CAIRO – President Barack Obama’s first week in office has been filled with words and deeds calculated to restore America’s image in the Arab and Muslim world, gestures that some of this region’s leading media figures believe are already changing the way people think about the United States. 

“You can’t believe the change,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad, a senior political analyst in Cairo. “People are beginning to entertain the idea of the U.S. as a force of good, not evil.”

But other Arab and Muslim reporters and editors gathered in Cairo to hear from President Obama’s Mideast envoy remain skeptical.

“Where is the policy? Is it just words?” asked Kareem Fathi, a correspondent for Kuwait TV. 

Amr Nabil / AP

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, right, meets with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell in Cairo on Wednesday.

Beginning with his inauguration promise to seek “a new way forward” with the Muslim world based on “mutual respect,” Obama has made headlines across the region by announcing the closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, making his first official telephone call as president to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, sending his Middle East envoy George Mitchell to the region (whose Irish-Lebanese parentage has been duly noted by many), and granting his first television interview to the Arab satellite network al-Arabiya.

“[Obama's] approach was extraordinary because of his choice,” said Randa Abul Azam, Al- Arabiya’s Cairo Bureau Chief.  “He corrected eight years of Bush during which Arabs and Muslims felt portrayed as terrorists. He is trying to mend that mistake. The distinction has been made and is felt and appreciated.” 
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“There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.”

-  Mao Zedong, The Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, Volume 1 (1955)

YUEQI, Chongqing – Driving around the farming villages surrounding Chongqing municipality during China’s Lunar New Year holiday this weekend, we noticed plenty of evidence to support Mao’s thesis.  

The most popular was the abundance of Guangdong license plates. Guangdong province, a few hundred miles southeast of Chongqing, is considered ground zero for China’s economic reform experiment, the heartland of the nation’s export manufacturing economy.   

“These cars all belong to people who went south and made it big,” explained Li Youfu, the village elder of Yueqi. In this rural hamlet of 5,000 people, half are migrant workers, and their remittances make-up about 80 percent of the town’s income. ”They became little bosses down there and bought cars to bring back here.” 

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Hopes for a better life run high for China’s new generation of so-called peasantry.

Outside Li’s home, where he also runs a small corner shop, young men pulled up on shiny motorcycles to play mah jong for money on a nifty automated table that shuffled their tiles for them. 

“[The table] cost only 2,000 renminbi (0),” said Li Jingshan, the village elder’s 22-year-old son. That’s more than what used to be his monthly salary. The younger Li came back home early in December for the holiday – a little earlier than usual – after the Guangdong food product factory that employed him suspended its operations temporarily because of the slowdown. He’s worked in the south for four years, where he earned 1,800 renminbi a month (4), plus free meals and housing. 

But the global economic crisis has reverberated around China’s once-thriving coastal areas in the south and east. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said up to 10 million out of an estimated 150 million migrants lost their jobs last year due to the crisis. Since business has slowed at Li’s factory, it’s unclear whether he will have a job to go back to once the weeks-long New Year holiday comes to an end. 

“We were finishing work at two, three o’clock in the afternoon,” said Li when I asked him whether there had been enough orders at the factory to keep him fully employed. Then he grinned. ”More time to play!” 

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Iraq is holding provincial elections on Saturday. The elections are expected to set the political landscape for the next several years and its expected to include the election of more women.

VIDEO: Women run for office in Iraq

Learn more about Iraq’s upcoming elections from NBC’s Richard Engel:
Q &A on Iraqi provincial elections

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YUBAI QU, Chongqing Municipality – It was a Chinese stand-off. 

Wang Chen, our 30-something driver from Chongqing, was looking at me anxiously.

I was grappling with not just anxiety (his) but also a mixture of guilt and resentment (mine).

The problem came up when Wang teased us with the prospect of interviewing migrant workers from his wife’s ancestral village about 40 miles outside of the center of Chongqing.   

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Paying respects during the Lunar New Year.

We were working on a story about how the global economic meltdown is affecting Chinese migrant workers and their hopes for the New Year. For the past couple of days, we had been driving around one small town several hours’ drive away, talking to workers who had returned from the economically blighted coastal areas for the weeks-long Lunar New Year holiday.

But a group of local officials turned up, and in spite of their friendly demeanor, their presence intimidated the villagers. Where earlier the workers had spoken frankly about the difficulties of trying to make ends meet in an economic downturn, they suddenly were limiting their comments to praise for the government. Needless to say, we weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of the interviews.

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By NBC News’ Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – The message from Washington to Pakistan was clear: there is no change in U.S. policy when it comes to going after al-Qaida and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s lawless border areas. After all, Barack Obama warned during his presidential campaign that America must go after terrorist targets if Pakistan did not act first.

It should not have been a surprise, then, to Pakistanis when on Friday night, five missiles from remotely piloted Predator drones struck targets in the lawless tribal areas of North and South Waziristan – but it was. 

The twin attacks killed 22 people, including some foreign militants, but also many civilians.

Athar Hussain / Reuters

Supporters of the Pakistani Islamist party Jamat-e-Islami protest U.S. drone attacks in Karachi on Sunday.

Who’s in charge?
The Pakistan government quickly voiced its outrage. ”These attacks can affect Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror,” Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari told U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson the following day.

The foreign ministry followed up with a terse statement expressing “the sincere hope that the United States will review its policy.” And Pakistan’s Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani – already on record promising the country there would be no more drone attacks once Obama became president – was embarrassed

Adding to the government’s problems, many Pakistanis no longer believe their government is being honest when protesting the attacks. 

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