Recently, I attended one of those consulate functions where a country's diplomats and chamber of commerce host a reception for a visiting dignitary. The chamber's chairwoman told the assembled audience that they should not believe everything in the newspapers about the political climate in Hong Kong. "Everything in the city is just fine," she said, punctuating this huge generalisation with the well-worn bromide: "Hong Kong is open for business."

Besides its staggering banality, the sentiment sends the wrong message to the international community about the climate of political intimidation and the sad state of "one country, two systems". The political hounding of key democrats clearly shows that everything in Hong Kong is most certainly not "just fine". The prospect of Beijing's anti-separation law proves that the leadership believes the "one country, two systems" concept is now a write-off as far as Taiwan is concerned. President Chen Shui-bian's second election victory consigned Deng Xiaoping's clever artifice to the ideological graveyard. Now, Hong Kong could suffer the consequences of its demise, with the continued deterioration of its autonomy and open business environment. Let's face it: Beijing no longer needs the special administrative region as its role model for "one country, two systems". And this is not "just fine".

If Hong Kong no longer provides Beijing with its best case for the principle, then how long before we see the intimidation we have already witnessed in politics creep into the business circles of the motherland's "economic city"? The intimidation of the democratic camp, and any mainland interference in this September's Legislative Council election, could eventually threaten the city's business environment, which the anti-democratic forces say they are defending from the onslaught of those who want to turn Hong Kong into a welfare state.

Big advertisers have been pressured into withdrawing business from unpatriotic publications. Beijing has targeted the mainland business interests of a prominent supporter of Mr Chen. How long before we see a Hong-Kong-based company hustled out of a market by a "connected" mainland firm through threats and bullying?

The members of western chambers of commerce know instinctively that democratic institutions ensure governments and businesses stay as honest as possible. Western companies pay the price to operate in an environment where there is a level playing field because they know that in a monopoly or cartel environment not everybody wins. Democratic institutions ensure that many more companies have the chance to survive and even prosper.

It is not "just fine" that these western chambers of commerce remain silent about threats to Hong Kong's autonomy. It is shameful for them to declare that everything is "just fine", because threats and bullying will eventually corrode Hong Kong's free competitive spirit.

Douglas George Anderson is a journalist and consultant in Hong Kong.

On June 1, Jiang Yanyong, a surgeon at Beijing 301 Military Hospital, and his wife, Hua Zhongwei, both 72, disappeared after leaving home to pick up a visa at the American embassy.

He has not been heard of since, although his wife was released from detention on Tuesday.

At the time, family and friends assumed that Public Security Bureau police had detained them and that the couple would be released after the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. But on June 8, officials asked the doctors' son to collect some personal effects and deliver them to the authorities. This was not a good omen.

With China's economy booming and foreign investors flocking, the couple's disappearance hardly caused a break in the country's hectic march. But it underscored the ongoing imbalance between economic and political reform.

Dr Jiang is no ordinary doctor. His odyssey began on June 4, 1989, when he spent a horrific night trying to save hundreds of wounded and dying victims who flooded through his hospital's 18 operating rooms as the People's Liberation Army opened fire on its way to Tiananmen Square. Dr Jiang, traumatised and anguished, nonetheless kept his silence.

However, as the Sars epidemic flared up last year, Dr Jiang realised in April that Health Ministry reports of only 19 confirmed cases of the disease in Beijing were bogus - he knew of almost 10 times that number. He decided to go public.

His exposé of the Sars epidemic cover-up forced the government to confront the disease more openly and aggressively, averting a public health catastrophe. But if Dr Jiang became a hero, he was also marked as an insubordinate, the kind of potentially uncontrollable person that the Communist Party fears.

Indeed, the party's worst fears were realised in March. As the National People's Congress was meeting, Dr Jiang broke his silence by writing a long, heartfelt appeal to the leaders of China. In grim detail, his letter described the bloody mayhem that the Tiananmen slaughter brought to his hospital, and the hysteria of ordinary people as they arrived to find children and loved ones dead.

Dr Jiang implored the party to reassess the 1989 student movement by "reversing its verdict" from "counter-revolutionary rebellion" or "political storm" to "patriotic acts that had the support of the overwhelming majority of the people in Beijing and the country". "Our party must address the mistakes it has made," he concluded unambiguously.

How does one reconcile an isolated retrograde incident such as his disappearance with the hopeful progress of the "economic miracle" that has so transformed this once seemingly desperate, backward land?

China today is a contradiction. The tensions between its increasingly open economy and its still closed political system and institutions make China the most conflicted nation of consequence in the world today. The demolition process that has transformed or razed so many of the old Stalinist economic institutions has not been matched by a demolition of stultifying political structures.

Although Beijing speaks of "one country, two systems" as its formula for governing Hong Kong, the slogan is far more relevant to China itself, given the co-existence of a capitalist economic system within a Leninist political system.

Dr Jiang may become a millionaire, but he cannot inform the public about an epidemic or write officials an honest letter of admonition. Does this matter? That depends on whether one believes that Leninist capitalism is a viable and stable form of government for China over time.

Orville Schell is a noted historian of China and a dean of the University of California at Berkeley.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, June 2004.

According to a recent survey by Taiwan's National Food and Drug Laboratory, 15 out of 21 "vegetarian" samples from traditional open markets contained meat products. A further survey of packaged vegetarian products found that about 10 per cent were contaminated with meat.

The news has caused a stir among Taiwan's 2 million vegetarians, although one wonders whether the other 90 per cent cares. At a press conference unveiling the findings, one Buddhist nun tried to comfort victims by saying: "It's not your fault, because you didn't know."

Vegetarianism is a curious thing in Taiwan because there are so many interpretations of the term. For some people, it means merely no meat. Others take it further, cutting out dairy products, fish and other seafood.

At the most devoted, and religious, level are the Buddhist vegetarians who cut out all meat, fish and dairy products - as well as garlic, onion and chilli, claiming that these arouse the senses and distract from meditation.

I pity the poor waiter who, serving a su (vegetarian), then has to ask another dozen questions to find out exactly what the customer can and cannot eat, before rushing back to the kitchen to work out whether those wishes can be accommodated. From my casual observations in the past five years, the number of more conventional (by western standards) non-meat-eaters is growing, particularly among the younger generation, although many still consume fish and seafood.

Another group I have encountered are those who I will unkindly call "casual vegetarians". They refuse meat for a few weeks, months, or even years, often following a relative's illness or death.

Try as I might, however, I still struggle to fully grasp the intricacies of their thinking, but it somehow relates to the idea of a kind of penance, or an offering to the gods. Whether it is because the penance has been paid, or their patience has run out, these vegetarians tend to go back to the "other side" at some point.

While all the different types of vegetarians and the motivations for becoming one can be confusing, one thing can be said for certain: Taiwanese restaurateurs understand and accept a vegetarian's choice and (usually) try to accommodate their wishes.

The same apparently cannot be said of Taiwan's food producers, who see the su label as little more than an excuse to increase prices, even when their products are not vegetarian.

Even if the situation is rectified and the food industry gets cleaned up, Taiwan's vegetarians, myself included, will be ever wary of what is being served.

Along line of people snakes down the drab grey lane that leads to the Complaints Office of the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. Although the rest of the city is bathed in the warm sunshine of early summer, this queue is permanently in the shade, united by a common tragedy.

Each has lost a child, abducted, presumed sold and far away from home. The parents' search for their missing children has brought them to the capital to find out why the police are not doing more to reunite the families.

The silence is broken by a mother's sobs. In 1996, Luo Fen moved from rural Guizhou to work in Yunnan province; a year later she married He Kai, a man from her home town, and on August 14, 1999, they became the parents of a baby boy they named He Jin, Putonghua for "moving forward". The couple's choice of name reflected their improved fortunes since moving to Yunnan. In 2000, Mr He bought a minibus and started making deliveries to restaurants across the provincial capital, Kunming, while Ms Luo sold vegetables.

With a household income of about 1,500 yuan per month, the couple could afford to send their son to a nearby kindergarten. Although cheap, at 130 yuan a month, it was still out of reach of most migrant parents.

On September 24 last year, diarrhoea forced He Jin to take a day off from kindergarten. At 11am, the boy told his mother he and a neighbour's daughter would go to the public toilet, just metres away from their dilapidated house. Ms Luo was busy preparing lunch when the two four-year-olds left; she glanced up to see them disappear from sight, not thinking it would be the last time she would see her son.

When her son hadn't returned 10 minutes later, Ms Luo called for him to come home. She went out to look for him when she received no answer and bumped into the little girl returning alone.

"The girl said an uncle took He Jin on a bicycle," Ms Luo said. "Then she told me he gave her money to buy candy, smiled and showed me two crumpled bills."

Ms Luo dashed back to her house and called her husband and the police. The shocked father arrived in minutes; the police never came.

"A cyclist could not have taken He Jin too far in such a short time. If the police had acted then they might have found my boy," said Ms Luo, weeping.

Ms Luo is one of a delegation of 31 parents who have travelled to Beijing to file a petition pleading for the central government to help them. They are just a small part of a bigger tragedy: at least 182 children have been abducted from Kunming in the past three years.

Like He Jin, most of the children were abducted in mere seconds. "As if they had just vaporised," said Wang Zongcan, 36, whose 2-1/2-year-old son went missing on April 1.

"The local police have been so indifferent to these frequent disappearances, that in 99 per cent of cases when an abduction was reported to them, they did not bother turning up at all."

Lu Dekui, whose 3-1/2-year-old son disappeared two months ago, said police don't act because the missing children are mostly from low-income or migrant-worker families. "They are just stalling for time because they know we are mostly migrant workers and have to leave the city sooner or later."

Some parents have gone so far as to accuse local police of conspiring with the child snatchers. In one case, the police persuaded a family who found their abducted son that there was no point trying to find the culprits because they already had their child back.

Of the 182 missing children, 170 are boys, mostly aged between one and six.

"The gender and age are representative of how the problem of child abduction on the mainland is getting worse," said Zhu Yantao, a Ministry of Public Security official, who has investigated many abduction cases.

Ms Zhu said the problem used to be isolated to the hinterlands of Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou, but now child abductions have been reported in all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.

"The abductors and traffickers are motivated by profit. The traffic in children is a business with no costs and huge profits," Ms Zhu said, adding that "a baby boy can be sold for between 10,000 and 20,000 yuan, while a girl generally costs a few thousand".

"The missing children are usually sold in rural or remote areas where people are not well-educated and still blindly believe `more sons, more blessing'," she adds.

This Confucian belief lives on in the 21st century in the disadvantaged countryside, where the majority of the mainland's population live - making boys targets of the human smugglers who sell them to infertile couples and those affected by the one child policy.

The demand is too large for the supply: about 30,000 children are adopted from the mainland's 176 government-run orphanages every year.

"Parents want to adopt young, healthy children, mostly boys," said Yan Qingchun, a Ministry of Civil Affairs official in charge of orphanages. "However, there are always more girls than boys available, and quite a few of the children are either retarded or disabled."

There is no restriction on the number of children parents who adopt can have; the adoption law only states that they must have a "stable and considerable income", which "stops rural farmers from adopting children", said Mr Yan.

Buying an abducted child may be the easiest way of having a son for many, not least because it is unpunishable by law.

The Criminal Law was amended in 1997 to include child abductors, who face sentences of five years' jail to the death penalty. However, its loopholes allow child buyers to go scot-free as long as they "have not abused the children or interfered with the rescue", according to Ms Zhu.

"Since the local police have not taken any action, the situation has only become worse. There have been two or three so-called Special Actions against Abductions, but they are just slogans," said Mr Wang.

"It is particularly hard to track down snatched children, who a well-organised group can move far away in a short time and they may be re-sold several times," said Ms Zhu, adding that "an investigation requires lots of money, which we are short of, as well as the cooperation of various government departments, which is also very difficult".

Grateful for the ministry officials' time, the parents said they could "forgive everything as long as our children are returned".

Things are now looking slightly more promising. After meeting them last week, Ms Zhu travelled to Fujian for five days to investigate their cases.

"I will not give up until I have solved the case," she promised the parents. "I hope the next time I see you all will be in Yunnan when I bring back all your children."

Provincial police officials were summoned to Beijing on June 2 to meet the representatives and find a solution. Parents said the provincial officials have admitted that "their work was not adequate, and they are sorry for the pain it has brought us".

Despite all the promises, most of the parents have gone bankrupt searching for their children. Some were also considering staying on in Beijing, fearful that local police will take revenge on them. This is not a groundless fear as many have been told by their families that local police have been to their homes in Kunming, demanding to know who their leaders are.

"I do not want to go home," said Ms Luo. "I will keep on the road, searching for my son until I have spent my last penny and drawn my last breath.

"I could never think about having another child. It is meaningless and shameful to be a mother who cannot protect her baby."