Beijing

It's late morning at Beijing's popular Beihai Park, and 72-year-old Han Shusuo is channeling the chimpanzee. Bent double with his gloved hands pressed against the pavement, Han gently lopes forward with a look of serene concentration, his rear end pointed skyward. "From crawling comes health" is Han's motto, rooted in his belief that walking upright has made humans more susceptible to illness. Over the last 14 years, he has developed his own brand of martial arts based on the walking patterns of different animals, including chimpanzees, elephants and kangaroos.

WASHINGTON - A blind Chinese dissident who escaped from house arrest is under U.S. protection, his supporters said Saturday, creating a dilemma for Washington before a visit this week by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Chen Guangcheng, a civil rights activist who has exposed forced abortions and sterilizations in rural areas, escaped a week ago from his heavily guarded home in Shandong province in eastern China. U.S. officials declined to comment Saturday and have not confirmed reports that he sought protection atthe U.S. Embassyin Beijing.

Zhao Ziyang, China's Communist Party leader accused of supporting the student pro-democracy movement, has been seen playing golf on a Beijing course, the Japanese daily newspaper Sankei Shimbun said Saturday. Sankei quoted Japanese government sources as saying that Zhao was seen sometime after senior leader Deng Xiaoping appeared in public June 9. Zhao's last public appearance was May 19, when he met protesters in Beijing's Tian An Men Square. A day later, martial law was declared in the Chinese capital, and on June 3-4, a brutal army assault cleared the square of protesters.

After five months of controversy over logistics, delegates have begun arriving in Beijing for a forum of private advocacy groups that hope to influence the work of the U.N. women's conference Sept. 4-15. Some of the world's leading women politicians plan to attend the conference, including First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Foreigners streamed out of Beijing by air Tuesday as their embassies urged them to leave before the violence gets worse. Some embassies arranged for special flights out of the capital. Others, including the U.S. Embassy, sent messages to their nationals suggesting strongly that they flee. "You should leave Beijing," a caller from the U.S. Embassy told one American resident of the capital. "If you must stay, then go to hotels on the east side of the city." An estimated 2,500 Americans live in Beijing.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said today that he'd like to see Beijing win the five-way contest to play host to the 2008 Summer Olympics. Speaking at a breakfast meeting, Kissinger--who was a key player in the reform process that dominated the International Olympic Committee in 1999--said that from a "strictly foreign policy point of view" and "what is best for the future of Asia and the rest of the world" the 2008 Games should go to Beijing.

String quartets still play during the cocktail hour at luxury hotels, blond children still ride their bikes along the broad avenues, the spouses of diplomats and foreign business executives still shop for luxury provisions at the cavernous Friendship Store on Beijing's main drag. After more than a week of martial law and mounting tension over student protests, troop movements and convulsions within the Communist Party, life remains normal--more or less--for the city's expatriate community.

For a while it looked as if the democracy movement at Nanjing University would fizzle out. While university students in Beijing led marches and demonstrations on Tian An Men Square commemorating the May 4th student movement of 1919, the student protest in Nanjing was effectively broken up by the police. The situation here, however, has changed dramatically. On Tuesday, students took over the Nanjing University public-address system at 7 a.m. and demanded a class boycott in support of the Beijing students' hunger strike, which was taking place during the visit of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

"It is well to remember that one eyewitness, however dull and prejudiced, is worth a wilderness of sentimental historians." The words are from "Indiscreet Letters from Peking," B. L. Putnam Weale's 1906 account of China's Boxer Rebellion. It's now the People's Republic of China, the capital is known as Beijing and the rebellious protesters in Tian An Men Square are poles apart from the fanatical, foreign-hating Boxers of an earlier era. Yet Weale's description of "extraordinary scenes" also applies to the sights now appearing on the television screen.

The fundamental things apply as Tom goes by. These opportunities don't present themselves very often. So it's a little surprising that Tom Brokaw wasn't parachuted into Beijing and videotaped floating earthward, mike in hand, analyzing Sino-American relations. Not that NBC, in dispatching its star anchorman to China last week, was caught with its promos down. Hardly. If you watched the screen, you saw him, walking or standing tall, amid multitudes of Chinese, as a voice declared: "He's met with the Chinese leaders, covered the people's way of life.