In the Kingdom of Mao Bell or, Destroy the Users on the Waiting List (selected excerpts) (1994)
In the inevitable rotating lounge atop the Shangri-La Hotel in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a burly local businessman, wearing a synthetic polo shirt stretched so thin as to be semitransparent, takes in the view, some drinks, and selections from the dinner buffet.
He is accompanied by a lissome consort in a nice flowered print dress. Like any face-conscious Chinese businessman he carries a large boxy cellular phone. It’s not that he can’t afford a “prawn,” as the newer flip phones are called. His model is prized because it stands up on a restaurant table, antenna in the fully erect position, flaunting the owner’s connectivity.
The lounge spins disconcertingly fast—you have to recalibrate your inner ear when you enter, and I half expect to see the head of my Guinness listing. Furthermore, it is prone to a subtly disturbing oscillation known to audio engineers as wow. Outside the smoked windows, Typhoon Abe is gathering his forces. Shenzhen spins around me, wowing sporadically.
Thirty-one floors below is the Shen Zhen (Deep River) itself, which separates China-proper’s Special Economic Zone from Hong Kong and eventually flows into the vast estuary of the Pearl River. The boundary serves the combined functions of the Iron Curtain and the Rio Grande, yet in cyberspace terms it has already ceased to exist:
—The border is riddled with leased lines connecting clean, comfortable offices in Hong Kong with factories in Shenzhen, staffed with nimble and submissive girls from rural China. Shenzhen’s population is 60 percent female.
—The value of many Hong Kong stocks is pegged to arcane details of PRC government policy, which are announced from time to time by ministries in Beijing. For a long time, the Hong Kong market has fluctuated in response to such announcements; more recently, the fluctuations have begun to happen hours or days before the policies are made public.
—Hong Kong television is no longer targeted at a Hong Kong audience; it is now geared for the 20 million people in the Pearl Delta—the 80-mile-long region defined by Guangzhou (Canton) in the interior, Hong Kong and the Shenzhen SEZ on the eastern bank, and Macao and the Zhuhai SEZ on the western bank. Thickets of television antennas, aimed toward Hong Kong, fringe the roof of every Pearl Delta apartment block. Since TV Guide and its ilk are not available, Star TV regularly flashes up a telephone number bearing the Hong Kong prefix. Dial this number and they will fax you a program guide. This is easy for Shenzhen residents, because . . .
—Every telephone in Shenzhen has international direct dial.
THE FIRST THING THAT HAPPENED DURING JARUZELSKI’S MILITARY COUP IN Poland was that the narcs invaded the telephone exchanges and severed the trunk lines with axes, ensuring that they would take months to repair. This and similar stories have gotten us into the habit of thinking that modern information technology is to totalitarianism what crosses are to vampires. Skeptics might say it’s just a coincidence that glasnost and perestroika came just after the photocopier, the fax, and the personal computer invaded Russia, but I think there’s a connection, and if you read WIRED, you probably do too. After all, how could any country whose power structure was based on controlling the flow of information survive in an era of direct-dial phones and ubiquitous fax machines?
Now (or so the argument goes), any nation that wants a modern economy has to have information technology—so economic modernization will inevitably lead to political reform, right?
I went to China expecting to see that process in action. I looked everywhere for hardy electronic frontierfolk, using their modems and fax machines to push the Communists back into their holes, and I asked dang near everyone I met about how communications technology was changing Chinese culture.
None of them knew what the hell I was talking about.
I was carrying an issue of WIRED so that I wouldn’t have to explain it to everyone. It happened to be the issue with Bill Gibson on the cover. In one corner were three characters in Hanzi (the script of the Han Chinese). Before I’d left the States, I’d heard that they formed the Chinese word for “network.”
Whenever I showed the magazine to a Chinese person they were baffled. “It means network, doesn’t it?” I said, thinking all the warm and fuzzy thoughts that we think about networks.
“Yes,” they said, “this is the term used by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for the network of spies and informers that they spread across every village and neighborhood to snare enemies of the regime.”
GOING TO CHINA AND ASKING PEOPLE ABOUT THE HACKER ETHIC IS LIKE going to Peoria and talking to the folks down at Ned’s Feed & Grain about Taoism. The hacking part comes to them easily enough—China is, in a sense, a nation of analog hackers quickly entering the digital realm. But I didn’t see any urge to draw profound, cosmic conclusions from the act of messing around with technology.
SHENZHEN HAS THE LOOK OF AN INFORMATION-AGE CITY, WHERE LOCATION IS basically irrelevant. Unlike, say, Shanghai (which is laid out the old-fashioned way, on an armature of heavy industry and transportation lines), Shenzhen seems to have grown up without any clear central plan, the office blocks and residential neighborhoods springing into being like crystals from a supersaturated solution. Think of the difference between Los Angeles and New York City, and you might get a general idea of what I mean. Streets tend to be straight, wide, and many-laned, with endless iron fences running down the middle so that pedestrians and bicyclists are forced, against all cultural norms, to cross only at major intersections. Shenzhen has more cars and fewer bicycles than most Chinese cities. This has shifted the balance of power somewhat; in, say, Shanghai, mobs of bicyclists play chicken with the cars and frequently win. But in Shenzhen they stand defeated on the curbs, waiting for the light to change. Occasionally some young scoundrel will dart out and try to claim a lane and be driven back by taxi drivers, scolding him with horns and shaking fingers.
Even on a humid day (which is to say, every day) the place is rather dusty, like a construction site where things haven’t been tamped down yet. Houses are rare, though there is one district that looks something like an American suburban housing development, albeit more tightly packed. But this one looks like it’s been abandoned and then recolonized by survivalists: Every house is surrounded by a high wall topped with something sharp, and if you peer between the iron bars of the gates, you can see that the windows and patio doors of the houses are additionally protected by iron bars and expanding metal security gates. Beyond that, everyone lives in high-rises.
On every block in central Shenzhen, clean new high-rises protrude from organic husks of bamboo scaffolding. Nissan flatbed trucks rumble away from the waterfront stacked with sheets of Indonesian mahogany plywood on its way to construction sites, where it will be used in concrete forms and then thrown away. The darkness is troubled by the report of nocturnal jackhammers, and all-night arc-welders hollow immense spheres of blue light out of the translucent, steamy atmosphere.
Only a quarter mile away from this scene of hysterical development, a green hillside rises, covered with an undisturbed mat of tropical vegetation and empty except for an ancient cemetery. It doesn’t make sense until you realize that you’re looking across the Shen Zhen into Hong Kong territory. Running parallel to the river is a border defense system meant to keep the mainland Chinese out. A chain of sodium-vapor lamps and a high fence topped with razor ribbon cuts across lakes and wetlands that have become wildlife refuges by default.
CORRUPTION IN CHINA IS NO SECRET, BUT THE WAY IT’S COVERED IN WESTERN media suggests that it’s just an epiphenomenon attached to the government. In fact, corruption is the government. It’s like jungle vines that have twined around a tree and strangled it—now the tree has rotted out and only the vines remain. Much of this stems from the way China is modernizing its economy.
If you thought zaibatsus were creepy, if Singapore’s brand of state-backed capitalism gives you the willies, wait until you see the Sino-foreign joint venture. The Russians, in their efforts to turn capitalist, have at least tried to break up some of the big state monopolies and privatize their enterprises—but since China is still Communist, there’s no reason for any of that nonsense. Instead, foreign companies form joint ventures with enterprises that are still part of the government—and, of course, everything is part of the government.
On every block you see an entrepreneur sitting at a sidewalk card table with one or two telephones, jury-rigged by wires strung down an alley, up the side of a building, and into a window. There is a phone book, a price chart, and a cigar box full of cash (in Shenzhen, always Hong Kong dollars). Some fastidious operators have a jar full of mysterious disinfectant with which they wipe down the mouthpiece and even the buttons after each customer is finished. Most of these enterprises also feature a queue of anywhere from one to half a dozen people. The proprietor will step in and cut long-winded customers off, especially if someone in the queue makes it worth his while.
All of the phone wiring is kludgey. It looks like everyone went down to Radio Shack and bought reels of phone wire and began stringing it around, across roofs, in windows, over alleyways. Hundreds of wires explode from junction boxes on the sides of apartments, exposed to the elements.
I was checking out some electronics shops along one of Shenzhen’s wide avenues. Above the shops were dimly lit office spaces housing small software companies or (more likely) software departments of Sino-foreign joint ventures. If there was a Chinese Silicon Valley, this was it. I wandered into an alley—the Silicon Alley, perhaps—and discovered a particularly gnarly looking cobweb of phone wires. My traveling companion Paul Lau, a Hong Kong–based photographer, started taking pictures of it. Within moments, a couple of attentive young Chinese men had charged up on bicycles and confronted him.
“Are you a reporter?” they demanded.
“No, I’m an artist,” Paul said, leaving them too stunned to make trouble. The lesson I learned from this is that a sophisticated Hong Kong Chinese knows how to use the sheer force of culture shock to keep his mainland cousins at bay. The Shenzhenese are pretty worldly by Chinese standards, but compared to the Hong Kong Chinese, who may be the most cosmopolitan people on earth, they are still yokels. This cultural disparity is about the only thing Hong Kong has going for it as 1997 approaches; but more about that later.
MOTOROLA RUNS ONE OF THE TWO CELLPHONE NETWORKS IN SHANGHAI. The local chief is a young American named Bill Newton, who came here a few years ago with two other people and worked around the clock at first—like new immigrants, he says, who’ve just come to America and have nothing to do but work. Now he’s managing 55 employees; he’s the only American. He thinks everyone should want his job: “To be in one of the fastest growing companies in one of the fastest growing sectors of the fastest growing economy in the world—how many times in your life is that going to happen?” In the context of Shanghai, “fast growing” means, for example, that cellular phone service is growing at 140 percent a year and pager use at 170 percent a year.
Motorola’s offices are in the international center west of downtown Shanghai—the modern, high-rise equivalent of the Western enclaves where capitalists used to do business in the old days. It’s got a Shangri-La luxury hotel, it’s got modern offices identical to those you’d see in any big American city, it’s got living quarters with purified water. Newton and I got in a taxi and took a long drive to the headquarters of the Shanghai Post and Telecommunications Administration (PTA)—Mao Bell, if you will.
Driving in Shanghai is like shouldering your way through the crowd at an overbooked trade convention. There’s never any space in front of your vehicle that is large enough to let you in, so you just ooze along with the traffic, occasionally claiming a few extra square yards of pavement when the chance presents itself. I’m hardly the first Westerner to point this out, but the density of bicycle and foot traffic is amazing. I’m tempted to write that the streets are choked with bicycles, but, of course, the opposite is true: All those bicycles are moving, and they’re all carrying stuff. If the same stuff was being moved on trucks, the way it is in, say, Manhattan, then the streets would be choked.
Everyone is carrying something of economic value. Eviscerated pigs slung belly-up over the rear tire; bouquets of scrawny, plucked chickens dangling from racks where they get bathed in splashed-up puddle water; car parts, mattresses, messages.
In network jargon, the Chinese are distributed. Instead of having One Big Enterprise, the way the Soviets did, or the way we do with our Wal-Marts, the Chinese have millions of little enterprises. Instead of moving stuff around in large hunks on trucks and trains, they move it around in tiny little hunks on bicycles. The former approach works great in say, the Midwestern U.S., where you’ve got thousands of miles of nearly empty interstate highways and railroad lines and huge chunks of rolling stock to carry stuff around. The latter approach works in a place like Shanghai.
The same problems of distribution arise in computer networks. As networks get bigger and as the machines that make them up become more equal, the whole approach to moving information around changes from centralized to distributed. The packet-switching system that makes things like the Internet work would be immediately familiar to the Chinese. Instead of requisitioning a hunk of optical fiber between Point A and Point B and slamming the data down it in one big shipment, the packet data network breaks the data down into tiny pieces and sends them out separately, just as a Chinese enterprise might break a large shipment down into small pieces and send each one out on a separate bicycle, knowing that each one might take a different route but that they’d all get there eventually.
Mao Bell is responsible, among other things, for setting up such data networks in China. The Shanghai headquarters is on the waterfront of the Huangpu River between the Shanghai stock exchange and a tall hotel used during the war by the Japanese as a high-rise concentration camp. A woman sits in the tiny lobby with her telephone and her jug of disinfectant, and allows you to call upstairs to announce yourself. A tiny, rickety elevator descends, hoists you up a few floors, and deposits you in a long corridor without artificial light. Some illumination enters through windows and glances down the shiny floor, but it’s the gloomy steel-gray light of a northern industrial city. You’d never know that Mao Bell takes in over US$7 billion a year and that revenues are growing by something like 60 percent a year.
A bit of a spelunking expedition through these corridors takes you into a classic communist-style meeting room, the kind of place Coleridge might have been thinking of when he wrote of “caverns measureless to man.” In this part of the world, the heavy hitters show up for meetings with large retinues of underlings, and all of them have to have a seat at the table, so the tables go on for miles. I established a foothold in a corner near the door and was met by Gao Kun, director of the import office of the Shanghai PTA, comfortable in a short-sleeved shirt. Gao, bless him, was the only government official who would talk to me the whole trip—the PRC was still pissed off at the Great Hegemon (as they now call the U.S.) about that incident in the Persian Gulf a few months back when our guys stopped and boarded a Chinese freighter allegedly full of chemical warfare ingredients. They found nothing.
Gao calmly rattled off a fairly staggering list of statistics on how rapidly the phone system there is growing—half to three-quarters of a million lines added per year for the foreseeable future. All of their local exchanges are webbed together with fiber, and they’re running fiber down the coast toward Shenzhen. They’re setting up packet-switching networks for their customers who want them—banks, import/export houses, and the like. The cellular and CT2 networks are also growing as rapidly as technology allows. He buys scads of high-bandwidth technology from the West and is actually trying to set up a sort of clearinghouse near Shanghai where Western manufacturers could gain access to the potentially stupendous Chinese market through a single point, instead of having to traffic separately with each regional PTA.
Gao is baffled by the fact that the U.S. makes all the most advanced technology, but our government won’t allow him to buy it. He asked me to explain that fact. I didn’t suppose that haranguing him about human rights would get me anywhere, so I mumbled some kind of rambling shit about politics.
He explained to me, through his interpreter, that the slogan of Shanghai PTA is “destroy the users on the waiting list.” Indeed, it’s the job of people like Gao to extend the net into every cranny of the society, making sure everyone gets wired. When nobody had phones, he says, nobody really missed them; the very few people who had them in their homes viewed them primarily as a symbol of status and power. Now, 61 percent of his customers are residential, everyone views it as a basic necessity of life, and Gao’s company has to provide them with more services, like direct dial, pagers, and so on. Cellphones, he said, are so expensive that they’re only used by businessmen and high-ranking officials. But the officials are uneasy with the whole concept because they have to answer the phone themselves, which is seen as a menial chore. I told him that in Hong Kong, businessmen walk down the streets followed at a respectful distance by walking receptionists who carry the phones for them. Gao thought that was pretty funny.
In one Chinese city, a woman spends all day running a sidewalk stand and keeping one eye on a construction project across the street. The construction project is backed by a couple of people who were running a software counterfeiting operation to the tune of some tens of millions of dollars until they got busted by Microsoft. They hid their money and have been sinking it into the real estate project. Microsoft is paying the woman a lot of money (by the standards of a Chinese sidewalk vendor) to watch the site and keep track of who comes and goes. She has a camera in her stand, and if the software pirates ever show up there and she takes a picture of them, she gets a whopping bonus, plus a free trip to the United States to testify.
Microsoft runs an office in Hong Kong that is devoted to the miserable task of trying to stop software piracy in Asia. In addition to running their undercover operation in the sidewalk stand, they are targeting a number of operations in other countries, which probably provides a foretaste of what’s going to happen in mainland China a few years down the road.
Most East Asian countries have sort of a stolen intellectual property shopping mall where people sit all day in front of cheap computers swapping disks, copying the software while you wait—the vaunted just-in-time delivery system. After a few of these got busted, many switched to a networked approach. One guy in Taiwan is selling a set of 7 CD-ROMs containing hundreds of pirated programs. He has no known name or address, just a pager.
Taiwan, the most technologically advanced part of Greater China, makes a lot of PCs, all of which need system software, so there the name of the game is counterfeiting, not pirating. MS-DOS and Windows are, naturally, the main targets. Microsoft tried to make the counterfeiters’ job harder by sealing their packages with holograms, but that didn’t stop the Taiwanese—they made a deal with the Reflective Materials Institute at, you guessed it, Shenzhen University, which cranked out hundreds of thousands of counterfeit holograms for them.
It often seems that, from the point of view of many entrepreneurial souls in East Asia, the West’s tight-assed legal system and penchant for ethical dithering have left many inviting niches to fill. Perhaps this explains their compulsion to enter such perfectly sensible fields as driftnet fishing, making medicines from body parts of nearly extinct species, creative toxic waste disposal, and, above all, the wholesale, organized theft of intellectual property. It’s not just software, either—Indonesia has bootleg publishers who crank out counterfeit bestsellers, and even Hong Kong’s Saturday morning TV clown wears a purloined Ronald McDonald outfit.
This has a lot to do with the collective Chinese approach to technology. The Chinese were born to hack. A billion of them jammed together have created the world’s most efficient system for honing and assimilating new tech (they actually view Americans as being somewhat backward and slow to accept new ideas—the Chinese are considered, as Bill Newton put it, “not so much early adopters as rapid adopters”). As soon as someone comes up with a new idea, all the neighbors know about it, and through an exponential process that you don’t have to be a math major to understand, a billion people know about it a week later. They start tinkering with it, applying it to slightly different problems, trying to eke out hair-thin improvements, and the improvements propagate across the country until everyone’s doing things the same way—which also happens to be the simplest and most efficient way. The infrastructure of day-to-day life in China consists of a few simple, cheap, robust technologies that don’t belong to anyone: the wok, the bicycle, various structures made from bamboo and lashed together with strips of rattan, and now the 286 box. A piece of Chinese technology, whether it’s a cooking knife or a roofing tile, has the awesomely simple functionality of a piece of hand-coded machine language.
Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia. The Chinese don’t draw any mystical distinctions between analog and digital tech; whatever works, works, and so they’re happy to absorb things like pagers, cellphones, and computers if they find that such things are useful. I don’t think you find a lot of Chinese expressing hostility toward computers or cellphones in the same way that technophobic Americans do. So they have not hesitated to enshrine the pager, the cellphone, and the 286 box in their pantheon of simple, ubiquitous technology, along with the wok, the bicycle, and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
While avoiding technophobia, they’ve also avoided techno-fetishism for the most part. They don’t name their computers “Frodo,” and they generally don’t use them to play games, or for anything more than keeping the accounts, running payroll, and processing a bit of text. In China, they treat computers like they treat dogs: handy for a few things, worth having around, but not worth getting overly attached to.
Shanghai’s computer stores were all completely different. One place had a pathetic assortment of yellowed stuff from the Apple II Dynasty. Another specialized in circuit boards, catering to do-it-yourselfers. There were several of what we’d call box movers: stores crowded with stacks of brand-new 486 boxes and monitors. And I found one place hidden way off the street in a giant old Western-style house, which I thought was closed at first because all the lights were off and no one seemed to be there. But then people began to emerge from the shadows one by one and turn on lights, one fixture at a time, slowly powering up the building, shedding light on an amazing panoply of used computers and peripherals spanning the entire history of the industry. In more ways than one, the place was like a museum.
I GOT AROUND SHANGHAI IN A NONDESCRIPT WHITE FORD. BECAUSE OF ITS high fuel consumption, the driver called it the “Oil Tiger.” Whenever it ran low, he was compelled by certain murkily described safety regulations to leave me a block away from the fuel pumps while he filled it up, which imparted an air of drama to the procedure.
One day, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I stumbled across a brand-new computer store with several large floral arrangements set up in front. A brass plaque identified it, imposingly enough, as the Shanghai Fanxin Computer System Application Technology Research Institute. Walking in, I saw the usual rack full of badly printed manuals for pirated software and a cardboard box brimming with long red skeins of firecrackers. The place was otherwise indistinguishable from any cut-rate consumer electronics outlet in the States, with the usual exception that it was smaller and more tightly packed together. There were a couple of dozen people there, but they weren’t acting like salespeople and customers; they were milling around talking.
It turned out that they had just opened their doors something like an hour before I arrived. I had accidentally crashed their opening-day party. Everyone stood around amazed by their good fortune: a writer for an American technology magazine showing up for their grand opening!
Dai Qing, the director, a young blade in an oversized suit, beckoned me into the back room, where we could sit around a conference table and watch the front through a large window. He bade a couple of females to scurry out for slices of cantaloupe and mugs of heavily sweetened coffee, and gave me the scoop on his company. There are 21 employees, 16 of whom are coders. It’s a pure entrepreneurial venture—a bunch of people pooled their capital and started it rolling some three years ago. The engineers mostly worked in state enterprises or as teachers where they couldn’t really use their skills; now they’ve developed, among other things, an implementation of the Li Xing accounting system, which is a standard developed in Shanghai and used throughout China.
The engineers make some 400 yuan per month, which works out to something like $600 a year at the black market exchange rate. This is a terrible salary—most people in Shanghai can rely on making four times that much. But here, the coders also get 5 percent of the profits from their software.
You can’t pick out the coders by looking at them the way you can in the States. The gender ratio among coders is probably similar. Everyone is trim and nicely but uninterestingly dressed. No extremes of weight, facial hair, piercings, earrings, ponytails, wacky T-shirts, and certainly no flagrantly individualistic behavior. In other words, there’s no evidence that being good at computers has caused these people to think of themselves as having a separate identity from other Chinese in the same wage bracket.
By the time I’d gotten out the door, the software engineers had already rolled a couple of dozen strings of firecrackers across the sidewalk. As soon as I jumped out of the way, they started lighting the fuses with their cigarettes (another habit not common among U.S. hackers), and everything went off in a massively parallel barrage, covering the sidewalk in dense smoke and kicking up a blizzard of shredded red paper. Several more coders came out carrying mortars and began launching bombs into the air, holding the things right in front of their faces as they disgorged fireballs with satisfying thuds. The strings of fireworks kept blowing themselves out, so as I backed slowly toward the Oil Tiger I was treated to the sight of excited Chinese software engineers lunging into the firestorm holding their cigarettes out like fencing foils, trying to reboot the strings without sacrificing eyes, fingers, or eardrums.
BACK IN SHENZHEN, WHEN I’D HAD ABOUT ALL I COULD TAKE OF THE SPECIAL Economic Zone, I walked over a bridge across the Shen Zhen and found myself back in the British Empire again, filling out forms in a clean well-lit room with the Union Jack flying overhead. A twenty-minute trip in one of Hong Kong’s quiet, fast commuter trains took me through the New Territories, mostly open green land with the occasional grove of palm trees or burst of high-rise development, and into Kowloon, where I hopped into a taxi.
On the approach to the tunnel between Kowloon and Hong Kong, stuck in traffic beneath a huge electronic billboard showing animated stock market graphs in white, emerald, and ruby, I gazed into the next lane at a brand-new gray BMW 733i, smooth and polished as a drop of molten glass. Behind the wheel was a Chinese man, affluently fleshy. He’d taken off his suit jacket to expose a striped shirt, French cuffs, the cuff links flashing around the rim of the steering wheel. In the passenger seat to his left sat a beautiful young woman who had flipped her sunvisor down, centering her face in a pool of light from the vanity mirror; as she discussed the day’s events with the man, she deftly touched up her Shiseido—not that I would have guessed she was wearing any, and not that she seemed especially vain or preoccupied. The BMW kept pace with my taxi through the tunnel and then the lanes diverged. I couldn’t help wondering what the hell was going to happen to this place when it becomes part of the People’s Republic in 1997. Needless to say, a lot of Hong Kong residents are wondering the same thing.
People who think that America has a monopoly on gratuitous TV violence have never watched what the Hong Kong stations radiate across the Pearl Delta every night between 7 and 10. Their fake blood technology is decades behind ours, but that doesn’t seem to bother this audience. The carnage is, of course, frequently interrupted by ads, which also appeal to folks who are fairly new to the idiot box. In my favorite TV ad, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” was played as front-end loaders fed boulders into a giant crusher and whole segments of mountainside were blasted into rubble. And the Mitsubishi ads looked like what you’d get if you hired Leni Riefenstahl to plug consumer electronics.
THE NETWORK IS SPREADING ACROSS CHINA, GETTING DENSER AND MORE SOphisticated with every kilometer of fiber that goes into the ground. We’d like to think of it as the grass roots of democracy, but the Chinese are just as apt to think of it as a finely engineered snare for tying the whole country together even more firmly than its predecessor, the human Net of the Red Guards. Looking at all the little enterprises that have sprung up in Shenzhen to write software and entertain visiting spacemen, it’s easy to think that it’s all the beginning of something permanent. But a longer historical perspective suggests that it’s only a matter of time before the northerners come pouring down through the mountain passes to whip their troublesome southern cousins back into line.