LIFE IN BEIJING

Life in Beijing in this, the last phase of the dictatorship of the Communist Party, has taken on some curious characteristics. One evening we visited a nightclub near the World Trade Center run by overseas Chinese in partnership with a foreigner. The club would have been unremarkable in the West - a dance floor downstairs, and upstairs, a bar with some eight tables and a couple of sofas. But here in Beijing it was a sign of how far the Party has moved towards consumerism. You can do a lot in the city if you stay off politics.

Change too when I recently revisited Beijing in 2001, the old university, Beijing, which before the Cultural Revolution was the Coal Mining Institute, a vast and dreary place. It was all but empty in the 70s - the staff and students had been sent to the mines during the Cultural Revolution and never returned. Now it has been renamed, as the Beijing Language and Culture University. Students have banners that read "we have no political superstitions these days", and the dormitories had been refurbished, there was a hotel, and a series of restaurants and cafes for foreign students.

It hasn't been easy being an intellectual in China in the 20th century. The tradition of the engaged scholar meant that intellectuals were in the forefront of the political movements that sprang up after the collapse of the Qing dynasty at the beginning of the century and divided along party lines when the Kuomintang and the Communist Party split in 1949. Thousands left China then, but those who had stayed, only to find themselves packed off to labor camps in the 50s and 60s as Chairman Mao pursued his own ideologies.

Now the younger generation of students dreams of going into business, and what remains of the culture represented by these gracious courtyards is being buried under a new wave of global consumerism. How much of it will survive is a question that bedevils the writers and artists who are tentatively exploring the new spaces that have opened up as the Party retreats from its ideological ground.

I went into the Guolinfeng bookshop near the campus of Beijing University further to the northeast. Beijing's first private bookstore, now the third largest in the city. Eager assistants hovered about, ready to give advice or just straighten the shelves. It boasted a basement cafe where browsers could read before they bought - or instead of buying. The bookshop is part of another new business, an advertising company. The competition, the state-owned Xinhua bookshops, are still neon-lit temples to socialist obstructionism, with rude assistants and unimaginative stock, kept afloat by their monopoly on the supply of school textbooks. The Guolinfeng bookshop is not allowed to sell foreign books or books from Hong Kong, though you will still find these forbidden categories on the shelves. The manager was relaxed about it and mentioned that he's not breaking the law, just a regulation only.

I had a chat over tea with the professor over at the culture and linguistics department. He invited me to his office which was crammed with books and there was a computer in the corner. He chatted about the old liberal tradition that existed in China in the 40s and 50s. And he chuckled that "this is a late totalitarian society, in which you see the truth of the absolute corruption of absolute power". There was still hope, he said. A Qing dynasty historian had predicted that from 1840, when the wave of transformation began in China, it would take 200 years to achieve democracy. That would mean another 40 years - I find that a reasonable prediction. Then he added, that even if they get democracy, perhaps the first hundred years won't be too good - it will be something like Latin America. After that, it should improve.