Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation Read Free

good choice for lunch, the response seemed a tad barbaric. IBM had long represented the future—the American future—and now that particular future was in the hands of barbarous dog-killers.
    Mostly, however, as I refreshed myself in the events of the day, I was struck by the gnawing sense that despite the best efforts of the freedom-hating Islamofascists, the bigger news seemed to be elsewhere. “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world,” Napoleon had famously remarked. China, clearly, had awoken. For some, this had been evident for some time. For others—say, like those who had spent a good part of the past decade living on remote islands in the South Pacific—it was something of a surprise to learn just how big China had become. Officially, there were 1.3 billion people in China. Unofficially, there were 1.5 billion. It had become the industrial capital of the world. The 200 million migrants who had left the fields for the cities reflected the largest human migration in history. China had managed to achieve an annual economic growth rate of 9.5 percent or more for twenty-eight years straight. It is presently the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and Japan and it is expected to become the second in the foreseeable future. China currently exports more than a trillion dollars’ worth of goods annually and will soon account for nearly 50 percent of world trade. There are more than ninety cities within its borders with populations over one million, most of which, to be perfectly honest, I had never heard of.
    And yet, despite China’s having become one of the economic engines of the world, I had no sense of what China actually was. Not since Deng Xiaoping has China had a leader that reflected a personality, a sense of Chineseness that foreigners could latch on to. Say what you will about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but they are, in their own ways, America writ large. Watching those two, the charmer who exuded empathy and insatiable appetites, and the smirking bully whose very strut is enough to send otherwise reasonable people into an inchoate, apoplectic quiver of rage, it is clear that Bill and George could only be American. Hu Jintao, on the other hand, simply comes across as the guy in the office that you really need to watch out for.
    Instead, all I could discern were contrasts. Beijing had been awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics and you’d think, okay, we’re a long way now from the events of June 4, 1989. In preparation, the authorities had decided to finally release the student who had hurled a paint bomb at the giant portrait of Chairman Mao that looms over Tiananmen Square. Well, good, you think. And then it emerges that after eighteen years of what we now soothingly call enhanced interrogation techniques, the student had been shattered, and today is free only to roam through his insanity. Yet many of our most esteemed commentators—and how, exactly, does one become an esteemed commenter?—speak reassuringly about the newfound freedom in China. Maybe, but who wants to unfurl a Falun Gong banner in Tiananmen Square? You first, Mr. Commentator.
    Clearly, a quick look at China from the outside invariably turns into a thorough investigation of the yin and the yang. China had launched men into space, and yet in some western parts of the country people still lived in caves. China produces some of the most lavish and poignant movies of our time, yet its literature remains stunted. China is quickly becoming a manufacturer not only of the cheap, plastic goods that stock the shelves of Wal-Mart, but also of high-tech goods like computers, and yet they haven’t quite managed to ensure that the toothpaste they export doesn’t kill people in Panama. It was all very perplexing to me. What exactly was China?
    “China is today’s Wild West,” said my friend Greg. I had first met Greg in graduate school in Washington, D.C. This was in the early 1990s, and as I pursued my studies on