From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

Sometimes an interruption is worth a thousand words. Taking the train from Shanghai to Shandong province, Michael Kramer shared a four-bed sleeping compartment with a middle-aged factory official clad in a blue Mao suit. As the man explained to Kramer why only foreigners and very important bureaucrats were allowed to travel in such accommodations, the door opened and in strolled a young Chinese man in a yellow Lacoste shirt, loaded down with boxes of stereo equipment. Absorbed in the music crackling through the headphones of his Walkman, the budding entrepreneur remained oblivious to Kramer and the very-important-bureaucrat, who talked late into the night about the changes sweeping the country.

The trip was part of a five-week, 4,000-mile journey across China by special correspondent Kramer for this week's cover story. His reflections accompany our 27-page gallery of photographs from the new book A Day in the Life of China. Says Kramer: "I saw a great people whose lives could be so much better if their political system was less oppressive."

Accompanying Kramer for part of the journey was Beijing reporter Jaime A. FlorCruz. A graduate of Peking University, FlorCruz has reported on China for TIME for nine years. When he visited the U.S. for the first time last month, he found himself constantly fielding questions about last June's student massacre in Beijing. Even a Broadway night out offered no respite. "I took my wife to see the play Les Miserables," he says. "Watching the portrayal of the French students at the barricades, I was thinking of the wide-eyed youth in Tiananmen Square."

Publishing executive David Cohen, who had produced similar books on the U.S. and on the Soviet Union with Rick Smolan, dispatched 90 photographers throughout China one day last spring. Months of planning went into the project, which was sponsored by Eastman Kodak, Nikon, Northwest Airlines, BankAmerica, Holiday Inn and Federal Express. Says TIME picture editor Michele Stephenson, who helped supervise the project in Beijing: "As fate would have it, A Day in the Life of China captured a portrait of this sprawling nation hours before the beginning of the student revolt."