COVERING Communist China is the toughest problem in journalism today. It is foolish to ignore one-fourth of the world's peoples; but it is impossible to report the news out of China with any of the accustomed safeguards of trained eyewitnesses, seeing for themselves and able to verify what they are told. Peking allows only two permanent Western correspondents (Reuters and Agence France Presse), and it shuns their requests and restricts their travel.

So the burden falls on Hong Kong. There, TIME Bureau Chief Stan Karnow presides over a tedious and essential operation akin to wartime intelligence gathering. He and Correspondents Jerry Schecter and Loren Fessler interview European and Asian businessmen who travel in and out of China, see diplomats down from Peking, pump the occasional Swiss journalist who gets a mainland visa. They keep a man posted at Kowloon railroad station to watch for arrivals from Canton; they get word of refugees arriving at Macao, and interview them--poor, haggard and inarticulate people who can tell of the rice ration in their own village but are ignorant of conditions five miles away.

Then there is the required reading, beginning each morning with the 30 or 40 pages of Hsinhua (the Communist New China News Agency) and the daily Peking radio transcript. It is turgid, tendentious and tedious. But the attention that the Chinese Communists give to Albania, or to confessions of crop failures in one province or another, provide clues to explore. A small colony of experts from the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany and Japan does the same job in Hong Kong, and there is much pooling of information. The U.S. consulate assembles a massive and useful Survey of the Mainland Press providing translations from dozens of Communist periodicals, and there is even an excellent weekly China News Analysis put out by Jesuit priests in Hong Kong, veterans of 20 or 30 years in China. They are intelligent and patient scholars. Much of TIME's own Hong Kong study of China is the work of Loren Fessler, 38, who comes from Montana and Harvard, spent years in China before the Communists took over, and is fluent in Mandarin. His filing cabinets are full of data on Chinese politicians and economic statistics. After preparing thousands of words on Li Fu-chun, this week's cover subject, he was concerned to find Li's name lately dropping out of the press. Fessler last week was almost as elated as Chief Planner Li himself may have been to see Li's name reappear, high on a list of mourners at a funeral for a Central Committee member. Li, despite all the failures of the Chinese economy, still seems to be riding high.

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