If you look a decade or two down the road, it's possible to imagine a future in which non-Westernized Chinese finally have the opportunity to use computers for the highest and best purpose we have ever found for them: goofing off. This is terribly important, because goofing off with computers leads tohackers, which leads to the hacker mentality, which takes us to other interesting places.

Whether the Chinese are interested in goofing off is another story. I saw a lot of computers in China, but I didn't see a single computer game. The idea of sitting by yourself in front of a machine doesn't seem to do much for them; it does not gibe with their concept of having fun. It's not a culture that encourages idiosyncratic loners.

There are plenty of historical examples to back up the proposition that we won't see any Hacker Ethic in China. The country has a long history of coming up with technologies before anyone else and then not doing a lot with them; a culture 5,000 years old prefers to bend new technologies to its own ways.

I got around Shanghai in a nondescript white Ford. Because of its high fuel consumption, the driver called it the "Oil Tiger."

Whenever it ran low, he was compelled by certain murkily described safety regulations to leave me a block away from the fuel pumps while he filled it up, which imparted an air of drama to the procedure.

One day, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I stumbled across a brand-new computer store with several large floral arrangements set up in front. A brass plaque identified it, imposingly enough, as the Shanghai Fanxin Computer System