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"The dissidents in the East had to trust us," he says. "But we had to trust them too. We weren't in a position to fact check whether an arrest at this or that demonstration had really taken place."

Not surprisingly, the Stasi were some of the show's most dedicated listeners, but their activities were not limited to monitoring.

At this time, Gorbachev ceased jamming Voice of America and the BBC in the Soviet Union, yet the East German authorities launched their first jamming campaign in a decade.

But the measure backfired. Radio Glasnost simply repeated the blocked shows, thanking the Stasi for the free promotion.

As the Stasi began to lose its grip on East German society, it gave up jamming the show. Radio Glasnost served as a vital communication channel for the resistance movement for over two years until it was no longer needed. The final show was broadcast just three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

"I still get emotional now when I think about that last show," Jahn says. "How we all came together for the first time in our studio and celebrated the fall of the wall and the peaceful revolution."

Even today, Jahn — still a broadcast journalist at heart — believes the power of radio should not to be underestimated: "By November 1989, Radio Glasnost had done its job."

"It had contributed to the fall of the wall," he says.

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Berlin Wall

As far back as the early 1990s, Washington thought trade and investment eventually would make China more democratic. In the past couple of years, though, the Communist Party has doubled down on repression at home and become more aggressive overseas.

In short, things have not turned out as Washington had hoped, and relations between the world's two major powers are tense these days.

President Obama will continue to work on that tricky relationship after he arrives in Beijing on Monday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit The gathering provides Chinese President Xi Jinping with an international platform as he hosts leaders from Japan, India and Russia and tries to boost China's standing in world affairs.

Prosperity's Unexpected Consequences

The Two-Way

China, Japan Agree To Disagree On Disputed Islands

Parallels

On China's Mainland, A Less Charitable Take On Hong Kong's Protests

China Sentences Professor Accused Of Separatist Activities

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Two decades ago, Republicans, Democrats and some prominent China scholars argued that economic engagement would change China's political system over time.

"By working with China and expanding areas of cooperation, dealing forthrightly with our differences, we can advance fundamental American interests and values," President Bill Clinton said in 1997.

James Mann, author of The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China, says the conventional wisdom was China's authoritarian system naturally would evolve.

"Part of the theory was, it was just inevitable," says Mann, a scholar-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. "Any country that became prosperous and had growing trade and investment ties with the world would automatically liberalize."

One popular U.S. columnist argued that as Chinese enjoyed greater and greater consumer choices — such as various types of coffee at Starbucks — a desire for political choice would follow. After meeting with then-premier Wen Jiabao in 2005, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters China was heading towards a more open political system.

"The whole basis of the discussion I have had in a country that is developing very fast — where 100 million people now use the Internet, and which is going to be the second-largest economy in the world — is that there is an unstoppable momentum toward greater political freedom," Blair told reporters in Beijing, according to Bloomberg News.

But Mann says capitalism had the opposite effect.

Chinese naval soldiers stand guard on China's first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, as it travels toward a military base in Hainan province, in this undated picture made available on Nov. 30, 2013. Tensions in the South China Sea have grown over territorial disputes between China, the Philippines, Japan and others. Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov

"It resulted in a rich, authoritarian regime, which is not what we were looking for in the first place, and which is more of a problem to deal with," he says.

China has poured some of its riches into naval power and is now tangling with Japan and the Philippines, close American allies, over disputed islands. China claims most of the vast South China Sea as its own, despite the protests of various neighbors.

Mann says American policymakers thought China would follow the path of other East Asian dictatorships, such as Taiwan and South Korea, which democratized in the 1980s. Those countries, however, relied on the U.S. for their defense, which Washington used as political leverage.

"The United States pushed Taiwan over a decade," says Mann. "None of that is going to happen in China. It has an entirely different relationship with the United States."

Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, says that instead of democratizing China, economic growth helped the party strengthen its grip on power.

"The U.S. has gravely underestimated the capabilities, the determination, the resourcefulness of the Chinese Communist Part. Better economic performance gives them greater political legitimacy, and [then] they don't have to do political reform," says Pei. It also "allows them more resources to use repression to defend one-party rule."

Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi has cracked down on Internet speech and jailed all sorts of critics. Last month, an 81-year-old writer known by the pen name Tie Liu was charged with "creating a disturbance." Among his apparent offenses: publishing the accounts of some of the political victims of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, knows China's political failings, but says the party has made improvements for which it doesn't receive credit. Those include term limits for top leaders, who — though not popularly elected — pay close attention to public opinion.

"America somehow is impatient," says Shen, who says Americans seem to think the only form of democracy is the one-person, one-vote Western model. America "is too idealistic and is too chauvinistic."

Trends That Undermine Communist Power

How long can the Communist Party stay in power? Pei expects it to run out of gas in 10 to 15 years.

"The people who work for this system have no fundamental loyalty to the system," says Pei. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among Chinese themselves is that most people who have joined the party in the past decade primarily did so to enrich themselves through connections and graft.

"All they want to do is benefit personally from their relationship with the system," Pei continues. "So, over the long run, the system will go bankrupt."

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says the party has another trend running against it. Young Chinese have dramatically different expectations than their parents.

"Let's look at the young people in Shanghai, Beijing," he says. "They are more similar to their peers in Taipei, in Tokyo, in Washington, in New York. That's a very powerful force.

"They have similar lifestyles, they have similar kind of inspiration, and sooner or later they will also want to have freedom."

Li says that's natural. When that might happen, though, is anyone's guess.

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In an unprecedented move, a Saudi advisory council says it approves of lifting a ban on female drivers. The Shura Council proposes that certain restrictions be applied, however: Women must be at least 30, have permission from their male guardian, not wear makeup and drive only in daylight hours, The Associated Press reports.

For years, the kingdom has refused to review the ban on female drivers, which is unique to Saudi Arabia, where conservative Muslim clerics have expressed concerns that female drivers could spread "licentiousness."

The AP reports:

"The Shura Council's recommendations are not obligatory on the government. But simply making the recommendation was a startling shift after years of the kingdom's staunchly rejecting any review of the ban.

"The council member told The Associated Press that the Shura Council made the recommendations in a secret, closed session held in the past month. The member spoke on condition of anonymity because the recommendations had not been made public."

As The Two-Way's Bill Chappell reported last year, there have been a number of bold protests against the ban, with Saudi women getting behind the wheel for a day. Thousands have signed online protests against the ban. The October 2013 protest highlighted by Bill was the third of its kind since 1990.

The AP says that the Shura Council recommended that women 30 and older be allowed to drive until 8 p.m. each day if they have permission from a male guardian. They would be allowed to drive from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Saturday through Wednesday and noon to 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, the Muslim weekend.

The council is also recommending a "female traffic department" made up of female officers to deal with female drivers, the AP says.

Saudi women driving

Saudi Arabia

British science is having a cinematic moment, with The Theory of Everything now and The Imitation Game soon. Yet neither film has much science in it. These accounts of Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing, respectively, are engaging and well-crafted but modeled all too faithfully on old-school romantic dramas.

In the movie universe, scientific breakthroughs — even when they help defeat the Nazis, as Turing's did — must be less important than love. Which, come to think of it, is also the corn-belt communique beamed back from Interstellar, a film that relies on the cosmological savvy of Kip Thorne, one of Hawking's closest colleagues.

Thorne appears briefly in The Theory of Everything, which introduces several of Hawking's scientific peers but focuses on a single companion: the one who wrote the book from which co-producer Anthony McCarten's script is derived.

She's Jane Hawking, nee Wilde, as embodied by the ideally named Felicity Jones. Pretty and vivacious, yet not so delicate as she appears, Jane is irresistible to the young Stephen (Eddie Redmayne) when he spots her at a party. This is one of many incidents depicted in the film that didn't exactly happen. Every time an everyday event can be transformed into a movie moment, McCarten and director James Marsh (Man on Wire) go for it.

In broad outline, the story they tell is true. Hawking, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge, is distracted and disorganized, but becomes studiously focused on Jane. He's diagnosed with a motor neuron disease related to ALS soon after they meet, but she marries him anyway. Soon she has three young children and a husband whose body is withering.

The couple struggles medically and financially, but he retains his intellect and wit and she her radiance and good humor. She even learns enough of his work to illustrate the conflict between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity — using peas and potatoes — to Jonathan (Charlie Cox), a choirmaster who becomes an intimate family friend.

Stephen wins fame as the author of A Brief History of Time, although the equation that will unify all astrophysics remains elusive. (Marsh embodies the universe in a swirling cup, quoting not Einstein but Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her.) Then pneumonia — whose operatic onset is another fictionalized episode — leads to a tracheotomy, and further loss of ability to communicate.

Ultimately, Jane becomes very close to Jonathan, while Stephen does the same with a therapist (Maxine Peake). And so a 25-year marriage ends, a rupture that may have been a little stormier in actuality than in this sanitized telling. Although it probably is hard to get into a shouting match with a husband who speaks through a voice synthesizer.

Devolving from a man who seems a bit clumsy to one who can barely move at all, Redmayne gives an impressive physical performance. It recalls Daniel Day Lewis' in My Left Foot — minus the rage. There's little acrimony in The Theory of Everything, which may reflect Hawking's actual outlook or just the movie's puppyish desire to please.

As gentle and saintly as Jennifer Connolly's character in A Dangerous Mind, Jones' Jane is immensely appealing if a bit unbelievable. And since in movies the essence of female virtue is cuteness, Jane barely ages over three decades.

Perhaps she took a rejuvenating whirl through the wayback machine that, in one of the clunkier touches, rewinds the story at the movie's end. Certainly it feels as if the script did, yielding the time anomaly of a 2014 film that seems to have been written when its 72-year-old protagonist was still in short pants.