Susan Sontag once said that there were three themes she’d been studying her entire life: women, freaks, and China. In these pages I’ve written a little about women, and a lot about freaks, but almost nothing about China. What is China? Where did it come from? What is it for? Were the weird old historians right when they said that the broadly integrative nature of Chinese institutions—the continuity of its civilisation, the pre-eminence of the state, and even the writing, which fixes the sign in its self-contained graphical mark, while Western systems break it up into constituent sounds—is grounded in Neolithic shamanism? Where are the good noodles? Is socialism with Chinese characteristics just another name for capitalism, or is it something else?
From now until September, Numb at the Lodge will investigate these pressing questions and more. Paid subscribers can join us in a brain-melting tourist odyssey across the past and future of Chinas real and imagined. This is a travel blog now.
Today I am writing from Chaoyang, Beijing. Or, at least, I think I am, but it's getting hard to tell. It might be someone else.