official banquets—the Chinese version of Thanksgiving dinner twice a day. And we should be grateful that Columbus really didn’t find the Orient, or our Pilgrim forefathers would have dined on chicken feet, pig’s face, black “preserved” duck eggs, and many less identifiable entrées. (One thing you learn in China is: Never ask, “What’s cooking?”) My reaction to academia hadn’t changed in twenty-eight years. I ditched. I spent my time hiking the imbroglio of Shanghai through the First Bank of Mars architecture and the Third Supermall from the Sun shopping, pushing between construction workers in their rattan hard hats (an idea for U.S. real-estate developers who want an earth-friendly look), and weaving my way among the backstreet food vendors (don’t look into a bucket of live eels right after breakfast). Retailing in Shanghai is a matter of either megastores or coolie baskets. And industry is either corporations so large that they rate a seat on the UN Security Council, or bike shops with sales-and-service facilities on the sidewalk. There are no middle-sized businesses in Shanghai, no middle-priced goods, and being middle class seems to be actively discouraged. Take, for example, that defining bourgeois act, buying a car. In China you have to get approval to buy it from the government’s Business Administration Department, buy it, present the receipt to the revenue authorities, pay a 10 percent sales tax, and, if the car’s imported, pay Customs duty of as much as 150 percent of the car’s value. (China favors free trade—for other countries.) There’s an inspection where they don’t just inspect but tell you to install fire extinguishers and so forth. You need a parking permit from the traffic bureau, liability insurance at $1,000 per year, a temporary car-registration license, and a receipt for your road-maintenance fees. Then you take a photograph of your car displaying all its documentation, and present it to the Car Administration Department, which will—if it feels like it—grant you a permanent car registration after you pay to have your license number recorded. This explains why none of those VWs in the Shanghai traffic jams is a private vehicle. They’re all government-owned taxis. The Chinese economy has grown. According to the World Bank, “China’s GDP per capita has grown at a remarkable 8.2 percent a year since economic reforms started in 1978.” But what, exactly, is growing? One of the professors from the
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