We don't intend the question to be cryptic – we are genuinely curious and are working hard to see China clearly ourselves.

Our website, Virtual China, which opens today, will bring you our very best findings: daily news and feature stories about China and its people; travel guides; stock market tips; maps; online language lessons; hotel reservation and airline ticket services; and much more.

Today is October 1, 1999, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. We chose this as the day of our launch in a decidedly bittersweet (and we wish there was a stronger word) celebration of the first five decades of the People's Republic of China. We recognize the tragic years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as well as the last two decades of remarkable progress. This National Day we show our solidarity with families and friends who live in China, and express our respect for one of the world's great civilizations. We will strive to know it even better in the years ahead.

Virtual China will be the liveliest, most expert, and most comprehensive English-language gateway to China. We open with a series of inaugural essays and multimedia works the week of October 4. With these works we hope to dramatically demonstrate our modus operandi: not to show and tell, least of all to preach, but rather to create a bountifully large, eminently free, and often richly decorated space in which to roam and explore. The idea is to let you see and experience this virtual China on your own.

Of course, nothing beats really going there. We hope to make that easier for you too, with our travel pieces, guides to expatriate living, articles on student and professional level exchanges, and ticket-buying services.

After the inaugural week, we begin our regular daily coverage on October 11 with the debut of our business and finance channel. Channels on travel, entertainment, education and culture will roll out at intervals thereafter.

A down-to-earth usefulness is our editorial touchstone. Yet the question "Can you see China?" also springs from a metaphysical source we believe is well worth a mention on this, our inaugural day.

Virtual China will explore the idea that the Internet is more than e-mail, chat, news groups, browsers, hyperlinks, flash graphics, toolbars, paintboxes, image files, text files and sound files combined.

We believe the Internet is actually a new way to see the world, no less than the telescope or the microscope were in their own day. In our case, we'll use the Internet as a new way to see China –for most English-speaking people still the most distant, most obscure, and most alien of nations.

People outside of China have seen the world's oldest living civilization through many lenses: the diaries of Marco Polo; the colorful accounts of intrepid writers exploring an exotic land (Pearl Buck, Edgar Snow, William Hinton); the fervent anti-Communism of Henry R. Luce's Time Magazine; and perhaps above all through the unstoppable flood of "Made in China" exported goods -- the China plates on your dinner table; the silk in your pajamas; the Yellowstone coffee mug you bought on vacation; the plush-toy Barney, Furby, and Tickle-Me Elmo on your children's beds.

We are eager, like kids with a new telescope on a cloudless starry night, to explore China through the lens of the Internet. We'll test this new manner of seeing, this new method of exploring our world and our ability to understand our fellow citizens of Earth, to the limit.

We are not saying we'll understand. We're saying we'll look, and maybe we'll see, and hopefully we'll understand – at least more than we do now.

As for ever fully understanding the mystery at the heart of another culture, we disavow all ambition for it. All of us, Chinese and Westerners both, have lived overseas too long to know we could hope for that. Nor would we want to. But we know – from sitting through Chinese operas, learning to read Chinese characters, and singing pop and patriotic songs with our Chinese friends in karaoke – that we can experience the mystery of otherness quite directly. That experience, we find, naturally engenders respect, which is a kind of deep savoring, of true pleasure.

We hope for that for ourselves, and for you.

We'll keep you posted with real-time news stories straight from China; multimedia essays (you'll hear the come-hither shriek of sweet potato peddlers, the clack of mahjong tiles, the ring of temple gongs); photographs of China's most beautiful, most interesting, and most desolate spots; and essays written by experts on China trade, business, finance, language, painting and poetry.

Just possibly the Internet will allow us to see China more clearly -- from multiple viewpoints, with both a greater panoramic completeness and in more concrete detail – than ever before.

A word about our politics, always important in China.

We're all a tad obsessed with the Middle Kingdom but have no affiliation with, nor any special sympathy for, the Chinese government. On the other hand, while recognizing that personal freedom is an ultimate good, we also believe social stability is a moral imperative. We are realists. We are optimists.

China has changed radically and irrevocably in the past two decades. It is a far freer and more vital place than most people in the West – whose image of China is still largely shaped by one-minute news snippets covering complex issues like nuclear spying – can imagine. We hope to make this vital China real for readers.

Most of all, we hope you'll join us as we take up our telescope/microscope called the Internet and point it towards China.

We think you'll like what you see.

Sincerely,

The Virtual China Staff