Cheung doesn't see electronic media exposing a lot of people in China to new ideas. He points out that political change in China tends to come from the bottom up, when the masses go voluntarily and spontaneously into the streets, all echoing and sharing one another's feelings. For reasons already discussed, it's going to be a long time before the Net reaches the Chinese masses. So Cheung doesn't think that electronic communications will cause any political changes in China except insofar as the free flow of information tends, over a long period, to make the economy more productive and lead to the development of a middle class.

The fact is that the Net can only reach people who have imbibed a lot of Western culture already - you can't even enter text unless you know the Roman alphabet. As far as the masses are concerned, the Net might as well not exist - the only important source of Western memes is television. In a sense, this is terrible news, because we all know what bilge television is. At the same time, the peculiar power of Western culture to colonize unlikely places may be the only thing Hong Kong has going for it.

So let's think about the second possibility, which is that Hong

Kong, far from being obliterated, will become the informational capital of mainland China - in other words, that the power of media will overcome, or at least balance, the tanks and guns dispatched from Beijing.

People who think that America has a monopoly on gratuitous TV violence have never watched what the Hong Kong stations radiate across the Pearl Delta every night between 7 and 10.