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LINK: http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/190SENGY/W190F920/
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COMMENT: Return to the Good Earth.

Dear A-Letter Reader:
When I was small child someone told me that if you dug a hole right through the center of the Earth from Maryland, where I lived, you would come out on the other side, in China. That was about as far as I could imagine one could go in this world, so to me, it was as esoteric a land as could be.

I owe my first impressions of China and the Chinese to the great writer, Pearl S. Buck. Someone once said that Pearl Buck "created" China in the same way Charles Dickens "created" Victorian England

The year that I was born (1937) her book about China, The Good Earth, was made into an MGM movie. The following year she won the 'Nobel Prize' for Literature. Years later I saw the movie, then read the book.

In Buck's China the contrasts were stark; scenes of the abject poverty of the average Chinese, the extreme hardship of their daily existence; fields decimated by a locust attack, famine, the mob destruction of a rich man's mansion, horrific poverty and the contrasting splendor of the imperial rulers' wealth.

Many years later, as a member of the US Congress, "Red China" was a bete noir for we anti-Communists, as Mao and company subjugated billions of souls to a new kind of uncaring imperial dynasty.

Thus I was reluctant, back in 1979, when  I was asked by the House Republican Leader, the late John Rhodes, to become a member of a House delegation headed to the Peoples Republic of China. "We need a conservative to go," he pleaded, "All the others are pretty liberal."

This it was that I participated in the last of the "Shanghai Exchanges," first arranged in 1972 by President Richard Nixon and Sec. of State Henry Kissinger, went they went to China and met with Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai.

As visiting foreign officials, we were shown what the Red government wanted us to see, but we managed to see a lot more. That included the short-lived "Freedom Wall" in Beijing where the first brave dissenters posted their cryptic poems and statements as secret police took photos. (This was very near Tiananmen Square, where in 1989, the blood shed came to symbolize the triumph of the human spirit over brute force).

I even met and debated briefly about Taiwan with then Premier Deng Xiaoping in the Great all of the Peoples in Beijing. (He declined to answer what, I was told by US embassy officials, was my impertinent question).

In those days China was not too different to my eyes than what Pearl Buck had described, a backward, closed society with massive poverty. While I was fascinated by the beauty of century old temples, the Great Wall, the people all wore those familiar padded Mao jackets and every question was met with memorized official party lines.

Now, after all these years, this November 8-20, I'll be returning to China, and retracing my steps in a nation that, since I last visited, has changed drastically in major ways -- and yet, in so many ways, remains the same as it has for thousands of years.

Back in 1979 I could never have imagined that Deng and other leaders would shift to market oriented economic development policies, quadrupling GDP by 2000. For some of its 1.3 billion population, living standards have improved dramatically but, while some personal choice is allowed, political control on individuals remains very tight.

The Sovereign Society always stays ahead of the offshore investment curve. Because China is at a crossroads of history, growing immensely and offering major profits, we're going there. You can join us and be there to witness, learn and profit first hand. You're invited.

That's the way it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor

PS: Find out more about our China trip and how to join us, click here:
    LINK: http://www.agoraimages.com/promos/china/