Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
--Robert Frost “Mending Wall”

At a time when we are repeatedly told that the world is flat, that words, images, and ideas can be sent from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else with the click of a button, and that nation states are a thing of the past, walls–actual, physical walls and barriers— would seem to be a thing of the past. The “fall” of the Berlin Wall in 1989 increasingly seems to represent not just the end of Soviet Communism, but the beginning of a New World Order characterized by globalism. Small matter that when the first official celebration of German Reunification took place less than a year later many were wearing t-shirts that proclaimed in Berlin dialect: Ick will meine Mauer wieder ham! (I want my wall back!).

I had the opportunity this past week to visit perhaps the most famous wall of them all, the Great Wall of China.

Even the most jaded of travelers would have to agree that it is an impressive site. However effective it may or may not have been at once keeping people out of China, it now brings people in.

Personally, I’ve never tried to invade China, but I suspect that if I did I would get a great deal more trouble from the highway toll booths than from the Wall. For the moment, however, the toll booths seem happy to lay down their arms at the site of a tourist bus.

So, China is going global. Perhaps we should be grateful that Ronald Reagan never asked Deng Xiaoping to tear down the Great Wall, because that would have taken a great effort and have been a terrible loss to world culture. In its own way, however, the current function of the wall as a site of an increasingly global tourism does say something about the transformation, not to say the “fall,” of Chinese Communism.

But what does it say? Some hear the message that slowly but surely China too is joining the World. What more proof do you need than the 2008 Summer Olympics? Clearly there is something to this. But I saw a lot of other walls in China as well. Barriers on the medians of major roads to discourage the decidedly unmodern habit of Chinese people to cross them wherever they please. And lots of construction walls around what used to be neighborhoods but will soon be grassy open spaces, high-rises, or perhaps Olympic villages. A lot of eggs are being broken, but it isn’t yet clear what kind of omelet is going to be made from them or how many people it is going to feed.

The official opinion of the Chinese government and the majority of Western observers will be that this is progress, while the liberal counter-view will lament the loss of traditional architecture and ways of living. I myself am a skeptical about the character-building virtues of communal toilets and so on, but there is no denying that while some are being transplanted to newer, more modern digs, and happily so, others are suffering great, even life-destroying loses from these changes, including finding themselves homeless.

In the 1978 film Superman: The Movie, Gene Hackman, in an unforgettable performance as Lex Luther, explains to his arch-rival Superman, played by the late Christopher Reeves, his plan to detonate an atomic bomb on the San Andreas fault, plunging the California coast into the sea and leaving behind a new West Coast of previously low-value desert that he, Lex Luther, has been buying up. Luther’s father once told him, he explains, stocks may rise and stocks may fall, the value of anything and everything will change, “but people will always need land, and they will pay through the nose to get it.” Lex succeeds in his plan and Superman is only able to triumph in the end by reversing the orbit of the earth and turning back time.

Short of someone with an unconditional commitment to the good of mankind and that particular superpower coming along, we will have to continue to accept the difficulties of living in a world in which we all need land, in which we all take up space, drink water, and breathe air somewhere other than in cyberspace. In the meantime, walls will continue to do what they do, some becoming sites of history and collective memory, some keeping out the riff-raff, improving traffic flow, or reinventing Israel.