Cities are being created from rural area in a matter of years and new ones are growing so fast that they are being unified under bureaucratic readjustments. The cultural implications and potential for new paradigms, especially regarding personal computing and telecommunications are worth considering, especially since the Chinese have shown themselves to be efficient and savvy adaptors to new technology.

The Chinese embassy in the United States reported this year that many cites in southern china are merging. The vice-govenor of Zhejing Province, just south of Shanghai, praised urbanization as indicative of the productive forces of modern civilization and vowed to build several cities each with over a million inhabitants in the next few years.

We talked to Mac users in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Beijing. Hong Kong was returned to Chinese control in 1997 from the British but kept free market laws in place. China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province that must be returned to the mainland Ð but it is a sovereign democratic industrial base with a huge economy and Beijing (or Peking) is China's capital.

Ray, a Hong Kong DJ, music producer and sound engineer said that Macs are the platform of choice for musicians: "I use a Mac in the studio and at home, just as 99% of the local music pros do," and that he has easy access to hardware and software through the net, adding, "it's not like that everywhere."

Hong Kong is part of the Pearl River Delta in the south, also home to Portuguese Macao and Shenzhen, a Special Economic Zone. The cities of this region compete with one another to attract business and investment. The population is expected to rise from 12 to 34 million by 2020 according to a study commissioned by the Harvard Project on the City. Rice patties and verdant hillsides go the way of tall gleaming office parks and high-rise apartments that remain largely vacant and wait in anticipation as millions of immigrants from the surrounding countryside (the "floating population") build makeshift dwellings in the in-between spaces.