At present I'm in Beijing. My first time in China.
Rumor has it that China will become the next superpower, but freedom is running far behind its economical power.
One could argue that the free market limits freedom as well, but the power coming out of the wallet of a customer is so much more lovable than the power coming out of gun.
To my surprise, much more foreign fiction and non-fiction is available in China than I suspected: from Stendhal to Balzac, from Husserl to Hemingway. Even Nabokov's Lolita and Salinger, they are all there in Chinese. Although the anti-pornography laws in China are rather strict, fifty years after publication, apparently even Chinese law becomes flexible.
I asked a young Chinese artist, living in the artist's colony Factory 789, "Who's your enemy now that the state faded away from this role?"
He said, 'I became my own enemy.' It is easy to forget with all the hype on t.v. and in the newspapers, but we in the free world live without an enemy outside ourselves these days, as well.