This will be my last Letter from China; after two years, I am returning to London. The stories I have covered - from news events like the earthquake and the Olympics to emblematic issues such as land disputes or the boom in classical music - have taught me a lot about the country, but my experience has made me question whether journalism is the best prism through which to view [...]

Journalists make poor prophets, but I think I'm on safe ground here: early next week the Chinese government will declare that the Olympics have been a roaring success. The International Olympic Committee - an organisation only marginally less authoritarian than the Chinese Communist Party - will agree. Someone will say, "It was the best Olympics ever."

Then, maybe, the bureaucrats who run the country will feel secure enough to stop [...]

As Beijing prepared for the Olympics, I set off for Rongwu, in the Chinese province of Qinghai, where last spring's Tibetan uprising started. The roadblocks which had stopped journalists from reporting events have been dismantled, and we evaded the security forces by never staying more than one night in the same place.

The police and soldiers may have withdrawn, but we saw one monk who still had handcuff marks on [...]

Gasping and grimacing, Sun Yining struggled to lift the iron bar above her head. At 12, she is a head and a half taller and twice as sturdy as most Chinese girls her age. A star pupil at the Fushan Sports School in the coastal town of Yantai, she has set herself a goal: to win a gold medal in weightlifting at the next Olympics.

Sun's coach, Zhang Jianmei, proudly [...]

The management office for my apartment complex rang this week to tell me which police station I should report to when I next return from a trip overseas.

As I am not a criminal on parole, I have no intention of reporting to any police station. But as a journalist, I am often followed by the police; and quite possibly they tap my phone and read my emails, so I [...]

Earlier this year, passing through Dubai Airport on my way from China to Africa, I contemplated the giant terminal's restless, shifting population.

Asian businessmen peered at BlackBerries, Bangladeshi migrant workers tried to sleep under the seats that line the concourses, Chinese tour groups milled around the shops, Somali mothers chided recalcitrant children. I thought back to the 1960s and 1970s, when socialist third world leaders such as Julius Nyerere, the [...]

Normal service has been resumed. After a month of unprecedented openness, the Chinese authorities are censoring the local media, blocking foreign correspondents and trying to intimidate parents whose children were crushed in shoddy school buildings which crumbled during the 12 May earthquake.

At the Deyang government office, some 30 bereaved parents gathered to petition local officials about the collapse of the Jiandi Middle School, in which 56 children died. "We [...]

As thousands of Chinese fled their ruined villages in Sichuan this past week, the roads were jammed with cars going in the opposite direction. State television was showing unpreceden ted 24-hour coverage of the disaster, so middle-class Chinese, gripped by concern for their compatriots, loaded up their cars with food, water, quilts and medicines and headed into the earthquake zone.

"I'm helping in whatever way I can," said a young [...]

In the central square, under the gaze of a giant statue of Mao and a grateful peasant, a hundred young people in tracksuits pledged allegiance to the flag. They held up their fists in a lacklustre manner and chorused: "I solemnly swear not to let down the motherland . . ."

We were in Hotan, in China's far western Xinjiang Province, 2,000 miles from Beijing but only 300 from Islamabad. [...]

The sleek lines, swooping architecture and huge scale of the new airport terminal are breathtaking. When we landed, a train conveyed us to the baggage hall, where the state-of-the-art system, designed by Siemens to process 19,200 items per hour, disgorged our luggage with admirable speed.

I'm talking not about Heathrow Terminal Five, you understand, but Beijing Terminal Three, opened with little fanfare a month earlier. Rarely has the contrast between [...]