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very difficult to cultivate in China itself. These include professional managerial skills; the idea of open academic debate, even with one’s elders; techniques for funding start-up firms and other organizational structures that encourage innovation; and a sense that bribery, petty or grand-scale, is at least in principle wrong.
    And most of them seem to have liked the process. The African students who trooped to Moscow and Beijing in the 1960s and 1970s often returned grumbling about mistreatment and racism; Americans who spend time in Japan often come away with love-hate feelings because of that culture’s exclusiveness. Chinese returnees, based on all available evidence, are at least subconsciously pro-American. They have made friends and followed sports teams; many have raised culturally Americanized children. Despite obvious differences of culture and language, and despite obvious exceptions to the rule I am about to propound, on the whole Chinese people get along with Americans, and vice versa. Because returnees have usually been part of either a university or a company in the United States, when they come back to China they’re more likely to think of working with General Motors (a huge success here and the leading automaker, with the locally manufactured Buick its most prestigious brand) or UCLA than with the counterparts from Japan or Europe.
    If I were China’s economic czar, I would recycle as many of the country’s dollar holdings as possible on grad-school fees in the United States. And if I were America’s immigration czar, I would issue visas to Chinese applicants as fast as I could, recognizing that they will create more jobs, opportunities, and friends for America than the United States could produce any other way for such modest cost. Many Americans will nod along with this point in principle. I would have, too, a few weeks ago. I’m saying that I feel it viscerally now, having met some of these people and begun to see their role in China. And to hear them say that their younger counterparts are going instead to Australia, England, or even Japan because of U.S. visa restrictions makes me want to say: America, wake up and watch out!
    CAUTION FOUR:
WATCH OUT, EVERYONE!
     
    It is too bad that “land of contrasts” is such a cliché, for there are situations in which it would be handy. Trying to make sense of the combination of rigid control and the near-complete chaos the newcomer sees in China is one of those.
    I don’t mean to sound flip, because one side of this contrast, the regime’s repression and authoritarian controls, is a grave matter. Apart from its effect within China, it is likely to be the main source of friction between the United States and China for years to come. Every day’s paper since I’ve come to Shanghai, and every hour’s set of blogs, has brought news of some fresh assertion of state control. An internationally famous activist named Chen Guangcheng, blind since childhood, was convicted on charges of “organizing a mob to obstruct traffic” after he protested official misconduct. (Famous elsewhere, but not in China; I have found that few university students recognize his name, since Chinese media did not highlight his case.) Ching Cheong, a reporter from Hong Kong, was sentenced to five years in prison on apparently trumped-up charges of espionage.
    Until I installed a “proxy server,” which allows my computer to tunnel under and around the “Great Firewall,” I was amazed at the parts of the Internet I could not reach from China. Technorati.com , for no obvious reason. Wikipedia. Both sites were mysteriously unblocked in October, but then I had trouble with Google News. One URL I can always reach is the central government’s very useful official Web site, www.gov.cn , which has an English page. Naturally it highlights the upbeat: A white paper on “China’s Peaceful Development Road” has as its first chapter, “Peaceful Development Is the Inevitable Way for