Presently in the preparatory stages of a research trip to China—journalist visa approved!—but I’m beginning to have second thoughts whether I should even bother. I can’t remember in my lifetime (post 1970, eh?) a country this wall-to-wall covered by Western media.

When has a single nation ever generated this scale of fascination and fear in the west? The USSR may have focused the anxieties of the west, but it wasn’t complimented by the sort of mass curiosity with which China is now treated. There wasn’t the same measure of media penetration and ubiquity then to make it possible. The China stuff now is kind of crazy obsessive-compulsive.

The closest comparison I can come up with is Japan—in the late 80s and early 90s Japan’s rising economic might stirred likewise fears in the West, while at the same time inviting all sorts of often daft pop anthropological probing. Then, as is the case with China now, it was predicted Japan would soon boast the largest economy in the world. Which isn’t to say China won’t soon possess the largest economy sometime around 2020-2025 as is usually predicted; I’m just not convinced it is the sure bet, or that it will happen as easily as it’s being prophesied.

As for the protests shadowing the Olympic flame, there’s something in their surprisingly violent tenor that suggests to me they’re about far more than just Tibet (leaving aside the demonstrators who are actually members of the Tibetan diaspora or directly connected to it). Where were all these people before? I can’t find any evidence to suggest the pro-Tibet movement was this large outside the exile community, even latently so? While Beijing’s hosting of the Olympics provides a convenient platform on which to raise the stakes, the shrill, simple-mindedness of the torch tantrums implies that they are not so much pro-Tibet, as anti-China.

There’s a familiar whiff of the more familiar anti-Americanism here: some ill-formed expression of emerging anxieties over China’s sudden relevance and power in world affairs. Which is not to say that the demonstrations are implicitly racist or illegitimate or a waste of time—China invited this scrutiny by turning the flame relay into the sort of propagandistic spectacle not seen since the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (the Nazis actually contrived this whole notion of a sacred flame being carried out of the ruins of ancient Greece… by fit and wholesome Aryans).

Having thus complained about the media saturation, I do have a few favourite bits on China. There’s this, from Jonathan Franzen in last week’s New Yorker (I can’t find the piece itself online, but here’s an audio companion):

“The week before, when I’d arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was one of the most advanced places I’d ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, ‘Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?’ and this place had raised its hands and said ‘Yeah!’”

The Globe and Mail’s European correspondent Doug Saunders had a thoughtful piece last Saturday regarding his sudden, and it turns out, unwarranted media fame in China. He goes digging into the nuances of the ethnic Han nationalism being witnessed both within China, and outside among the diaspora, in reaction to the flame protests. I don’t know it’s entirely accurate to say, however, that the party leadership is now more nationalist than communist, as Saunders does. That would suggest that Beijing’s mindset is primarily a pragmatic one—using the uproar to tap into a well of ethnic pride and bolster its legitimacy. I think the leadership in China still has some very set ideas about how the country should be governed. This is merely a moment of opportunism, another tide Beijing seems able to channel and turn on/off at will, as it does whenever it has cause for anti-Japanese sentiment to spike.

National Geographic couldn’t help itself. The current issue is all China. I just bought it and can’t say much other than that there are lots of nice pretty (but smog-choked) pictures and the sort of breathless, banal and unoffensive prose NatGeo typically traffics in.

If you want a more unbridled, and let’s say offensive, opinion on China, take a dose of William Langewiesche in the April Vanity Fair. I’m a fan of Langewiesche’s magazine articles (”City of Fear” on Brazil’s prisons, VF) and books (The Atomic Bazaar, Sahara Unveiled), but I can’t recall him ever being as downright nasty and funny as he is in “Beijing’s Olympic Makeover”. I thought for a moment that I’d misread the byline, and it was actually from the opium-dipped pen of VF contributor Nick Tosches.

[Picture beneath the head: a portrait of Huang Qihou in front of one of his paintings; photo by Beijing artist Xing Danwen.]