ShaoXing

At first, the experience was "awkward, my face and ears turned red and my heart skipped a beat", Liu Xiaozhen, a 70-year-old member of the investigative team, said as he recalled his first day on the job. Liu is a member of the Hunan provincial "eliminate pornography and illegal publications" office. Such departments exist throughout the mainland, and because of their indecorous duties, officials usually keep quiet about their work. Liu is a long-time professional. In 2008, he received a national award of excellence for writing an essay about his profession. He and three colleagues have the task of looking through the 700 DVDs confiscated in April. They have to do it within a week and then classify them as either "pornographic", "obscene" and "others", he said. The distinction will help the public prosecution on what charges to press against those arrested in the bust. "You have to watch even if you don't want to watch," Liu said in the report. "But when you're in this job, you have to watch very closely, and once you've watched, you classify." He could not be reached in his office for comment on Monday.

Everyone knows that, compared with when Bakhtin and Benjamin were still alive, the current circumstances of Chinese society are more complicated. This complexity is more than my novelist colleagues in the west can imagine. We can say wholeheartedly that whatever crime and punishment Bakhtin saw in Dostoyevsky's novels is ubiquitous in China, while at the same time the influence of mass media now wholly permeates people's lives. Chinese people who live in the remote countryside receive information from the media practically at the same time as those living in Beijing, London or New York. Censorship in publishing and the media has, by and large, no effect on the reception of information. Chinese society has become a combination of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies; it's just like a sandwich.

But it is also true that the United States allowed China to rise because it was so supremely self-confident that it would always remain on top. China's benign rise was a result of American neglect, not a result of any long-term strategy. China acted strategically; America did not. After the 9/11 attacks, for instance, the United States focused on the Middle East instead of the rise of China, leading Hong Kong journalist Frank Ching to write, "The fact is, it's not going too far to say that China owes a huge debt of gratitude to Osama bin Laden."

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