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 US, 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 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.