My previous experience of China was an unrepresentative month in the mountains along its border with Pakistan 10 years ago. I returned recently for another month, criss-crossing the country, and carrying out scores of interviews with all kinds of people. The combination of the Olympics and the aftermath of the earthquake may have meant that I was there at an unrepresentative time, and such a short visit to such a vast country - the language of which you cannot even read - is only enough to teach you what you have yet to learn. That said, here are some initial thoughts.
1. China is not half way to being a developed economy and country, but it is a few decades away from being a poor one. This is not just a semantic difference. Yes, the Shanghai skyline is impressive but it obscures not just fairly well-reported deep poverty - there are still millions of people who do not eat meat regularly - but a broader level of development that is still very rough round the edges. A small but telling detail: urban cartography is still in its infancy.
2. China is not communist - except for the political system. This may seem a bizarre statement but the apparatus of a one-party repressive state sits uneasily on a mass of go-getting, neo-liberal materialist individualism. "My philosophy is that a man's worth is his wealth," one hotelier in the Shaanxi town of Yan'an told me. Such values appear far from rare. And in terms of social security, subsidies and collective efforts, many western European countries seem positively socialist in comparison.
3. In China there is a general confidence in the future that does not exist in Europe or the USA. Hundreds of millions of people are convinced that life is better for them than for their parents and will be better still for their children. This confidence underpins their very lucid view of the Chinese position in the world - as one of the globe's paramount nations/civilisations that has lost ground over a couple of centuries for a variety of internal and external factors and is now back on the road to regaining its rightful place as a superpower.
4. Democracy is unlikely to break out soon. The focus of western media on political dissidents disguises their minority status within China. "Democracy" is often seen as "foreign" or "un-Chinese". The bottom line, as one Beijing intellectual said ruefully is "why change a winning team". Frustration and anger is directed at low-level officials - particularly those who are corrupt or incompetent - but not the system as a whole. "If there was an election tomorrow, the party would probably win," the intellectual commented.
5. This could change if economic growth is derailed by economic disaster, a lack of resources (including water) and/or some kind of radical external shock. However, in the next couple of decades, it would seem hard to foresee any major threat to the hegemony of the Communist party of China.
6. That said, the extraordinary disparity in incomes may become a serious threat to stability. When you have shop assistants who sell fairly banal shoes that cost their entire month's salary to local white-collar workers - to say nothing of the expensive sports cars parked in front of the vegetable sellers stores or the migrant labourers working on the new luxury brand shops - a massive forward economic momentum is necessary to keep the social balance. If growth slows, then - as with one of the bicycles overloaded with produce that one sees in provincial towns - a spill could become inevitable.
7. Despite the confidence and the nationalist rhetoric, there is also profound uncertainty. The shrill reaction to any external criticism, and the tendency to sulk or to bully seem evidence of some significant self-doubt. In social terms, many people have grown up in a society that has changed so radically that the example and the values of their parents are simply no longer relevant. The best-selling authors for China's "Generation Z" are often very young and their subject matter very dark. This lack of norms makes for enormous openness and vigour and energy but also a tendency to the extremes: of hedonism, of materialism, of nationalism.
8. You are free to say more or less what you want in a private individual capacity - though few would risk going too far - but to communicate your views in any way or seek out others who share them is extremely dangerous. The monopoly that ensures the continued power of the Communist party is not merely that of coercive violence or of the dissemination of information but on the ability to organise. Any physical or virtual attempt to join people up, to build links risks draconian punishment. The Communist party is the nation's "network of networks". Any potential threats to its dominant position are thus brutally cut down.
9. The massive economic expansion of the last 30 years has been based largely on the building of the hardware of a developed modern nation. But when all the roads, the railways, the airports and the bridges have been built, the programme of national construction will have to make something else: creative, intellectually agile, freethinking individuals able to cope with a chaotic, plural 21st century world. China's pragmatic, open-minded ability to take ideas from anywhere, study them, learn from them and apply them is impressive. But, though the Chinese one-party model may be supremely effective at getting railways built it, is less certain that rule by a middle-aged male engineers can provide the mental equipment that will be needed to continue to grow once the hardware has been built.
10. China is big. This is a very obvious statement. But it is only when you drive along a 200 mile road across hills and deep gorges that is being widened and straightened along its entire length and is not even the most important infrastructure project of the far-flung province where it is found, or when you arrive in what you expected to be a small rural town and find its population is in fact five million, that it sinks home. That the nation's collective ambitions rival their new railways stations or ports in scale, should surprise nobody.
