Turns out I can access Typepad in China.  Here I am, sitting in the business center of the Grand Hotel in Beijing, typing away at the blog.  I know that some of what I have written over the past year has been blocked here, but, obviously, the censorship is not comprehensive.

     As I may have mentioned earlier, I have not been back to Beijing in many years.  I do not want to simply repeat the oft told tale of "wow, has Beijing changed in the past decade!" but my overwhelming impression is "wow, has Beijing changed in the past decade!"  Maureen, my wife, immediately noticed the color and style of the clothing.  The old drab Maoist blues and greens are almost completely gone.  The block upon block upon block of new buildings is mind-boggling.  It is very clear to me that, with all of the bars and nightclubs and stores and diversions, economic reform is starting to pay off politically for the regime.  In the major cities at least (I know life is quite different in smaller towns and the countryside) it is easy to see how young people would give up on more direct political engagement: there are so many other things to do, so much competition for the good-paying jobs, so much sense of economic opportunity (even if large portions of the population are not benefiting from the prosperity) to take one’s mind off of the fact that political participation is so strictly limited.

     I saw a former student last night, who is now working in the US Embassy on trade issues, and she had a good insight: the diversionary aspect of economic growth, the ways in which it can draw people away from politics, is likely to last until 2010, the year of the World Expo in Shanghai.  When that is done, and the Olympics is fading into the past, perhaps then, people will turn back to politics.  They will be finished putting on the happy face for the world, they will realize that all the glitter and promise of the growing economy is really not enough, and they will regain their political voices. 

     But I’m not completely convinced by this argument.  Perhaps the CCP has revised (yet again) Marxism: economic growth and the promise, even is unfulfilled for many, of a better material life, is the new opiate of the Chinese masses.