I went with a group of art lovers assembled by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to savor the treasures of an ancient civilization. So my view of modern China was only a tourist's view. In the teeming cities, I ranged just a few blocks from incongruously luxurious hotels. And I saw the densely settled and planted countryside mainly from air-conditioned buses and Yangtze River boats. A warning stapled into my passport said I was "not allowed to engage in news report activities," not even the superficial interviews I managed on my first visit in 1972 to record President Nixon's obeisance to the Red giant.

No matter. The observable changes are palpable and startling. Communism has expired. Commerce has exploded.

People who were required by the Emperor Mao a generation ago to hide their individuality in blue uniforms now sport sneakers, jeans and T-shirts heralding Michael Jordan and Colonel Sanders. The dank courtyard houses that once sheltered most of China's urban masses have been swept away for vast acres of stolid apartment blocks and forests of fantastical skyscrapers rising 30 and 50 stories even where there is not yet enough electricity to power their elevators. Acrid pollutants from soft-coal industries, outdoor kitchens and car exhaust foul the air and sting the skin.

The rural population of 900 million still labors mostly by hand. In long hours on the road, I saw no farm machinery and only an occasional water buffalo roaming a paddy. And the urban minority of 400 million travels mostly by bike. Yet the streets and highways are clogged with taxis and automobiles that enterprises confer upon the privileged "few" -- which in China has become a very large number. The Buicks rolling off a new Shanghai assembly line had to be refitted with a more capacious rear compartment because, their marketer explained, they are destined for people "who never sit in front."

Those rear-seat riders are the beneficiaries of huge foreign investments and generous or larcenous sell-offs of national assets. They and their educated employees form a new class whose living standards are centuries beyond those of China's still half-literate peasantry. The E-mail, fax machines and nominally illegal satellite dishes serving this new class easily circumvent the information controls that the reigning Communists try to preserve. And even the party and army elites send their children to colleges abroad. Will the new class stay bought by the ruling party or conquer it with political reform?

Nixon's melodramatic "opening to China" a generation ago was staged mainly to worry the Soviet Union and to finesse the American retreat from Vietnam. He had no compunction about embracing a tyrannical Mao, the conqueror of Tibet and author of the mad and bloody "cultural revolution." But Mao's successors have now staged an equally dramatic "opening to the West" to ignite China's economy. People in China worship anything foreign, from McDonald's to Lancome. General Motors discovered that its Buicks sell better when branded with English letters rather than Chinese characters. Every doll and mannequin has a Caucasian face. A thousand television stations convey American-style talk shows and Western soaps to the poorest slums.

According to American reporters and diplomats in Beijing and Shanghai, people's fear of criticizing the regime, at least in private conversation, has been fading fast. And some of that criticism goes beyond griping to a yearning for more open debate and opposition. No one contends that civil and political rights are secure, but there is hope that the privatization of housing, farming and commerce and the opening of China to so much foreign influence will inevitably produce political reform or convulsion.

That is the faith also of those Americans who favor "engaging" Chinese society despite the Government's authoritarian ways and brutalities. They argue persuasively that computers in the cities and television sets in the countryside are generating appetites and discontents that the regime cannot restrain or satisfy. The pressure for ever more growth, they predict, will produce organized oppositions that clamor to be heard and protected by the rule of law.

Enlarging contacts is also the counsel of less optimistic observers like John Bryan Starr, author of a clear-headed book, "Understanding China," that proved a reliable guide. Starr perceives a "widespread skepticism about democracy" among China's politically conscious citizens because they think their country's history, culture and size make it ungovernable by democratic means. But he also believes that China's corrupt and rigid one-party state has lost so much of the public's confidence that it may well collapse abruptly, like the former Soviet regime.

Whether government in China evolves, dissolves or convulses, the chances are that it can never again seal its borders against the global Babel of voices, including voices of freedom. And the effects are not only economic. As Starr observes, "The cultural scene is the part of Chinese society that most closely approximates the non-Chinese world." He finds "a freedom to explore and experiment, to enjoy or reject, that never existed in China before and that does not yet exist in other parts of Chinese society even today."

Thanks to MSNBC and CNN in the hotels that cater to foreigners, I learned of the conclusions of a different author named Starr. Chinese home sets, however, get no news with their Star-TV programming from abroad because a craven Rupert Murdoch won his franchise by agreeing to banish the BBC. But news and information nowadays travel many alternate routes. China's Great Wall, an impressive relic, serves only to attract more foreigners. It cannot defend an archaic politics.