In China's ancient capital, every other street is a bazaar. Vegetable stands on narrow lanes display a summer's bounty of fresh corn, duck eggs, shiny purple eggplants, and hot peppers. Watermelons overflow from straw baskets and eels squirm in shallow plastic tubs. You can have a bike flat fixed, your hair cut, or your fortune told in the open-air markets of Beijing. Here material wants are not only satisfied, they are born.

Ever since Deng Xiaoping's 1992 call for renewed economic reform, making money has been a patriotic imperative. "Money worshipping" is what the newspapers call it.

Where is communism in all this? At the most obvious level, ideology has been recycled as pop. Kids wear People's Liberation Army caps and Atlanta Braves jerseys. Mao's face emblazons T-shirts, watches, and cigarette lighters. With the exception of a few die-hard old cadres, nobody believes in communism, and everybody knows it.

What most people also know is that the Communist party will never willingly relinquish power. In the wake of Tiananmen Square and the events of 1989, an unspoken bargain has been struck between the party and the people, and it goes something like this: We, the party, will raise living standards, allow unprecedented economic freedom, and retreat on all fronts but one -- politics. In return, we expect the masses, well-fed and comparatively well-clothed, to be acquiescent.

Where does such a bargain leave the Chinese press? To a large extent, Chinese journalism still functions as propaganda. Since newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting stations are owned, directly or indirectly, by the government, a black mark in a reporter or editor's political file may make finding another job impossible. While some journalists see themselves as civil servants, an editor at the English-language China Daily describes the situation more bluntly: "We are like dogs on a leash. A very short leash."

Sometimes the leash is pulled tight. In the summer of 1993, the deliberately vague and apparently all-encompassing State Secrets Law was used to sentence a Xinhua News Agency journalist to life in prison on charges that he sold a copy of General Secretary Jiang Zemin's speech to a Hong Kong reporter a week before the speech was made public. This fall, a mainland reporter for Hong Kong's Ming Bao and the former deputy editor-in-chief of a now-banned newspaper, Economics Weekly, were arrested under the same law. The latter, Gao Yu, was detained just days before she was to leave Beijing to become a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She had previously spent fourteen months in jail in the wake of Tiananmen.

The rules of coverage, while mostly unwritten, are well understood. "We have to portray even negative things in a positive light," says a newspaper journalist. When officials ordered the compulsory purchase of state treasury bonds, workers found their pay docked to meet the quota. China Daily's upbeat headline read STATE HITS BULL'S-EYE WITH BONDS. With graft and embezzlement running rampant among party leaders, the press recently launched a tirade against corruption -- but carefully avoided citing names or examples. This was soon followed by an official campaign to "root out" and punish wayward officials. In China, muckraking reportage and the latest government propaganda are a joint venture.

Yet while it retains editorial control, the cash-strapped government has announced that it wants the press to support itself financially. One result has been the rise of lightweight and sensational news, popular but politically unthreatening.

Last January, People's Daily, the turgid mouthpiece of the Communist party, launched the weekly Global News Digest, an international gossip rag that chronicles the romantic lives of pop singers and movie stars. And Global News Digest is just one of many new tabloids. On crowded subways and buses, commuters favor Beijing Evening News and Beijing Youth News. Both emphasize light social commentary and lively entertainment features. To entice readers, many papers rely on the timetested American formula of sex and crime. "Sure, they're low-class," one journalist at a "serious" newspaper remarks, "but even gutter news is better than propaganda."

Another trend is soft-news weekend editions of mainstream dailies. "During the week, these papers fulfill their Communist party obligations. On the weekends, they make money," says Song Wenya, a former newspaper columnist who was blacklisted on political grounds. Unlike many other journalists, Song Wenya finds reason for optimism in the press's new financial independence. "In the late 1980s we seemed to have more press freedom, but it wasn't genuinely ours. It was due to the patronage of liberal leaders," he says. "Now the leadership is more conservative, it's true, but newspapers are freer to make money. That's the most basic, fundamental freedom we can have."

Indeed, despite the government's efforts at a news blockade, China's information borders are becoming increasingly porous. One evening in his darkened living room, a prominent writer and historian leaned toward his television set and flicked a switch. Suddenly BBC World News filled the screen. "We bought our dish eight months ago," he says, grinning. "From a company which is actually a part of the Ministry of Television and Broadcasting."

Restrictions on the sale and use of private satellite dishes are supposed to take effect in April. Meanwhile, hundreds of Beijing shops boldly display dishes in their storefront windows. The historian shared the cost of 2,800 yuan (about $ 450 at the official exchange rate) with three other families in his building. He and his wife now receive the five channels of the Hong Kong-based cable network Star TV. There's a reason for government indifference, he says: "Many people will be buying these satellite dishes, but because BBC is in English, they won't watch it. They'll watch music videos instead. And the government is not too afraid of MTV."

In response to the competition from cable television and, in the southern provinces, the availability of Hong Kong and Taiwanese broadcasts, mainland radio and television stations have been forced to jazz up their act. Imitating American shows like Cops or 48 Hours, television crews ride along with police for exposes on crime and corruption.

In radio, the real change has come with the introduction of late-night talk shows with call-in lines. The subjects range from dissatisfaction with municipal garbage pickup and congested roadways to open-mike poetry rests, but the hottest topics are sex and divorce. The Beijing People's Broadcasting Station's evening "hotline" receives thirty to fifty calls a night as, under cover of anonymity, people bring up subjects they would never discuss with their coworkers or family. In Shanghai, both the mayor and the vice-mayor have responded to people's questions on the radio. The content may not be overtly political, but in a country where voicing complaints has always been risky, a direct line to the leadership is a novelty.

And then there is China Business Times, probably the freest newspaper in the country. One day this past summer, in its offices on the second floor of a decrepit building on a Beijing side street, a group of young journalists crunched watermelon seeds and brainstormed story ideas. One man sat at a desk, translating articles from an American newspaper. A woman, pen in hand, sketched her vision for the reorganization of the staff, giving more weight to editorial than management. Her model: The Wall Street Journal.

China Business Times was started four years ago by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. While China Daily churns out government propaganda in its gleaming white tower with state-of-the-art facilities, and People's Daily, the party mouthpiece, occupies a compound larger than some college campuses, journalists at CBT are almost proud of their newspaper's obscure location and lack of amenities. One journalist joked that, while their working conditions were the worst, their freedom was the greatest.

As a relatively nongovernmental paper, not directly owned by a party organization, and as a financial newspaper in a time of economic liberalism, CBT enjoys a degree of latitude rare at official organs. During the gulf war, it went directly to the Iraqi and Jordanian embassies for interviews, something editors at China Daily say they would never have been allowed to do. CBT combines hard business coverage -- investment tips, stock market analysis, job news -- with frank opinion polls. Among the staff of 200 are several who were suspended from other papers because of involvement with the journalists' demonstrations of 1989. That CBT dared to hire them shows its commitment to creating an independent press.

Unlike the more daring publications in the heady days of 1989, however, today's newspapers don't mention press freedom, at least not directly -- not even CBT. There is, however, discussion of laws, responsibilities, and rights. A lengthy July article in CBT compared China's press laws unfavorably with press laws in several Western countries, and cited the landmark 1964 Supreme Court libel case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The CBT reporter complained that, because there are no legal safeguards for the media's watchdog function, journalists have a hard time simply investigating a story, and "to openly criticize something is even harder." The article was titled: CHINESE JOURNALISTS, WHAT ARE YOUR RIGHTS?

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