Following up on my promise last week to keep moving towards a grand unified theory of contemporary China (which I am of course unqualified to produce), here are a few more thoughts for the mixer:

1. Obviously, things are changing very fast there, as the entire country girds itself for the 2008 Olympics. Around Beijing and Tianjin, where most of the events will take place, these changes are radically altering public space. Their major effect is to isolate public space from any encounter with unmodernized (un-Westernized?) Chinese culture. American travelers to China in 2008 (the Olympics begin, auspiciously, on August 8, so 8/8/2008) will find China, I think, very familiar in its unfamiliarity: the toilets, the roads, the ratio of parks to skyscrapers, the hotels, the taxis, all feel like they could be anywhere. This progress--which has in many cases meant real advantages for Chinese people--comes at the cost of "local" color--it seems unlikely to me that any traveler who does not speak Chinese will be able to eat where ordinary (middle- and working-class) Chinese people eat, sleep where they sleep, or even peer, with whatever curiosity, through the windows of their homes.

I am suspicious of "developmental" tourism and of the demand that the undeveloped world remain as it is so that Americans can enjoy seeing the authentic spectacle of poverty, and so I am not sure this is an enormous loss. Or rather what is being lost in Beijing is what has already been lost in Paris, in New York, in London, and in the world's other major tourist cities, each of which exists as it were in two spaces simultaneously: the New York composed of tickets to Letterman and a Broadway show, a trip up the Empire State Building, a visit to the 9/11 site, and a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty has little to do with how most New Yorkers experience the geography of the city. In this sense Beijing's modernization has to do with an increased ability to manage and separate the tourist city from the quotidian one, an ability that is a function of increased modernization (the complete redevelopment of the airport, new taxis, new subway lines, etc.) but which is, in some sense, ontologically prior to it.

2. I continue to be amazed at how non-sexual Chinese pop culture is--or rather, at how non-sexual it feels to me. I experience this difference--which indicates just as much about the United States as it does about China--most often in two arenas: first the complete absence of direct sexual expression in pop lyrics (which are for the most part very "romantic," whether sung by men or women) and in pop music (which is very much keyboard-driven, and absent of any of the more penetrating, head- and body-shaking rhythms of American rock, hip-hop, or pop). And second the degree to which "childishness" in dress (by which I mean, I think, a fairly stringent absence of sexuality, again) extends well into and even past the teenage years. I was astonished last week to find out that one of my cousins-in-law was 18: I had thought, based on her clothes and the way she carries herself, that she was 13 or 14 years old.

3. The most bewildering thing I saw in the last two weeks was a young white man working as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant. The place did cater to a fairly wealthy clientele (which in China means lots of foreigners), and he did speak English, so you can imagine he was hired on for his language skills. Nonetheless, it was the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese working at that kind of job--a type of job reserved, incidentally, largely for young women who have come to cities from the countryside, because the wages are so low. What was he doing there? Friends I asked immediately suggested he was doing "research" of some kind, which gives you a quick sense of how difficult it is to imagine that he was working there because he needed the job or the money. Presumably this is a sign of things to come--though, as I suggested last week, the shifts in the Chinese government's policies on immigration and work permits would seem to contravene any possibility of its ever happening. Historically, the CCP has frequently allowed for the unofficial breaking of certain laws before their official revocation, a policy that allows for changes to be tested while still being subject to an eventual governmental crackdown, and I find myself wondering if that's what was happening here. Or maybe he was just doing some research.

4. Imagine, as a writer, being able to say anything you'd like but not being able to write certain things. Imagine that your entire career, and the careers of everyone around you, depended on the fact that you could write whatever you'd like, as long as you don't criticize the government directly. And imagine that everyone knows this, but that this knowledge is itself one of the things you can't write about or discuss in certain kinds of public situations (though you can speak about it with friends, or even in classrooms).

It is hard for me to fathom being an intellectual under such circumstances, which are those under which most Chinese intellectuals work.

But then I remember that a Brooklyn College professor recently had to drop out of the running for a position as department chair after it was discovered he'd insulted religious people on his blog. And then I read on the website of Campus Watch (a conservative organization devoted to "monitoring Middle East Studies on campus) that "American campuses are crawling with pro-terror professors," find that Alan Dershowitz has accused Columbia University of supporting terrorism, and see that Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) has argued that a recent joke by Bill Maher "borders on treason" (treason being legally punishable by death), and I wonder.

Let me clear: I would rather be a professor here than there, and I think that the American situation is unquestionably freer in terms of political speech than the Chinese one. But it is also clear that lots of people in our culture--many of them on the political right--would be happier if the situation here were more like the one in China.