Unlike the rest of the world, this event was not merely a chance to mourn the passing of a technology icon. Instead, it was an occasion for Chinese citizens, especially the emerging middle class that is the key to the nation’s consumer culture, to reflect on what Steve Jobs’ life said about their own prospects and future.

All of this seemed counter-intuitive, because Apple, and Jobs personally, never seemed to try very hard to win the heart of China.

He never visited on business, unlike the countless CEOs of multi-national corporations who make regular, humbling pilgrimages to win favor with the Chinese government and media.

He never tailored his products for the Chinese market, the favored tactic for most makers of consumer wares, but still managed to turn anything Apple into a nationwide aspiration. This was the case even though an iPhone 4, with a price tag of 5,000 RMB, costs as much as the average worker in a prosperous city such as Shanghai makes in a month.

He was a man completely different from Chinese business leaders, someone who most Chinese believe would never have been a success had he been born and raised in China. (Check out this great weibo post, translated into English, that speculates on Jobs’ life had he been Chinese. )

The latter point holds the most compelling lesson for other companies hoping to learn from Apple’s success and the iconic status Jobs achieved here. As Chinese citizens both online and off debated whether China could ever produce a visionary leader equal to Jobs, they revealed something essential for global business leaders to understand about this nation’s middle class.

Masked inside the national pride and patriotism displayed daily in social and traditional media, there is a gnawing sense that all of China’s remarkable progress is somehow not enough.

Members of the fast-growing middle class are insecure overachievers. They continually worry about their next pay raise and promotion, while comparing their own success with that of their schoolmates or colleagues over coffee at Starbucks, asking each other in the course of iPad- and iPhone-enabled social media discussions whether China will ever have its own Steve Jobs.

That question is less about China than about themselves. And the products they buy after waiting on long queues to enter an Apple store reassure them that their aspirations might just be more powerful than their anxieties. As far as China goes, perhaps Steve Jobs’ true genius was that his products were able to tap into that insight in a powerful way.

This comes just a few days after one of Beijing’s top Communist party leaders visited the offices of the nation’s most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Sina Weibo, and strongly suggested that Sina do more to block the spread of “false information” among its 200 million plus users.

The grassroots power of the Weibos, with those managed by Sina, Sohu and Tencent being the most popular, has been apparent for many months in the wake of a series of government corruption scandals. But a heated and angry online uprising, which followed the crash of a high-speed bullet train that killed 40 people in July, brought the situation to a head. The furious string of online challenges of the official account of the accident spurred government officials to act.

Zhan Jiang, a professor of journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, says that, compared to microblogs, China’s traditional media face “technical and systematic restrictions” in their efforts to supervise the government. Microbloggers have filled that gap by making it easy for people to speak their thoughts in real-time, essentially making their public voices louder, according to Professor Zhan.

But this week’s attack on microblogs by Xinhua, the official government news agency and most powerful media outlet in the nation, foreshadows that things are about to change.

“Fundamentally eradicating the soil in which rumors sprout and spread will demand stronger internet administration from the responsible agencies,” Xinhua wrote, according to a translation proved by Chris Buckley of Reuters.

Although the nation’s 550 million internet users have demonstrated remarkable creativity in evading the watchful eye of the Golden Shield in the past, it’s tough to bet against the Chinese government when it tightens the censorship screws. But there is no doubt that the outcome of this struggle will have a profound effect on the credibility and openness of the world’s largest social media community.

In the Mad Man era, PR equaled publicity, either managing it when a reporter called, or creating it with cool stunts. Don was an amateur; Peggy was a natural. I’d hire her in a minute.

Before I did, though, I’d warn her that, even though the public relations industry in our post-Mad Men era has changed a lot, it still has a long way to go before it’s the dog. I’d tell her PR has an opportunity to become as powerful and compelling as the ad business in the last decades of the 20th Century, if only a couple of things would change.

1: Create PR Holding Companies

The ownership structure of most of the world’s large, global PR firms is an insurmountable wall in the way of greatness. Tucked near the backside of global ad conglomerate org charts, the world’s major public relations firms, with the exception of independent Edelman (disclosure, my employer), are encumbered by second-class status. They are grouped into kludged organizations with names like “constituency management,” “diversified agency services,” and “specialized agencies and management services.” The organizational categories are basically “other.”

Despite the talent and excellence of some of the holding-company PR firms, they will never assume marketing leadership locked in a last-generation concept that puts ad networks at the front of everything. When these holding companies were formed, the ad agencies ruled the day and owned the client, and their DNA is born of a time that will never again exist. And regardless of all the talk by holding company heads about the importance of digital, the ad guys still run the show.

Because so much of the world’s PR talent is locked into this declining model, the entire industry is being held back. PR needs a little bit of Darwin to create the model of the future holding company: One made up of great PR firms, with perhaps a small creative ad agency and a digital direct-marketing firm in the “other” part of the organization.

2: Own - Really Own - Social Media in the New Engagement Economy

It was social media that poisoned the holding company, ad-agency-led marketing model, and it can be social media that empower the PR industry. If, and it’s a big if, the industry embraces the implications of social media and restructures itself to take advantage of the new engagement economy, it will move to the center of the client relationship.

Some PR firms have genuinely embarked on a journey to alter their business models and are quite skilled at engaging on behalf of their clients within social media. Most, however, have a social media expert or two, but still spend the majority of their time and their clients’ money sending out core messages and strategic responses to the media, then counting media hits and ad-equivalent column inches to justify that effort.

Of course, PR will always communicate with media in whatever form media take. But the industry will be great when public relations agencies have scores of people adept at the way information is shared across digital platforms, when their employees are respected members of online social networks, good listeners who are also expert at cultivating relationships through increasing customer and stakeholder interaction.

My pitch to get Peggy Olson to join the PR ranks would also include a confession. I am an accidental PR guy. I didn’t choose this business; it chose me. I didn’t know it existed when I was in college; I scorned it during my years as a newspaper journalist; I found myself in it one day, and have now embraced it.

I would tell Peggy Olson I’m glad I did, because PR, before long, might just be the dog.

This post also appeared in Marketing Asia magazine.

The reaction on Sina Weibo and elsewhere online surprised me, in part, because the survey, in its 11th year, had found similarly high levels of trust in government and most other institutions in China, but had not prompted anything like the level of discussion that played out in the past week.

A likely explanation for this is the rise of social media as a powerful populist force over the past 12 months. I’ve talked about this and blogged about it often, but nothing brought the point home so clearly to me than the discussion online this week.

Consider: Sina Weibo has gone from a few million to almost 75 million users since Edelman released its previous Trust Barometer survey early in 2010.

Its success, and the success of similar home-grown social media platforms, may reflect the fact that Twitter, Facebook and other foreign social-networking sites are blocked in China, so Chinese microblogging services have become a popular alternative source of information. Its labyrinthine conversation threads makes it almost impossible, short of shutting down the entire platform, for the government to censor effectively.

2) Everyone on social media has opinions, and many don’t let the facts get in the way when expressing them.

People post crazy things. For example, more than one netizen suggested that there was some ulterior motive behind the Trust survey findings. Edelman is trying to curry favor with the Chinese government to get more work from government agencies, one post stated. Or, a variation, the government sponsored the survey, as others said.

Given the results about government in places like the U.S., where trust is low, and Russia where it is very low, I can’t help but ask the people who offered these thoughts why Edelman would be less interested in government elsewhere and so interested in it in China? For the record, Edelman does no work for the Chinese government, and the government had no involvement in the research.

I wish everyone who took the time to post comments had also taken the time to review the full global research. The study, its methodology and the full context have been available on Edelman's web site. They are worth a look by anyone who’s seriously interested in understanding this research. The full China-specific research data will be released after Chūn Jié, by the way.

3) Social media are a powerful demonstration of the gap between popular opinion and the opinions of urban elites in China.

While the Trust Barometer does not explore why people respond to the survey questions as they do, it is reasonable to conclude that the populist voice represented by comments on social media are not in synch with the opinions of those surveyed by Edelman.

For those who have not seen the survey methodology, here is how the research was done.

Phone surveys of 375 people in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou were conducted between October 11 and November 28, 2010. A total of 5,075 people were interviewed worldwide, and the survey had more than 140 questions about various institutions and industries.

The people interviewed were between 25 and 64 years old and fit into a distinct category generally known as “informed publics.” These are people who are college-educated, in the top 25% of income by age group, and follow news media and policy issues at least several times a week. Well-educated, wealthy and well-informed: In the U.S., for example, this group represents 15% - 20% of the total population.

We have been surveying this global population in our Trust Barometer since its inception in 2001, because they are more attuned to business news and information and, as we have seen from other studies, are more likely to act on their beliefs through purchase behavior, spreading “word-of-mouth,” and supporting or opposing regulation based on their beliefs. Typically, this is the population that adopts an opinion or action earlier and then influences the general population. Therefore, we think they are a good indication of where “informed opinion” is heading.

These people do NOT, however, reflect popular opinion in China. They reflect the opinions of people in their demographic group.

Popular opinion in China is rarely studied, mainly because of the practical difficulties of getting a representative sample of a highly diverse population of 1.3 billion people. It’s important to note that the Edelman study is independent, well-established, follows the rigorous academic rules for conducting social research, and is statistically representative of the opinions of the group surveyed.

So, an interesting thing to discuss, and for journalists to explore, is the gap between the opinions of those surveyed and those reflected in social media.

I would like to read some lively social media discussions, and maybe a few serious news stories, that try to answer questions like these:

-- Why do such a large percentage of college-educated, financially successful people in China who spend a lot of time keeping up with business and public affairs news trust government and the other traditional institutions of Chinese society?

-- Why don’t the people who express opinions on social media trust those institutions?

-- What are the implications of the gap?

As I said, the Edelman Trust Barometer is not designed to answer questions like those, but it should stimulate debate among people who think they know the answers.

And, it seems, there are a lot of them using social media in China these days.

. . . the Third Ring, looking north from Fortune Plaza, looks like this at 1 p.m. on a Monday.

Working with Planet Water Foundation and the WWF, a group of Edelman managers and executives focused a portion of a regional meeting on solving this school's drinking water problem. Well done to everyone who took part. The photos in this presentation are great to see.

Both economically and politically, China is a different place than it was before the global recession of 2009. It is stronger, more aggressive and more demanding of its partners, especially multi-national companies operating here.

• A transition is underway to a new generation of leadership in the ruling Communist Party;
• A new economic plan has been previewed, which includes an emphasis on developing a stronger consumer economy and spreading the nation’s wealth to cities and people west of the powerful east coast necklace of prosperity, stretching from Beijing to Shenzhen;
• China’s leaders are trying to avoid the ill-effects of inflation and an artificially weak currency, while shifting investments into indigenous industries;
• And social media continue their unprecedented growth, with no one really sure how this growing populist community of netizens will affect government policy or corporate reputations.

To accommodate the new environment, western companies are reshaping their public affairs agendas and models. They now must think of their challenges in a more complex framework. Government access and relationships can no longer be their sole strategic platform.

In research and one-to-one discussion related to this year’s Public Affairs Dialogue (See a full report of the proceedings and download the Dialogue white paper) organized by Public Affairs Asia and Edelman public relations, several key themes emerged, which together constitute the three-pillar structure upon which future public affairs models will need to be built.

They are:

• Achieving change in the political, legislative or regulatory environment requires greater regional mapping and significant localization.

• Corporate social responsibility strategies will need to be aligned to the social and economic agendas of the Chinese government to give companies an implied license to operate, and those strategies must be retooled to meet the unique definition of CSR in China.

• And social media, with its connected community exceeding 420 million, must be addressed to reflect the importance of these new, populist and difficult to control sources of information.

I believe it is time to challenge long-held beliefs about how to manage public affairs and government affairs in China and embrace the complexity of the modern nation by adopting this three-part approach.

And, like most things in China, when the government puts its weight behind an initiative it often succeeds beyond expectations.

Drivers took to the road in unprecedented numbers, too, with the government logging more than 474 million individual road trips by car and bus. The Beijing traffic control bureau reported a gridlock on the Beijing-Tibet Highway that lasted from 2 pm to 8 pm on Sunday, with vehicles stretching back nearly 10 kilometers.

The Forbidden City was mobbed with record crowds of Chinese tourists at more than double the daily capacity of 60,000. Check out what it looked like in the photo above.

More than 600,000 Chinese visited Hong Kong over the holiday, a record, and queued up on long lines at high-end malls to fill suitcases with luxury goods, available in Hong Kong at 30 percent lower prices than on the Mainland.

The proof points go on and on, and these eye-popping travel numbers are part of a long-term trend that is seeing the emergence of the Chinese tourist on the national and world stage as perhaps the most influential force in the global travel industry.

The Golden Week concept, created in 1999 by the central government, mandates three days of paid holidays for Chinese workers to celebrate National Day, commemorating the creation of the modern Chinese republic on Oct. 1, 1949, and the Chinese Lunar New Year in January or February. The surrounding weekends are also re-arranged, so workers always have seven continuous days of holiday.

In the 10 years since the policy innovation, Chinese travelers have taken to the road and skies with considerable passion and increasingly are crossing international borders. Sometimes statistics rather than anecdote tell the clearer story, and this is such a case.

Consider:

• China's Tourism Academy estimates that 54 million tourists will go abroad this year from China, up from 47 million in 2009.

• Relaxed visa rules effective July 1 will soon make travelers from China Japan's biggest tourist group, topping 10 million per year. Those visitors spend more per traveler than those from any other nation, and Chinese tourists are already the largest per capita spenders in France.

• The China International Travel service (CITS), the nation's ubiquitous storefront travel agency, enjoyed record revenue growth and profit during the first half of 2010, with income of $375 million USD, up 80 percent year-on-year.

• China's big three airlines -- China Air, China Easterm and China Southern -- also reported record profits and growth during the first six months of 2010, as their lucrative international flights were packed to capacity.

As if the two National Day periods aren't enough to continue driving this unprecedented growth in tourism by Chinese citizens, the government is weighing the creation of a new holiday specifically and literally intended to get people to travel. The new National Tourism Day will likely make its debut next year, once the government figures out on what day the holiday should fall.

With extensive lobbying from various local governments across China , the outcome is far from certain.

According to the China Daily, the factions breakdown this way:

"Jiangsu province's Wuxi, wants the national tourism day to fall on March 29, the day famous Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) tourist Xu Xiake started traveling.

"Zhejiang province's Ninghai, suggested May 19, when Xu started writing his travel books. (More than 5,000 volunteers in Ninghai county, Zhejiang province, advocate for national tourism day to be held on May 19, the day Xu Xiake, a famous ancient explorer, began his adventure from the county.>View China Daily image)

"Meanwhile, Hunan province, proposed Dec 26, the day late Chairman Mao Zedong was born.

"And Sichuan province, wants the day to fall on either July 5 or 15, when prominent leader Deng Xiaoping made important speeches about tourism.

"Wuxi is the birthplace of Xu, who first mentioned Ninghai in his maiden travel book, while Chairman Mao was born in Hunan province and Deng in Sichuan."

When the government asked the popular online portal, sina.com, to poll its visitors about potential dates, the site was deluged with more than 4.2 billion votes. Given that China has 1.3 billion people, the results suggested that those local Chinese governments had taken a creative approach to spurring support among their citizens.

With so much economic reward at stake, the forces of fakery in China had been unleashed in an effort to market the respective dates.

That incident aside, there's no questioning the genuineness of the travel boom in China. It is a trend that is certain to continue and will influence tourist destinations worldwide. The era of the Chinese tourist is upon us, and it's coming to a city near you.

An iconic, grand figure, Goodall is the British anthropologist who brought worldwide attention to the chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park and inspired a generation of conservation and animal welfare activists.

She was in Beijing as part of a world tour to generate interest in her NGO, Roots and Shoots, which is trying to empower young people to save the planet. She was also carrying her message that humans, the smartest of the great apes, aren't smart enough to realize they are choking the planet to death with global warming, deforestation and the other ills of economic development.

But as I listened to her speak, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with her message, that human progress was imperiling the world and that the way to address that was by somehow turning the dial down, or off, on that progress.

Mostly because of the work I do representing corporate clients, many of whom are struggling to identify their role in addressing the issues Goodall eloquently champions, I was eager to hear her vision about how to create a sustainable economic future for the world.

Unfortunately, that vision is more spiritual than practical; more Native American than modern; more about excluding the rewards of economic progress from people's lives than balancing the desire for those rewards with the realities of the environmental damage that unchecked growth can cause.

It is simply and unrealistic vision in a world in which the billions of people in China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere are trying to lift their families from poverty to a better life through economic development and growth.

Given her potential influence and credibility, I wish she would begin talking about the tangible movement among global corporations to align their values and futures with the needs of the broader society. I wish she had told her audience that young people cannot go backward to save the world, but instead must work to ensure that government and business, the two most powerful forces on the planet, work together to create a sustainable future.

I wish she had said that business can be a force for good, and that she was working to educate business leaders about how to lead organizations that have good purpose at the core.

The recent case of Qiu Ziming, a business reporter for the Beijing-based Economic Observer, had a happy ending this week when he was able to come out of hiding after the police in the Eastern China province of Zhejiang were pressured to drop their efforts to arrest him for doing his job. For several days, though, the reporter was on the lam, because police put him on a national list of wanted criminals "for damaging a company's reputation." His crime: Writing stories that exposed insider trading and bribery at a powerful paper manufacturer in Zhejiang province.

The Economic Observer broke the corruption story,
marshaled internet support for an investigative reporter.

Then, as is often the case in the China "news cycle," China's powerful traditional, government-controlled media reacted to the online buzz with reporting of their own. The China Daily reported the story and the broadcaster CCTV ran a segment that revealed further questionable activities at the paper company.

By Thursday evening, Qiu Ziming was no longer a wanted man.

(Accounts of the story as reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are available for more details.)

The situation ended well, but is still a troubling reminder that a commitment to doing quality journalism can still be bad for your health in China. I've written about this before, and there are frequent, less publicized cases of journalist bashing. Literally. Some journalists from CCTV, for example, were recently beaten when they uncovered a story about local officials in Shanxi province who were building private villas on land meant for a public reservoir.

Aggressive reporting is certainly becoming more common in China, with publications vying for readers, journalism schools producing vast numbers of young idealistic reporters, and the central government becoming increasingly tolerant of the media's role in exposing corruption at the provincial and local level across China. The trend is making for a more readable, watchable and influential media community.

But it is clearly the internet, and its ability to marshal the powerful force of public opinion and outrage among the country's 350 million social media participants, that is giving me reason to be optimistic about the future of honest news reporting in China.

(Update, Aug. 2: A series of new reports of aggression directed at Chinese journalists surfaced over the weekend and brought more calls for reform and newsgathering protections. Details in the Global Times, and China Daily.)

In 1996, if you were lucky enough to be among the handful of people with an internet connection here, you could freely surf across what was then called the World Wide Web. You could drink all the tea you wanted, but getting a decent espresso was impossible. The great Chinese leader and father of China's modern day economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, was still alive, even if the economic reforms he launched had yet to transform this country. And the word "baseball" would have been as foreign on the streets of Beijing as the concept of a hot dog.

And baseball, the 2010 All Star game specifically, was shown live today for the first time on Chinese TV.

China's embrace of America's pastime is still tentative. Yet, the willingness of Chinese TV executives to share the game live with a potential audience of 350 million people in China's southern provinces, the nation's temperate areas where the government hopes to nurture the nation's appetite for balls and strikes, feels like a milestone to me.

There are no effective audience measurements tools in China, so we may never know how many viewers actually tuned in. But the power of big numbers (300 million is about the total population of the U.S.) suggests that the potential audience in China today for the game could have rivaled that in the U.S.

That's why Major League Baseball is so eager to create a taste for the sport here. They do the math, just like every other western brand, and calculate the huge upside in potential viewers, participants and future players if their marketing efforts succeed. And even though only 4 million people in China now play baseball, the game's marketers have their sights set on duplicating the success of the NBA, which claims 100 times as many people in China play that sport.

The cultural obstacles of creating a nation of baseball fans will be substantial, of course. It's worthwhile to read a delightful op-ed by Matt Forney that appeared in the New York Times in 2008 following a spring training game played in Beijing. The headline serves up the gist of the piece: "Major League Baseball Arrives in China, but Traditions Don’t Quite Translate"

But while the MLB may be years behind the NBA, it is still investing and trying to catch up. This September, it will open a developmental center in Wuxi, near Shanghai, that it imagines will eventually tip the scales in its favor. The facility will provide professional baseball training for talented middle- and high-school players and serve as a baseball boarding school, where small groups of players will attend academic classes while they learn the finer points of hitting the cut-off man and hitting the curveball. The hope is that these kids will fill the future ranks of China's national teams, seed the start of a professional league in China and ignite a mania for a sport that the world has long linked to American culture. (Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?)

Jim Small, the MLB's vice president for Asia, likes to note that China was the first place in Asia where baseball was played.  He told The China Daily recently:

"Bangqiu, the Chinese word for baseball, which literally means “stick ball”, can trace its roots in the country to at least 1863, when the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed by an American medical missionary named Henry William Boone. Studies say baseball virtually disappeared in China with the commencement of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Red Army cadres attacked all sports as an “unwanted extravagance” of Western decadence.  Baseball coaches were ridiculed and persecuted, and some were killed." (Sounds like what New York fans do when their teams lose.)

But now, baseball is back. The Chinese government has even paid to move the dormant Wukesong baseball field, which was used for the 2008 Olympic Games and then dismantled, to Xiamen in Fujian province. The stated reason for the move south was the government's interest in promoting future baseball games in the facility between China and Taiwan (who says the world has not changed). Is this the potential Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of Asia if MLB marketers play things right?

When the 2009 World Series trophy was toured in China earlier this year, small, but enthusiastic crowds led Randy Levine, the general manager of the world champion Yankees, to imagine the future: “The dream of kids all over the world is to play in Yankee Stadium," he said. "One day that will be a Chinese kid’s dream.”

For me, waking up today and knowing that the All Star game was live on TV here wasn't quite a dream come true, but it was enough to get me happily through a summer day in Beijing, made even sweeter when the National League pulled off the win.

If you speak and write Chinese, you will officially become a full-fledged member of the world's internet community next month, when the Chinese characters in this blog's headline, known up to now as .cn, .hk and .tw respectively, will make their internet debut as top-level domain names.

The agency that manages internet URL names, ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced that the language now spoken by 20% of the world will soon be all you'll need to surf the night away. Up to now, users could almost complete a web or email address with just a Chinese keyboard. Almost. But once the user got to the characters that follow the final dot (.com, .org, .cn, etc), only Latin letters would do.

For the world's English speakers, the web has always been a language-friendly place, where our Latin characters were the basic typographical currency. If you wrote Chinese, or Arabic, or Russian or Hebrew you were something of a second-class citizen.

"One World, One Internet, Everyone Connected" is the happy slogan invented to make these changes seem to fit some larger, more important context. Many in the Chinese media have wrapped the change in nationalist slogans, heralding it as an important move to protect Chinese culture and heritage, and pointing to it as further evidence of the decline of Western culture and the rise of the East.

Some have even cynically noted that another change announced the same day, the creation of a special top-level domain for pornography (.xxx), received much more news attention globally than did the addition of Chinese characters to the top-level domain club.

The real impact of this change, of course, will be minimal. People in China will access the sites they've always accessed in much the same way. Sites with the .com domain will still require users to type those three characters, just that same way.

Most importantly, though, most web sites are now accessed through embedded links or other methods that don't require users to type an address, so who really cares about URLs anymore? They are quickly becoming the invisible code of information access, rather than a branding platform or an object of pride.

So when the ICANN brass and the nationalist pundits in China, the Middle East and Russia start heradling this as the biggest change in the internet since it was created, well, be skeptical.

I watch it deteriorate each day, from "pretty good" during my early morning walks with my dog Buster, to worse in the afternoon as seen from my 33rd floor office window, to "very unhealthy" on many days by the time evening rush begins at 5 p.m.

And the internet enables my obsession.

I also torture myself by following the Twitter account @beijingair, which provides updates through the day of the pollutants in the air outside the U.S. embassy. The air-quality Tweets progress from "moderate" to "very unhealthy" as the day passes almost as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

In idle moments, I also like to visit the Asia Society's "Room with a View," a web feature the organization started during the Beijing Olympics. There, I can see a photo, taken from the same high-rise window each day, which chronicles with visual day-to-day evidence what my own eyes and my internet data already prove beyond any doubt: That the air in Beijing is really bad.

At first, I took some comfort thinking that what I was breathing was not really any worse than the air in New York on many days. Once again, some web research shattered that illusion. The New York City equivalent of the API is usually at about 50, or air quality of moderate concern.

The Chinese government knows air quality is a major problem and recently came up with a plan that it claims will continue to improve things by tackling the issue on a regional, rather than local, basis. The new plan reported this week in The China Daily builds on an existing government initiative, called "Blue Skies," which aims to increase the number of days in which Beijing's air is only "slightly polluted," with API readings below 100. The government goal was to have 256, or 70%, "blue sky days" by 2008. They surpassed this target by 18 days. In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 “blue sky days," so things have been worse.

The cause of all this air pollution is China's policy of Fazhan, or rapid and dramatic industrialization, since the mid 1970s. As a proof point about how much has changed in that time, the government says that visibility in eastern regions of China, Beijing included. has dropped by 7 to 15 km compared to that in the early 1960s, as a result of air pollution.

Industrialization has been powered by cheap electricity, produced by coal-burning generation plants. Steel manufacturing and cement production, the core industries that are building China's cities, are among the dirtiest businesses on the planet. And let's not forget China's 76 million vehicles, which are trapped in never-ending stop-and-go traffic, which produces the lowest miles-per gallon and highest emissions-per-mile of any form of driving.

But now Fazhan has given way to a new policy of "scientific development," which basically means China would like to keep growing the economy without choking its residents to death.

I am optimistic that they can do this. I am hopeful, even, that things can improve soon and my obsession can be calmed. Because as bad as breathing the air in Beijing might be for my physical health, I'm starting to worry about my mental health, too, because even when things seem to be OK, there's evidence that they are not.

Consider: Today in Beijing the Chinese government says the API is 94, making this an official "blue sky day." But, just two minutes ago, this from @BeijingAir: "06-23-2010; 13:00; PM2.5; 42.0; 112; Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups."

I've written before about how the media in the two countries each present a unique point of view, in the context of objective reporting, on issues that divide the world's two most important economies, and the Yuan revaluation news was no exception. Each country's media played to readers and viewers who expected to read or hear the story from a U.S. or China perspective. Like that Louis Armstrong song, "Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off," a tomato can be a tomahto when it comes to China / U.S. media coverage.

From the Wall Street Journal: "With pressure on China building in both the U.S. Congress and the Group of 20 major economies, the decision showed pragmatism and a desire to set China's economic relations with the world on a more sustainable footing."

From the New York Times: "The Chinese central bank announced Sunday afternoon that any changes in the value of its currency would be gradual, in a clear attempt to reassure the Chinese people that a move Saturday evening toward a more flexible currency would not result in a sharp or disruptive change. The central bank’s statement coincided with signs of a backlash in China, where many view a weak currency and the accompanying strong exports as a sign of national sovereignty. "

The New York Post: "Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) isn't buying Chinese resolve to end the yuan's fixed rate to the dollar -- and is vowing to advance trade-sanctions legislation to force them to act. 'Just a day after there was much hoopla about the Chinese finally changing their policy, they are already backing off.' "

The China Daily: "China will be able to keep inflows of speculative capital under control even if the latest clarifications on its yuan policy trigger any influx of 'hot money.' . . . The gradualist way of currency appreciation, while causing more inflows of speculative capital, will help control such adverse capital movement, analysts said. If the annual appreciation of the currency can be kept below 3 percent, it will make it hard for speculators to profit, since they will have to pay dual-way transaction costs that will be close to what they can gain from a rising yuan."

CCTV, under the headline RMB reform restarts, to aid China and world: "Now fairly ensured the global economic recovery is on a solid footing and its exports had rebounded since April, Beijing finally decided to enhance the RMB exchange rate flexibility, to help squeeze out low-value labor-intensive production, and to sooth rising outside cries that the RMB must be revalued."

The Global Times: "A more flexible exchange rate isn't in response to a bilateral trade imbalance with any one specific country . . . The move is in line with China's long-term fundamental interests, as it will help boost employment, especially in the service sector; curb inflation and asset bubbles; and create a more favorable international development environment for China.

It is worth noting, however, that media on both sides of the Pacific agree that the best way to illustrate their stories about this issue is with pictures of Chinese bank notes. The photos below were widely used in U.S. and China media. There is hope, I guess, for a common media view. Or, as that Louis Armstrong song concludes: "We know we need each other, so we'd better call the calling-off off."

I was reminded of that in New York Sunday during a brief business trip back to the U.S. when, over a cup of coffee and a bagel, I read a really smart piece of reporting by Ian Urbina about what went wrong on that BP deep-ocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico -- how a series of mistakes and poor decisions led to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The story reminded me of ones I'd seen in the Chinese media, mostly the China Daily, CCTV and the Global Times, about the pressing environmental challenges facing that nation. And how different the stories were.

The Gulf oil spill.

And that made me think: What a difference the First Amendment makes.

A river in China

The independent, questioning analytic tone that American media consumers have come to expect from the best U.S. media just doesn't exist in China, where the media have no legal protection equivalent to the Constitutional shield afforded free speech in the U.S.

Instead, Chinese media, while in most cases not directly government controlled, are viewed as an extension of government policy, a tool intended to help the government drive its social and economic agenda. That's what the government expects and usually manages to get. And news organizations that cross the line into the gray zone of independent reporting can have bad things happen.

The government can suspend their licenses to publish. Chinese courts can slap them with fines for writing factual stories that embarrass state-owned companies. Editors get "reassigned" for handling controversial stories. Offensive blog posts will vanish from social media portals. China is simply a tough place to be an independently minded reporter or editor.

And most Chinese news consumers, who value societal harmony much more than journalistic independence, are OK with the way things are. There's remarkably little awareness of this issue among news consumers I speak with and even academics in China who study society and media.

Consider this recent letter to the editor that appeared in the China Daily: "Media are like fire . They are a vital part of our lives, but in the wrong hands they become lethal and disastrous. That is why good parents don't let their children play with fire. At the moment, the Chinese media are acting like children playing with fire. When will the parents (read as government) intervene?"

Or this recent column written by the director of a large university's communications research center on the subject of the possible purchase by Chinese investors of Newsweek, the U.S. news magazine. "Standards of news reporting also have to be kept high. Confuse news and propaganda and the magazine's credibility will plummet." So far so good. But then: "Investors should also be aware of lingering Western prejudices and stereotypes about China, and recruit a professional team with a global vision to correct them."

China is a place that has undergone an economic miracle unmatched in human history. It is a place that has come so far in so short a period because of its unique marriage between top-down government control and bottom-up evolution in its society. A free and vigorous press, which doesn't exist here, has had little role in the country's development except to act as a mouthpiece for the top-down forces and a release valve for the bottom up forces.

I can't help but worry that, with a growing set of emerging societal ills such as crime, pollution and wealth disparities, China needs a free and vigorous press to help air the issues and provide voice to the diverse interests that are shaping the country.