As the Chinese people celebrated the first Year of the Dragon of the new millennium, they embraced a brave new world of prosperity, hi-tech, and future challenges with high hopes.

With the coming of the lunar New Year this morning, reverend monk Pufa tolled the bell in an ancient temple in east China's Fujian Province to save the souls lost to drug addiction.

"This is the sound of hope," he said.

He uses the sound of the bell to bless the new millennium and mankind.

As Chinese people have become better off and closer to the outside world, they have come to know the happiness and challenges of being wealthy.

The tropical beaches of Hainan Island are one of the top tourist destinations during this Spring Festival holiday. More than 300,000 tourists are crowding the hotels on this second largest island in China, including 250 boarding houses in local households. Hotel prices have doubled or tripled, and everything must be paid in advance.

The lunar New Year has also brought new hope to the consumption market, which plays a key role in reversing the trend toward deflation the China economy has suffered over the past two years.

More than 1,000 apartments were sold in the city of Haikou in Hainan Province over the past ten days, while residents in Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan Province were driving some 500,000 private cars to go shopping and sightseeing during the holiday.

Citizens in Shanghai and in the city of Urumqi in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region ordered catered food for dinner parties at home and hired house cleaners from household service companies.

Many people in Tianjin in north China now regard dinner parties, travel, shopping, sightseeing, and festival fairs the top activities for the week-long Spring Festival holiday.

More Chinese people are becoming increasingly hi-tech savvy, and now use telecommunications to extend festival greetings instead of visiting their relatives and friends.

Shenyang, a northeast China city with 4.8 million people, had a 20-minute traffic jam on its telephone paging system as one million users thronged to the phone at midnight on lunar New Year's Eve.

As they used more of these new products of the information revolution, many Chinese remain eager to preserve traditional customs. Despite a ban on firecrackers, Guangzhou residents in south China's Guangdong Province made colored lamps in the shape of firecrackers and added audio tracks of the loud bangs to greeting cards.

Farmers in east China's Shandong Province printed the words of folk songs on festival paintings, and people in north China's Shanxi Province inscribed historic and scenic sites with the word "dragon."

Dragon lanterns and bonfires were lit in places such as Nanjing in east China's Jiangsu Province, the city of Shenyang in northeast China's Liaojing Province, and Inner Mongolia in north China.

However, the Chinese people are also faced with challenges in their bid to make China take off like a flying dragon.

As the New Year comes in, the government of Anhui Province in east China has allotted more than 52 million yuan to buy food for laid off-workers living at the subsistence line, and the provincial federation of trade unions opened a 24-hour hotline for emergency relief for workers having difficulties during this most important Chinese festival.

On the other hand, during the Spring Festival holiday, about 1. 2 million travelers are expected to line up at the Gongbei border gate in Macao to exit and enter inland China. Most of them are from Taiwan, and because there are no direct air links across the Taiwan Straits, visitors have to take a roundabout way through Macao.

As bells tolled 108 times in an ancient temple in northwest Beijing, the country stands at the threshold of a future full hopes and great expectations.