Eastern Star

Only her friends recognize TV talk-show host Yue-Sai Kan when she walks down the streets of New York, but to 400 million Chinese, she is bigger than Cosby, Stallone and Madonna combined.

“I was doing a radio show in Miami, and they asked the international operator for a number in China, any number, just to test whether everyone there really knows me,” Kan said during a recent visit to Los Angeles.

“I was nervous, you know, because in this country even Johnny Carson may not have passed that kind of test. Well, they got some hotel and a guy came on and said, ‘Of course we know her. We watch her show every week. In China not everyone knows your Ronald Reagan, but everybody knows Miss Kan.’ ”

Kan’s “One World” show, a magazine-type program designed to introduce the West to the Chinese, has been airing in China since early 1986 in both Mandarin and English. A typical show might feature an elaborate Swedish subway system, or the Muppets on a New York set.

In the United States she is host of “Looking East,” a program seen on some UHF stations and cable-TV systems. And on Sunday she’ll be hosting a “Journey Through a Changing China,” airing at 9 p.m. on KTLA-TV Channel 5.

“I want to show Americans what the Chinese people are really like today,” Kan says. “You have a massive country with 5,000 years of history trying to transform itself into a modern state, and so you see the most primitive customs operating right alongside the most advanced technology.”

Kan, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Guilin, China, one year before her parents fled the Communist revolution to Hong Kong and eventually Hawaii and New York, is by her own admission a closet Western propagandist, championing the comforts of the free marketplace on state-run television.

“I am a real capitalist,” she said. “I do not believe in communism. The Chinese government welcomes my program because since 1979 they have instituted economic reforms and with economic freedom comes intellectual freedom. You can’t talk about having an open door to the outside without knowing the outside world.”