I'm writing this from China, where web access has been spotty at best, a combination of weird hotels and smoky internet cafes making it far less pleasant than usual to spend time online. And so alas, dear printculture readers, the best I can do this week (and more than likely next) is a few scattered ideas. But I promise the definitive statement on today's China, in which I'll bring together the complexities of the global economy, the movements of capital, and cultural transformation in an easily digested package of three or four hundred words, sometime later...

In the meantime:

1. Anyone wanting to deduce some measure of the historical changes in China since 1949 could begin with the life of my mother-in-law, whose bullheaded movement forward in the face of technological and economic change means that she has a lot of great stories to tell. Last night, she remembered with some pleasure her first visit to a Western-style movie theater with the family. As the lights went down and the film began, she shouted, "Turn up the lights! It's too dark in here!" The kids were of course mortified, and she, convinced it was just too damn dark for normal people, walked out, never to return--she's never seen another movie in a theater. She tells this story with great pride.

2. Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the first person of non-Chinese descent will call him- or herself "Chinese" (I am excepting the handful of American Maoists who stayed here through the Cultural Revolution). This will have been an effect of the fact that it is now possible for people who are part of the global business class (most of whom are of European descent) to spend their whole lives in China--there's enough infrastructure here now to support that, at least for the length of a working life (it's not that clear to me that a businessperson spending his/her whole life here wouldn't retire back "home"). That means that the children of these workers will be able to grow up here from birth to college (right now college is possible but I imagine most such children will study in the West). The "Chineseness" they acquire will presumably be a partial product of high-end global diplo-business culture (which embassy kids live today), but they will share it in common with the millions of Chinese who can now afford to live, work, eat, and send their kids to school with the West's elite. Whether this cultural Chineseness will affect political Chineseness at all is, from this prophetic perspective, fairly doubtful. But we'll see.

3. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci wrote "it is absurd to think of a purely objective prediction. Anybody who makes a prediction has in fact a programme for whose victory he is working, and his prediction is precisely an element contributing to that victory. ... Certainly a conception of the world is implicit in every prediction." That goes for #2 above, of course, but I thought of it first two weeks ago when I sat next to a man at dinner whose knowledgeable and pessmistic take on current global politics included the blithely delivered announcement that he believed that European Muslims would in the next 20 years be subject to a second Holocaust.

4. A fun thought experiment: you are told you are going to die in 10 minutes. The only thing you're allowed to do is write. What do you write? Same question for 10 hours, and for one year. Surprisingly, for me the hardest one is 10 hours: beyond writing notes to loved ones (which is what I'd do for the 10 mintues), I can't think of anything good I could do with that amount of time. My answer to the year question is, at least right now, that I'd write the methods book I'm saving for my 40s.