> I would like to hear your impression of 1998 China that strikes you as having
> familarities to 1859 France.
Both are industrializing countries in the process of turning vast numbers of indigenous peasants, who are still the majority of the population, into urbanized citizen-consumers. 19th century France lagged way behind the US and UK in terms of urbanization and industrialization; as late as 1965 about 25% of all French citizens still worked in the agricultural sector. Baudelaire's France was thus an unruly composite of metropolitan-capitalist and archaic-feudal registers, an explosive mixture which gave rise to some ferocious social conflicts, as well as wondrous aesthetics (Flaubert, the Impressionists, etc.). Chinese culture today is experiencing something similar, what with the Hong Kong films, the Taiwanese export economy and the Chinese mainland traditions all converging into an amorphous, dizzying mediascape.
-- Dennis