With the Beijing Olympics, China will be in our face for the next two weeks. China has been on my mind ever since I made my first visit there 15 years ago, leading a group of Maryland journalists in a 3-week exchange program.

I got interested in China because of what you might call the ignorance gap. Even in 1993, the Chinese knew far more about the United States than even the most educated Americans knew about the People’s Republic. It is a knowledge imbalance as serious as our trade gap.