Quotes of the Day

I once spoke to a wise man in Beijing about his house. he squinted through thick bifocals and dispensed aphorisms while tapping ash from his cigarette onto the gleaming marble floor. "When houses are old, their bones creak," he said. It was, he believed, time to buy himself a new home. I asked the age of his house. He said it had been built five years ago.

We foreigners judge China by its tragic layers of history, the thousands who died building the Great Wall, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the shocking massacre at Tiananmen Square. We are entranced by the epic sweep of the Middle Kingdom, and the Chinese themselves oblige us by talking endlessly of their 5,000 years of civilization. The irony, though, to borrow from historian Francis Fukuyama, is that China has reached the end of its history.

The 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution began the destruction, razing centuries-old temples and condemning China's imperial past as feudal and superstitious. For twenty years after the terror ended, people struggled just to find themselves, to recover from one of the worst tragedies a state could inflict on its people. Now, at last, the Chinese are able to look forward. A whole generation is coming of age, untouched by the nation's painful past. Eight years ago, when I studied in China, some of my classmates still referred to each other as "comrade." For China's youth today, such expressions from the Cultural Revolution seem as distant as poems from the Tang dynasty. Even the middle-aged, who suffered the brunt of those horrible years, are resolutely moving into the future, their dreams ever more expansive (and expensive): televisions; mobile phones; fully wired, million-dollar mansions.

This much more genial cultural revolution is transforming the nation. Walk Shanghai's Nanjing Road at midnight, and yesterday's factory workers are today's entrepreneurs, fashioning a neon dreamscape from ancient alleyways. Overseas Chinese return from five years abroad to find their hometowns unrecognizable, while in the interior, whole new cities are sprouting out of rice paddies. In many ways, this makes the Chinese seem like the most unsentimental people in the world—the cult of newness replacing the cult of history. But, in truth, this kinetic dash into the future is also creating one of the most dynamic societies on the planet. Designers are fashioning a new Chinese aesthetic, blending the here and Mao. Business moguls are building economic empires, flooding Asia with their cutting-edge products. Even those sclerotic communists are reinventing themselves, inviting once-disdained capitalists into their fold.

And that wise old man? I hear he's moved into a brand-new house, taking his prized collection of jade antiques with him. The next cultural revolution has only just begun—and there's no looking back.

• Hannah Beech
• Nearly 30 years after the mind-numbing Cultural Revolution, China is free again to dream of what can be