For the next 10 days, the Far East is on the West Side. "A Close Look at China," a free exhibit created by the People's Republic of China at the Jacob K. Javits Center, offers an expansive inside look at that nation's millennia-old culture. The show is in three parts. One is an hour-long fashion show that reproduces Chinese sytles going back 2,000 years, as well as current designs. Another part focuses on Chinese arts and crafts. Although all the objects on display were made withing the last 20 years, they reflect artisanal skills for which the Chinese have been celebrated over the centuries - including jade, porcelain and lacquerware. The third part is devoted to tourism, with computer games, replicas of major tourist attractions, performances of traditional folk dances and replicas of China's most beloved export, pandas.

The intention is to build an awareness of the diversity of China's peoples and the riches of its past. A similar exhibit was presented in Paris last year. This will be the show's only U.S. visit. The show reflects, in part, a concern by the Chinese that the West still perceives them in outmoded ways. "According to a poll taken in New York last week, most of the people interviewed think Chinese women still have their feet bound," Zhao Qizheng, minister of the State Council of Information Office, said through an interpreter Tuesday. "That practice ended in 1911." "Because of the Cold War, China was cut off from the rest of the world. We need to bring each other closer." Zhao concedes that the show represents a change in thinking for the Communist regime, which, for most of its 51-year existence, preferred to consign China's history to the memory hole.

"The past 50 years are not the scale by which we measure China's past," Zhao says. Zhao Zhi Shuo, chief of the China National Arts and Crafts Museum, who supervised the selection of art objects on display, also says the emphasis on the past represents a new direction. Many of the artists represented, he acknowledges, are survivors of the nation's bitter Cultural Revolution. "During the Cultural Revolution period, these masters and artisans were forbidden to create, but they were there," he said through an interpreter. "As China proceeds in the pursuit of high-tech, people in China feel a stronger and stronger sense of urgency to protect arts and crafts, to preserve the arts of the past." But the exhibit, whose $7 million cost has been underwritten by a variety of U.S. businesses, is viewed warily by members of New York's expatriate Chinese community.