From afar, China was often described as marching inexorably toward better days. But inside the country, people were more circumspect. Everything the Chinese had ever gained was by iron and sweat and fire, and they, better than anyone, knew the impermanence of it all—“the unreality of reality,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.” In my final months in Beijing, that feeling of fragility took hold more deeply.
