China is still Communist, there's no reason for any of that nonsense. Instead, foreign companies form joint ventures with enterprises that are still part of the government - and, of course, everything is part of the government.

On every block you see an entrepreneur sitting at a sidewalk card table with one or two telephones, jury-rigged by wires strung down an alley, up the side of a building, and into a window. There is a phone book, a price chart, and a cigar box full of cash (in Shenzhen, always Hong Kong dollars). Some fastidious operators have a jar full of mysterious disinfectant with which they wipe down the mouthpiece and even the buttons after each customer is finished. Most of these enterprises also feature a queue of anywhere from one to half a dozen people. The proprietor will step in and cut long-winded customers off, especially if someone in the queue makes it worth his while.

All of the phone wiring is kludgey. It looks like everyone went down to Radio Shack and bought reels of phone wire and began stringing it around, across roofs, in windows, over alleyways.

Hundreds of wires explode from junction boxes on the sides of apartments, exposed to the elements.

I was checking out some electronics shops along one of

Shenzhen's wide avenues. Above the shops were dimly lit office spaces housing small software companies or (more likely)

software departments of Sino-foreign joint ventures. If there was a Chinese silicon valley, this was it. I wandered into analley - the Silicon Alley, perhaps - and discovered a particularly gnarly looking cobweb of phone wires. Paul Lau started taking pictures of it. Within moments, a couple of attentive young

Chinese men had charged up on bicycles and confronted him.

"Are you a reporter?" they demanded.