The WFP will make its last donation to China next year, marking the end of a 25-year program that started in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and supported more than 30 million hungry people. “At the end of 2005, we will no longer be an active, operating program in China. China will no longer need us,” Morris said. In recent years, that program has been steadily reduced as China’s economy has soared with average annual growth rates of 9 percent, which have helped to lift up to 500 million people out of poverty.

“This achievement is unprecedented in the past 50 years, maybe for all time,” said the WFP chief at a press conference in Beijing. “Given the Chinese experience, we have as much to learn from China as China can learn from us.” The praise is deserved but also self-interested. While the U.S. and other rich nations review their commitments to multinational bodies, the WFP is hoping for greater backing from rising powers such as China and India.

Morris said he had received a promise of increased Chinese support from Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, although no details were given. “The commitment was to do more,” he said. “I did not ask for specifics.”

The transition has already begun — albeit on a very small scale. This year, China donated $24 million to the WFP. The bulk of these funds went toward operations in China’s poorest provinces. Only $1.5 million was earmarked for international humanitarian work, but Morris said this was a good start.

In particular, he said the agency needed more assistance in Africa, where AIDS has struck down more than a quarter of the population of some sub-Saharan nations. “I’m hoping over time China will become more supportive of our work in Africa,” he said. “I think we’ll see over the next 25 years, China will become one of our most important friends.”

He also called upon Beijing to support the WFP’s program in North Korea, where low nutrition intakes have stunted the population so badly that the average 7-year-old boy is eight inches shorter than his South Korean counterpart. But Beijing appears hesitant to assume the mantle of global care provider — and the financial burden that comes with it. “China is still a developing country. We have 29 million people living in poverty,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao. “China will make a donation according to its own capacity.”

Among the biggest problems facing the Chinese government is a growing gap between its rich coastal cities and poor inland farming areas. Among the worst hit is Gansu province, where the the WFP will abandon a program that supports minority communities living in some of the world’s most squalid conditions. Morris said he was convinced that the Chinese government was willing and able to deal with such problems by itself.

History, however, shows that communities in every country have a habit of forgetting the poor once they become rich. Morris pointed out that it would cost only $5 billion to feed the 300 million children currently living in hunger around the world, but these funds have not been forthcoming.

As a part of the $1.75 billion deal Lenovo will have use of the IBM name on personal computers and laptops for at least five years. IBM, founded in 1911, has been one of the most enduring symbols of corporate America and played a crucial role in shaping the modern era. The company, known as the Big Blue, ushered computers into homes and offices when it launched its first desktop in 1981. In the early years IBM became the standard in PC manufacturing, at one stage selling 70 percent of all computers made. Information technology departments fell back on the adage that nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM. The company’s technology bled into everyday life, providing software for the first cashier machines and supermarket scanners in the 1970s.

IBM was not the first to the market in the early 1980s, but lending its experience in mainframes to the desktop computer moved it into the mainstream. The speed with which the PC made its mark was reflected in 1982 when Time magazine broke with tradition and chose the personal computer as its “Man of the Year.”

IBM also shaped the industry in another way. Its first desktop computer opened the door for a still fledgling Microsoft, while Intel produced the processor. That decision has been hugely criticized by historians for allowing the two suppliers to build a stranglehold on the computing industry. The move effectively ceded control to Microsoft, which set the standard for software and continues to make billions of dollars in profits.

The disposal of the IBM’s PC division illustrates how computers have become a pervasive part of everyday life. The PC is now little more than a commodity item in an intensely competitive market, offering manufacturers the hope of only slim profits. IBM Chief Executive Sam Palmisano said the PC market “continues to take on characteristics of the home and consumer electronics industry, which favors enormous economies of scale.”

Although a symbolic wrench with the past, IBM’s decision to shed the computer division came as little surprise to anyone who has watched the industry. IBM has been transforming its business for years, shifting from the building and sale of PCs to more lucrative areas like services and consulting work for the world’s largest corporations. The sale of desktop and laptop computers today accounts only for around 12 percent of IBM’s annual revenue of $92 billion. This year the division was expected to make less than $100 million in profits — peanuts for a company of IBM’s size — on sales of around $10 billion.

IBM led the market until 1994, but the firm then began to lose ground, suffering as the likes of Dell began to put pressure on prices. IBM had around 6 percent of the global market for PC sales before Wednesday’s deal was announced, putting it a distant third behind Hewlett Packard with 16.1 percent and Dell with 18 percent.

IBM has been under pressure for years to sell its PC business. By 1993, the company’s annual losses had reached $8 billion. In an effort to stem the problem, IBM retreated from the retail market and began focusing on corporate customers. It sold its manufacturing plants three years ago and had confined itself to design, product development and sales. The Lenovo deal covers IBM’s desktop and laptop business, including the Think brand. Lenovo is paying IBM $1.25 billion in cash and shares and assuming an additional $500 million in debt from the U.S. company. IBM as a result will own an 18.9 percent stake in the Chinese firm.

Lenovo, founded in 1984 and already the leading brand in China with more than a quarter of the market, is expected to have $12 billion in annual revenues and around 8 percent global share. The company’s founder, Chuanzhi Liu, described the deal as a breakthrough in its ambition to become a global business. “Our unwavering goal has been to create a truly international enterprise,” he said. Lenovo will gain access to 160 countries by taking over IBM’s sales and distribution network.

The company will open a new U.S. headquarters in New York, with its principal operations based in Beijing and Raleigh, N.C. American management imported from IBM will lead the company, a nod to the still greater experience of the U.S. on the international scene.

Lenovo’s rapid rise to international prominence is typical of the path taken by China’s leading corporations since the launch of the country’s market-oriented economic reforms in 1978. The firm, known until last year as Legend, was founded in 1984 by a group of Chinese government scientists and financed from public coffers. For most of its first decade, the company merely distributed foreign-built computers, but its engineers quickly learned how to copy and adapt the designs. In 1997 — only four years after the start of its manufacturing operations — Legend overtook IBM as the leading seller of PCs in China.

Further deals from Chinese firms can be expected in the future as the government in Beijing pushes ahead with an industrial strategy that aims to turn at least one domestic producer into an international competitor in every field of business.

Flush with cash from an export industry in overdrive and a domestic economy that has hurtled forward at an annual rate of more than 9 percent for the past two decades, Chinese firms are being encouraged to step out from the shadows of joint ventures with foreign multinationals and establish their own global brands.

“It’s a signpost, and a really prominent one, on what’s the next phase for China, which is moving outwards,” said Bob Broadfoot of the Political and Economic Risk consultancy in Hong Kong. Employment will not be affected — about 10,000 IBM workers, more than 40 percent already in China, will be joining Lenovo.

“With the boldness of vision of a great revolutionary and politician, comrade Deng Xiaoping  along with other party elders  gave the leadership their firm and full support to put down the political disturbance using forceful measures.”

For such a senior figure, it was a rare public reference to one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Chinese Communist party, when People’s Liberation Army troops killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4 1989.

With many of today’s leaders implicated, the massacre is the most politically sensitive topic in China. Despite calls from victims’ families for an investigation, media discussion of it is almost taboo.

But Mr Li, who stepped down from his final government post last year, has more reason than most to want to reopen debate. In the eyes of most Chinese, the 75-year-old is primarily responsible.

In the protest before the crackdown, thousands of students and citizens in the square chanted the slogan “Li Peng must step down”. As premier, he was blamed for scheming to undermine Zhao Ziyang, the moderate party secretary general who argued against the use of force.

According to leaked “Tiananmen papers”, Mr Li moved at a meeting on June 2 1989 that the square be cleared. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” he told Deng and other leaders, “that the turmoil has been generated by a coalition of foreign and domestic reactionary forces, and that their goals are to overthrow the Communist party and to subvert the socialist system.”

After the army clashed with Beijing citizens who were trying to prevent the troops reaching the square, Mr Li called for “decisive measures to put down this counter-revolutionary riot”. Mr Li has indirectly referred to the massacre in the past. Last August he published a book in which he mentioned for the first time he had been in hospital in July 1989  prompting many sinologists to speculate that he had suffered a breakdown after the bloodshed.

This spring, a magazine in Hong Kong reported that the communist leadership had blocked the publication of Mr Li’s memoirs. According to Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly), Mr Li offered to revise his 300,000-character manuscript entitled The Key Moment, but he was still denied permission to release a work deemed too sensitive.

Now he has used the 100th anniversary of Deng’s birth as an opportunity to play down his responsibility for the three most controversial decisions of his tenure: the Tiananmen crackdown; the construction of the Three Gorges dam; and the building of the Daya bay nuclear plant.

In a commemorative essay for Seeking Truth, a Communist party mouthpiece, Mr Li says the government’s most daring policies had been initiated by his mentor, who died in 1997. He paints a picture of a relationship with Deng in which he was a timid apprentice in need of encouragement from the master. Recalling a conversation when he became premier in 1988, Mr Li wrote that Deng had urged him to toughen himself up.

“Comrade Xiaoping said: ‘What I am worried about is that you are not bold enough to carry out your work. You have to learn hard and train yourself in work in order to make yourself more mature.’”

But Mr Li showed no remorse for the Tiananmen massacre, echoing only the official line that it had been necessary to put down the “disturbance” to ensure the stability that has underpinned China’s economic growth.

The debate is unlikely to end with Mr Li’s essay. There have been calls from within the party for a reassessment of the events of June 4 1989.

This year one of the most respected men in China  Jiang Yanyong, the military doctor who blew the whistle on the Sars cover-up  urged the party to reconsider the acts of the demonstrators as “patriotic”. Dr Jiang’s letter  in which he described treating the victims of the massacre  was leaked to the international media, but was never published within China.

Links href=”http://hrw.org/campaigns/china/scholars/t15/”> Human Rights Watch: Tiananmen Square, students’ support href=”http://tsquare.tv/”>Beijing uprising 1989

The flotation is being planned to ensure that management and editorial control remain with the authorities, who are struggling to accept that the media can be an independent public watchdog rather than a public relations tool.

According to local reports, investors will be offered only a quarter of the company, putting the float’s value at about #200 million. Other restrictions are likely to ensure that the government maintains control.

It has been 25 years since Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policy began to transform other sectors of the economy, but party and government organs still own and — at least nominally — control every one of the country’s 2,137 newspapers. When the propaganda ministry issues a list of stories that should not appear in print, editors stifle their instincts to inform. But this political grip is being weakened as the media market expands, becomes more profit-oriented and is obliged to open up to foreign competition in advertising and distribution as part of China’s commitment to the World Trade Organization.

Reformers inside the Communist Party and academia are also pushing for change. They argue that a stronger media sector is necessary to counter the growing problem of corruption, and to ensure the healthy development of a rapidly transforming nation.

“A major change is necessary,” said Yu Guoming, deputy director of the school of journalism at Beijing People’s University. “In the past, the public were often kept in the dark, but as society changes it is essential that information is provided in a timely and objective manner so that people feel secure.”

In many areas, change is already apparent. The media market has expanded rapidly since 1978, when China had 186 registered newspapers. According to a survey by the Interfax news agency, there are now 12 times as many titles, generating 76 times more income. While competition is still limited — no newspaper is allowed to go bankrupt — rivalry for circulation and advertising has increased after reforms to make publications more financially self-sufficient.

Last year, the government banned the practice of work units and other bodies being forced to subscribe to party and administrative organs such as Taxation News. It also targeted 2,000 heavily subsidized papers and journals for closure and barred public officials from joining the management of media bodies.

“Changes in the media reflect changes in society,” said He Li, editor in chief of the Economic Observer. “Competition gets fiercer every year. But, compared to the car or mobile phone market, it is still not enough.”

His is one of a handful of publications to have bent the rules to secure a degree of financial and editorial independence that would have been unimaginable five years ago. Although most of its staff and offices are in Beijing, the magazine is privately funded and registered as an organ of a provincial office sufficiently distant — politically and geographically — to allow the paper leeway in its coverage of businesses in the capital, Shanghai and Guangdong.

A similarly managed publication that has won plaudits for brave journalism and sound management is Caijing. Its editor, Hu Shuli, won the World Press Review’s Editor of the Year award last year for stories on the SARS crisis and corruption.

Hu said the outside world’s view of Chinese journalism was 30 years out of date. “Media supervision is not as tight as it was. We are treated as businesses.”

“Our values are increasingly close to those of the global media,” she noted. “Ethics are related to money. Without financial independence, there can be no ethics.”

The media are still far more closed to foreigners than other areas of society, but in politically nonsensitive areas, such as fashion and information technology, overseas publishers have hooked up with local partners. To get around restrictions, some set themselves up as advisors but play an influential role in design, editorial policy and business management. According to Global China Media Consulting, eight of the 10 most popular magazines have some foreign content.

With annual growth of 12 to 25 percent forecast, China’s media market is attracting the attention of global tycoons. Rupert Murdoch, whose Star TV is accessible in China by satellite, has given a lecture to the Communist Party school in Beijing.

So far, the only outsiders who have been allowed to invest in Chinese media groups are from Hong Kong. Last month, Tom.com, a Hong Kong-based Internet publisher, caused waves by buying a 49 percent stake in Popular Computer Weekly, the mainland’s most popular I.T. publication. But this HK $196.9 million (#13.7 million) investment brought control of advertising and distribution — not editorial content.

Further openings are likely to come gradually. The Communist Party is expected to announce reforms this autumn that will designate media organizations as private companies rather than public bodies.

Such reforms are partly motivated by a desire to strengthen China’s mainly small, regional news groups to meet competition from overseas. Liu Binjie, deputy director of the state administration of press and publications, predicts that China will have its own national media groups within a few years. But officials have made clear that the primary principle will be to leave the media under the control of the party. Editors who forget are ruthlessly put in their place. This year, three senior journalists of the Southern Metropolitan Daily were arrested. The charge was embezzling state funds, but few doubt that they were punished for unauthorized revelations about SARS, police brutality and corruption.