Postcards From Tomorrow Square Read Online Free PDF

China’s Modernization.” But, to its credit, it also includes announcements of the latest restrictions on commerce, banking, and the news media.
    A list of the tensions between individual rights and the interests of the state could be very long. On the other hand, at least on brief exposure, urban China hardly feels like a hypercontrolled or overpoliced society. You can arrive at the Beijing or Shanghai airport thirty-five minutes before a scheduled domestic flight without needing to break into a nervous sweat. Few police are in evidence at the airport, and the security lines are short. (This is not because air travel is such a rarefied, elite taste in China. Fares are relatively low, and the China Eastern Airlines shuttle flight I took from Shanghai to Beijing was a 747 with all seats filled.) Every instant of life in East Germany under the Communists or in Burma under its ruling generals reminded you that Big Brother was in control. Walking down Shanghai’s main shopping boulevards, Huaihai and Nanjing roads, makes you think you are in one vast bazaar. You can hardly walk a block in Shanghai without passing a vendor selling pirated DVDs for less than $1 apiece. Viewing these has given me my first inklings of sympathy for the Motion Picture Association of America: I never have to spend much for a movie in China, but the versions of movies I can see are terrible. I missed The Da Vinci Code in America and bought a copy here. The dialogue had been dubbed into Chinese and then subtitled back into English—sort of. When Tom Hanks is told that descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene might still be alive, he asks incredulously, “BE? They on the hoof?”
    I have not before been anyplace that seemed simultaneously so controlled and so out of control. The control is from on high—and for most people in the cities, most of the time, it’s not something they bump into. What’s out of control is everything else.
    Often this is in a good way. On an evening walk down a
    side street that looked little changed since the 1930s, my wife and I started noticing that nearly every person we passed was running a business of some sort. This man was riding a bicycle with a towering load of flattened-out cardboard, meant for a scrap dealer. That old woman was weaving together rice straws for a broom, helped by her toddler granddaughter who handed her straws. A middle-aged woman sat outside her house working on a sewing machine. A vendor who looked as if he had just trudged in from the countryside tottered along with a heavy yoke across his shoulders, balancing two heavy baskets full of peaches. Another man was selling crickets in tiny individual straw cages. It makes you marvel at Mao’s delusion in thinking that China could be a centrally planned economy rather than a beehive of commerce.
    One reason why Americans typically find China less “foreign” than Japan is that in Japan the social controls are internalized, through years of training in one’s proper role in a group, whereas China seems like a bunch of individuals who behave themselves only when they think they might get caught. As I took an airport bus from downtown Tokyo to the distant Narita International Airport for the trip to Shanghai, the squadron of luggage handlers who had loaded the bus lined up, bowed in unison, and chanted safe-travel wishes to the bus as it departed. When I arrived in Shanghai, I saw teenage airport baggage handlers playfully slapping one another and then being told by the foreman to get back to work. In Japan, the controls are built in; in China, they appear to be bolted on.
    A less attractive side of China’s social bargain comes in public encounters. Life on the sidewalk or subway may have been what Thomas Hobbes had in mind with his “war of every man against every man.” As technology, Shanghai’s subway is marvelous; as sociology, it makes you despair. Every person getting on a subway understands that there will be more room if people