There is a common Western assumption that China is taking an economic path to a more open society, and in large part it's based on the cultural biases of people who remember Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven's 9th at the Brandenburg Gate and who reckon that the same thing must be going on in China.

These people like to say that China's trying to emulate South Korea or Singapore. But I'd say Haiti or Guatemala is more like it.

This article is the result of a two-week trip to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Shanghai during September '93, during which I tried to get some sense of how the Chinese perceived the influence of technology - particularly digital technology - on their culture.

The answer is that this issue hasn't occurred to the Chinese yet, and probably never will, because it basically stems from a Western, post-Enlightenment perspective. Going to China and asking people about the Hacker Ethic is like going to Peoria and talking to the folks down at Ned's Feed & Grain about Taoism.

The hacking part comes to them easily enough - China is, in a sense, a nation of analog hackers quickly entering the digital realm. But I didn't see any urge to draw profound, cosmic conclusions from the act of messing around with technology.

Shenzhen has the look of an information-age city, where location is basically irrelevant. Unlike, say, Shanghai (which is laid out the old-fashioned way, on an armature of heavy industry and transportation lines), Shenzhen seems to have grown up without any clear central plan, the office blocks and residential neighborhoods springing into being like crystals from a supersaturated solution.