter sandwiches, my closest third-grade friends and I watched, with fascination and terror, the grainy news footage of Chinese soldiers crossing the Yalu River into Korea. It was 1950, the year after Mao Zedong and the communists had taken control of China, exiling General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party to Taiwan. And now they were fighting us.

That fascination and terror would grow in the decade to come as I, and millions of other Americans, grew up reading Henry Luce's TIME. It was Luce, born in China to Presbyterian missionaries, whose powerful newsweekly most demonized Mao and, by extension, all of what became known as Red China. Later, in the 1970s, I lived in Hong Kong, where, peering across the border, I had the chance to observe Mao's last days, when the notorious Gang of Four reduced China to chaos and near anarchy. I thought then that Luce was probably right. China was a country that couldn't be trusted, as an ally or as a competitor, and the diplomats who thought otherwise, preferring what we now call "constructive engagement" to containment, were making a mistake.

Those thoughts and emotions came rushing back earlier this month after I flew to Beijing for a remarkable three-hour dinner with Jiang Zemin, China's President and General Secretary of the Communist Party. Driving into the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Henry Kissinger's secret meetings paved the way for Richard Nixon's trip to China in 1972, I realized how much China and its leadership had changed and how much America had not--how often we still see China through Luce's eyes.

China has done much to liberalize its economy and its society in the years since I lived in Hong Kong. While the garishly lit skyscrapers of Beijing and Shanghai may mask continuing poverty, China has begun to cast off the worst vestiges of communism. On the international front, Beijing has sometimes been helpful, trying to cool tensions between India and Pakistan, keeping North Korean military ambitions in check and usually abstaining (rather than voting no) on U.N. ballots to use force in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans.

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