(FORTUNE Magazine) – I F ATMOSPHERICS were profits, China, with its new enthusiasm for incentives and doubts about Karl Marx, would be business heaven. It's not, though opportunities for patient risk-takers are increasing. Separating Chinese rhetoric from reality is a familiar task for Asian editor Louis Kraar, author of ''China After Marx: Open for Business?'' (page 28). When he joined FORTUNE in 1972, Kraar had already covered the Far East for ten years as a correspondent for the Time-Life News Service; later that year he was among the first American journalists to enter China after Richard Nixon reopened contacts. Among the changes Kraar has noted on subsequent visits is awareness of this magazine. ''When the Cultural Revolution was still on, no Chinese could safely admit to being a reader of FORTUNE. Now it's on sale in major hotels,'' he reports. ''Chinese read it, too. When I visited the Shanghai Economic and Trade Commission, one of its officials began by saying: 'From your magazine we know information of the world. We think it's a most authoritative magazine. Forecast helps us a lot.' '' Then, like any market-savvy trader, the official inquired: ''Do you have any information we cannot get in the magazine?'' Kraar was able to assure him the readers get all the choice morsels.

When reporter Edward Baig set out to look into the bustling business of getting singles together (page 98), he approached the assignment with perhaps more than the usual journalistic curiosity and some relevant personal experience. Baig, who is 30 and single, proposed the story after he had advertised in the personals columns of New York magazine on a whim. The ad garnered 25 responses, and Baig went out with 12 of the women who wrote back, at the whirlwind rate of about three a week. Alas, Ed Baig didn't fall in love, but a roommate who copied the ad idea did, and recently married a woman who responded to his personal ad. The episode helped persuade Baig that there was a story on the business end of dating in the 1980s. The assignment let him in for plenty of ribbing from his colleagues here at FORTUNE, some of it possibly envious. For the record, Baig says he didn't have inordinate fun on the story. ''I was too busy working,'' he claims. Baig and reporter Sarah Smith (27 and also single) talked to dozens of would- be facilitators of yuppie love, Smith for the most part covering singles bars and health clubs while Baig looked into dating services, matchmakers, and adult education. One of Smith's discoveries: bars that give customers some peculiar excuses to hang out there. One was a combination bar and laundromat in Austin, Texas, called Barwash. Smith asked some of the women customers if they were there because they hoped to meet someone. ''Most of them were pretty dressed up,'' she says, ''but they all said they were there to do their laundry.''