From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone with an encore broadcast of O-TM's trip to China.

We arrived in May between the earthquake and the Olympics, a time when China long focused on an effort to rebrand itself as a modern player on the world stage felt the eyes of the world upon it.

We're lingering near a restaurant window in Beijing. O.T.M producers, Jamie York, Megan Ryan and I, listening to the sweet sound of music pouring out into an alley.

Caught eavesdropping where waved in to watch a rehearsal of China's Olympic theme song,

We Are Ready.

China is ready for its close-up,

honored as the site for the Olympic Games, shamed as an exporter of shoddy goods,

praised for its response to natural disaster and condemned for its foreign and domestic affairs,

what China wants most of all is to be seen as a modern player on the world stage.

Of course, for most of the last 170 years, China has recoiled from modernity,

since it was forced on them in the form of opium by the British.

The opium wars humiliated the self-styled Middle Kingdom, which saw invasion and slaughter by nine different

armies in the next hundred years and even more horrors after that. But now, finally, China has

emerged from its permanent state of Orange Alert, declaring, your money's safe with us. We're

modern. We're not your father's China. Will anyone believe it?

You know, Zhang Zamin, who was the last general secretary of the Communist Party and the last

president of China, in his retirement speech, used the word new 90 times in a 90-minute speech.

Joshua Ramo, managing director of the international consulting firm Kissinger Associates,

meets us in a Beijing tea house.

He was trying to drive home this idea that precisely because China is creating new problems faster than it can possibly solve them,

the only hope for the country in the future was its newness. Probably the most important debate underway in Chinese foreign policy circles these days is exactly this question,

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