I went to China expecting to see that process in action. Ilooked everywhere for hardy electronic frontierfolk, using their modems and fax machines to push the Communists back into their holes, and I asked dang near everyone I met about how communications technology was changing Chinese culture.

None of them knew what the fuck I was talking about.

I was carrying an issue of WIRED so that I wouldn't have to explain it to everyone. It happened to be the issue with Bill Gibson on the cover. In one corner were three characters in Hanzi (the script of the Han Chinese). Before I'd left the States, I'd heard that they formed the Chinese word for "network."

Whenever I showed the magazine to a Chinese person they were baffled. "It means network, doesn't it?" I said, thinking all the warm and fuzzy thoughts that we think about networks.

"Yes," they said, "this is the term used by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for the network of spies and informers that they spread across every village and neighborhood to snare enemies of the regime."

See what I mean? Same idea, different implementation.

Our concept of cyberspace, cyber-culture, and cyber-everything is, more than we care to realize, a European idea, rooted in Deuteronomy, Socrates, Galileo, Jefferson, Edison, Jobs, Wozniak, glasnost, perestroika, and the United Federation of Planets. This statement may be read as criticism by people who like to trash Western culture, but I'm not one of those. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier.

You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

CNN has been running ads for an American company that had been doing business in China - one of those nauseatingly self-congratulatory numbers we saw so much of after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The ad shows us exotic temples, mist-shrouded mountains, twangy music, adorable children. It's so effective that whenever I see it I have to get out my Tiananmen picture book and take a look at the picture of the Chinese pro-democracy student lying in a fetal position, his brains sprayed across the pavement by a tank that ran over his head.