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China has yet to realize the value of professional tourist information centers. Those in Beijing are underfunded and poorly staffed. The state-approved China International Travel Service (CITS), originally set up to cater to the needs of foreign visitors, today functions as any other local operator, offering nothing more than tours, tickets, and rented cars.

There are many excellent sites offering information on Beijing, and China in general. The best starting point is www.beijingpage.com, which is a gateway to many other useful sites. The official Beijing Tourism Administration site (www.bjta.gov.cn) is good for what’s going on in the city.

Foreign press is hard to come by, with just a small selection available in some of the larger hotels. You can usually get Time, Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, and Asian Wall Street Journal – providing none of them carry articles critical of China, in which case that particular edition will not be on the shelves.

The government’s English-language mouthpiece is the woeful China Daily. More worthwhile are the many English-language magazines aimed at expats and distributed free around the city’s bars and restaurants; these include Beijing Talk, City Weekend, and that’s Beijing, all of which are published monthly.

The state-run Chinese Central Television (CCTV) has CCTV9 as its flagship English-language station. Cable and satellite television with BBC and CNN is available in top-end hotels. The Chinese radio network, has only a few local English-language programs.

There are some very good maps available of Beijing but you won’t find them in China. Pick them up at home before you travel. Given the amount of changes taking place, it’s vital that you buy the most recent map you can find. Anything more than just two or three years old will be of little use.

The first place to start is the trade section of your own embassy in Beijing. Otherwise there are several trade promotion organizations including the American Chamber of Commerce, the British Chamber of Commerce, and the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Visit www.beijing 2008.com for news and information concerning the upcoming games.

Mr China by Tim Clissold is a terrific account of how to lose millions of dollars doing business with Beijing. Mao is Jung Chang’s lacerating biography of the Great Leader, banned in China. Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin is the memoir of a sexually liberated American girl gatecrashing modern Chinese society.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie is a beautiful novella tracking the lives of two childhood friends enduring Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Wild Swans by Jung Chang is the gripping story of three generations of women living though 20th-century China. Big Breasts and Wide Hips is the latest saga by Mo Yan, an epic of Chinese history, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex.