After crossing the Mongolian border into China, the tilled fields and villages of China make it clear that there is no longer room for wild and free nomads. The felt tents and horsemen in traditional garb in the Chinese part of Mongolia serve only as backdrops for tourists and as evidence of how much China respects the lifestyles and cultures of its ethnic minorities.

The first Chinese city I come to expresses what is this people’s number one priority: trade. Finally Chinese business acumen, repressed for too long, is once again coming to the fore. At Erkenhut, every building is an office or shop, covered in neon signs and advertising posters. Rather than in apartments, the businessmen live in the shops, where they eat and sleep, and whereas in Mongolia the scarce public transport runs along barely perceptible tracks in the plains, here a German coach with sleeping berths and air conditioning carries me comfortably towards the “northern capital,” Beijing. It can’t be said that Beijing is not a beautiful city, beautiful in the sense of new and clean. I don’t know how it was before
Communist progress swept away ancient monuments and palaces to make room for six-lane avenues; or how it will be after capitalist speculation will have eliminated the last alleyways and low houses of the people’s neighborhoods to replace them with twenty-story shopping malls and banks with a pagoda on top. People look to the future by removing the past, in Beijing just as in Chicago. Some streets in the old district - which, with its silk and herb shops, teahouses, dry-goods stores and other shops, maintains a Medieval ambience - are so narrow that the carts of itinerant salesmen have to go inside when a car comes along. In these alleyways, in the courtyards of the siheyuan, the traditional Chinese houses, people play cards in their typical silk pajamas and sleep on beds without mattresses. Near the entrances, stone statues of dragons keep away the evil spirits, and crickets sing in their tiny cages as they’ve done for thousands of years.
Farther along, under the skyscrapers of the Pacific Century Place, other Chinese crowd into the Internet cafŽs on Wangfujing, the main commercial street. Once the Baihuo Dalou stood here, the grand pavilion of the hundred articles, the only temple to consumerism during Mao’s day when the articles on sale were called “necessities.” Now the crowds fill the shopping malls, while listening to the same canned music people listen to in Western shopping malls. It’s useless to speak of the past, which is more past here than elsewhere. But it is interesting to observe how a consumer society gets off the ground, starting from zero: the Chinese will not invent new products but will consume ours, made in China, since by signing joint-venture contracts with leading companies in the various sectors they can make more money and satisfy more demands more quickly.
The cars are the makes we know, and the toothpaste isn’t an exotic mix of Chinese herbs but the usual multinational products. The Chinese call Mao Zedong “the great helmsman,” Deng Xiaping “the great architect, and Jiang Zemin “the great automatic pilot,” required to steer the preset course. And so China moves ahead on automatic pilot, which is leading to consumer happiness. Globalization is managing to unite us all: Communist consumerism there, democratic consumerism here, with power in the hands of a few, in China as with us. In common with Americans, the Chinese also exalt patriotism, militarism and mercantilism. They wear brand-name shoes, brand-name T-shirts, brand-name watches, drink brand-name beverages, eat brand-name ice cream, hamburgers, and chicken, and they love credit cards, or rather debit cards, since the banks have already begun introducing debit cards, the shopping (and indebtedness) system of the future. Even the TV seems American: the commercials for a state-owned company that produces buses look like the advertising for a luxury car. In addition there are soap operas, talk shows, and sitcoms with the same level - low - as ours, but with the difference that some channels belong to the armed forces. So it’s possible to see a chorus of officers singing a march in falsetto, or tiny soldier girls dancing in front of fake sunsets with fake tears in their eyes. The train connecting Nanjing, the “southern capital (nan means south and bei means north), to Shanghai is ultra-modern and covers the distance in less than three hours. I’m seated between businessmen and government officials who sip green tea and communicate via cell phone. The service on board is impeccable: young women with plain, uniform carts serve tea, snacks and newspapers. I discover that not everyone is happy with the Chinese Road to Consumerism, when a Mr. Zhui introduces himself to me; he’s a university professor by profession: “I earn 100 dollars a month and can’t manage to buy anything. China’s development is slowed down by the incompetent policies of party functionaries,” he says. “Once it was the state that decided where you lived, studied and worked, and it was the work units that saw to health car, housing, school and other benefits. Now they’re taking away the services, but they’re not even setting up a free market economy.” The state is trying to keep the gap between haves and havenots from widening by employing millions of the unemployed and other workers in gigantic construction projects: buildings, dams, highways. To eliminate some residual resistance, Jiang Zemin has removed the military from politics and the economy, purged the national parliament of nostalgics, and intimidated the regional governments into submission. He’s playing slip-sink with the left and allowing liberal economic reforms to continue. And while the unemployed masses find themselves with the rice bowl half empty and could become a future source of unrest, people with money spend in order to assure themselves of what the state no longer provides: a high-quality education, skilled medical services, an apartment. China looks like Europe during the boom times of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, and in a few years it has changed so rapidly that the Western collective imagination has not yet got used to the fact that the ants in blue suits are now extinct.
Egalitarianism is definitely outmoded in Shanghai, the city that symbolizes the dragon’s rise in power. The spectacular skyline of the Pudong district makes even the skyscrapers of Manhattan pale by comparison, and walking along the panoramic Bund one gets the impression of being on the sets of two different films at once: on the one hand it’s Gotham City from Batman, on the other the metropolis from Blade Runner. Imposing Neo-Classical buildings across from the stunning fa?ade of the economic world of tomorrow. I opt for Gotham, where I order a plate of Chinese noodles sauted with vegetables and bits of pork, in one of the many elegant restaurants. It’s the right place for watching the Chinese of tomorrow, so similar to us, who offer their children everything life has to offer that they couldn’t have: private dance lessons, computer games, designer kids’ clothes, and happy meals. And if modern life becomes too stressful, they seek help from psychotherapists who know how to make the right diagnosis: OCB, obsessive compulsive behavior. A sign of our times.