publishing companies or chains of bookstores. I’m just wondering if multinational executives have thought this through. There are some strange players in the Chinese communist economy. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army is a major investor. Consider putting PLA officers into positions of corporate responsibility. “Sir, the merger strategy is a minefield, sir. Literally, sir.” And now I’ve offended the People’s Liberation Army. There go my 1.2 billion hardcover sales. I don’t want to disparage private enterprise. The world has political, religious, and intellectual leaders for that. But when a totalitarian government gets cozy with large financial and manufacturing concerns, it rings a twentieth-century historical bell. I’m thinking how a certain “people’s car”— ein Volkswagen —got its start. I’m thinking, “Made the trains run on time.” I’m thinking, “Greater Asian Coprosperity Sphere.” There’s a technical name for this political ideology. Shanghai, on first impression, seems fine—that is, it seems to be in the dire, hideous, and enjoyable state of confusion that market freedoms always produce. I can’t even tell you what Shanghai looks like, because, look again, and it looks different. Other cities have construction sites; Shanghai is one—a 220-square- kilometer cellar hole where the full business of urban existence is scrambled with the building trades. Tan yourself during lunch hour in the arc-welding glare. What fortieth-story I-beam girder do I inch down to get to McDonald’s? Don’t call a cab; flag a crane and get hoisted back into your office window. Everything in Shanghai seems to be going up or coming down. Maybe at the same time. Maybe, between customers, store clerks tear bricks off the shop’s back wall while the saleswomen run up front to lay cinder blocks. On my first morning in town, I saw a whole platoon of the People’s Liberation Army going down a manhole with plumbing tools. Which is a good place to put communist military, as far as I’m concerned. But it’s beyond telling if all the activity in Shanghai makes as much sense as that did. THIS SITE WILL DEVELOP A SUPER HIGH BUILDING , read a sign on a narrow side- street lot. Buildings were being built everywhere—on top of other buildings, smack in the middle of the street, and smack under it, too. People’s Square, Shanghai’s Tiananmen equivalent, the place for mass rallies and such, was torn up so that a multilevel shopping center could be installed below it. That way, if any more of those 1989-style democracy protests happen in Shanghai, the kids
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