Their fake blood technology is decades behind ours, but that doesn't seem to bother this audience. The carnage is, ofcourse, frequently interrupted by ads, which also appeal to folks who are fairly new to the idiot box. In my favorite TV ad,

Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" was played as front-end loaders fed boulders into a giant crusher and whole segments of mountainside were blasted into rubble. And the Mitsubishi ads looked like what you'd get if you hired Leni Riefenstahl to plug consumer electronics.

It works. The parvenus in Shenzhen watch ultraviolent flicks in their rooms at the Shangri-La with the sound turned all the way up, whooping helplessly with laughter, like the Beverly Hillbillies passing a jug of moonshine during a 24-hour Beavis and

Butt-head marathon. And in the devastated landscape between Shenzhen and Guangzhou - beyond the Second Border - countless bulldozer operators spend their days clawing maniacally at the verdant hillsides, their cockpits lined with posters of their favorite Hong Kong starlets, and the horizon is prickly with television antennas.

Some unimaginative sorts have described this as cultural imperialism. When millions of Chinese spend their scant yuan on putting antennas up to pull in snowy programs from Hong Kong, that's us nasty Westerners being imperialistic, you see.

It's not imperialism. It's what happens when a culture with a sophisticated immune system comes into contact, as it inevitably will, with a culture without one. The Chinese have a completely different relationship to the world of ideas than

Westerners do - it seems that they either take an utterly pragmatic approach, paying no attention to abstract ideals at all, or else they go nuts with it, the way they did in the Taiping

Rebellion (when Chinese Christians went out of control in the 19th Century and sparked a very nasty civil war) and again during the Cultural Revolution (and let's remember that