The sale, of course, is backed by French members of the Eight-Nation Alliance, who were frozen more than 100 years ago with strict instructions to be thawed out to mastermind just this occasion.

Ah, but China is no fool this time around. Foreign insults will not be taken sitting down. Hell no, China is a Great Nation now. One of honour, pride, common sense, power, and a whole string of other Great adjectives.

No, the Bag’er Revolution is upon us! Where the Boxers failed, the Bag’ers shall not! We will hold up signs and hassle ALL patrons of Carrefour, using our bodies, our BODIES!, to block their way. We, alone, stand as the last bastion of Chinese self-respect. We have risen to the occasion, and now hold the line that must educate those ignorant Chinese that would trade their country for ‘Two Yuan Off’ sales.

We will show the world that we know, yes WE KNOW! what is REALLY going on in . We invite all our foreign friends to come to beautiful China and see for themselves what it is REALLY like in . No, not just what the evil and his mouthpiece CNN want you to believe. Don’t you know the people of have more freedoms than us Chinese erm… people-in-China-but-outside-? They can have AS MANY CHILDREN AS THEY WANT! Really! As many!

Wait… what do you mean there’s no sale? There are signs in the Carrefour window informing thrifty hopefuls that in fact there is no sale today?

But, but… if there’s no sale, does this mean possibly that there were other falsities in the call to arms SMS message I received from my very good and patriotic friends? Wait, does this mean that maybe the CEO of Carrefour doesn’t hang out with the and China bash? Oh boy, does this mean that France really doesn’t hate China and we’ve just spent the last two weeks on a self-serving nationalistic rampage that is as stupid as it is wide-spread?

Oh no…. [lowering head] does this mean that we Chinese have presented the rest of the world with the exact image we were trying to show them we are not?

[rising head with new found vigor] Hell no!

Down with Carrefour! Down with Carrefour! China’s Olympics! One (country) World, One Dream! Fuck you France, fuck you Rest of the World, we don’t need your kind! We don’t need your common sense! We are Chinese! We are proud! We are strong!

There’s nothing new about saying “China’s changing fast”. Every Sinophile for the last 25 years has been saying that, and they’re right.

But what gets me is that I’ve got this front-row seat to it all. And frankly, it’s a bit exciting.

Now, my generation – growing up in the technological revolution of the 80s-90s – undoubtedly experienced changes to the world faster than any generation before them, and this is likely to just compound for generations to come.

Even then though, you had a “generation” (y? z? which are we on now?) to deal with it. You had parents that didn’t understand all that Internet mumbo-jumbo. Wizkids. A divide of sorts.

To say things in China are “different” is somewhat akin to saying the Great Wall is “long”. But it’s not the difference of China that got me thinking the other day while I was walking my dog. It’s how fast the country is becoming the same, but not in that McDonald’s hegemony that cultural anthropologists are most concerned about.

Rather, the same in all the ways the country has been physically and emotionally unable to be until now.

• I was in the park and saw a bunch of kids pull up on their bikes and (after sticking about ten locks on each tire) run off into the trees together – to conspire, play fort, do math homework, or whatever kids that age do.
• Just shortly before the walk I was at a (typical Taiwanese-”American” style) coffee shop and grabbed a coke. It had a stay-on tab, which the Shanghaiist reported on last week.
• Last weekend I was at friends playing poker and PlayStation, eating Doritos and drinking a reasonable Chinese Cabernet.
• This morning I poured my coffee out of a freshly opened box of UHT milk, and the spout had been improved so as not to spill the first quarter of the box all over my microwave.
• I’ve been watching the news about all the Carrefour/CNN/Olympic malarkey, and reading comments on this blog and others where Chinese have chimed in on what used to be topics us Westerners would preach to the choir about. And I’m not talking ultra-nationalist (read: ultra-brainless) reactionary comments – but thoughtful, debate-expanding and prospective shifting conversations.

These may seem like some rather random and discombobulated things, but each in its own way has made me realize that much of the issue in the West and the recent conflicts between Chinese and Western media, is because many of us (as in Westerners) don’t realize the level of change happening here. We can say “China is changing fast”, hell it’s the catch phrase of every China business book written in the last decade, but we don’t have the facilities to understand what that actually means.

We judge the terms “fast” and “change” by our own societal perspectives, and as nations that have endured a relatively minor amount of change in the past century, it’s a challenge to really understand what rapid changes in a country that has yet had a chance to just “settle in” and enjoy the rewards of being a large modern nation.

Whereas CNN, Cafferty, and his ilk, are struggling to understand that this isn’t our grandparents’ China with Maoist slogans everywhere. It’s not even the post-Nixon, ‘to be rich’-Deng China of our parents – when I look around me, I realize this isn’t even the China I came to just three and a half years ago.

We grasp at the landscape and attempt to use that as a measurer of sorts. We see the massive amounts of construction and think, “Wow, that building wasn’t there yesterday, things sure change fast here.” And we use our inherent mistrust of change to condemn it. We step back and say, “China, you’re coming up too fast now. Slow down. Watch the environment. Watch your issues.”

I say, watch those kids playing together in the trees. Not everything about China need be a warning.