When we think of Chinese cities today, nothing comes more obviously to mind than ‘speed’ and ‘spectacle’: the speed at which urban construction takes place, giving rise to hyperbolic terms like ‘urban frenzy’ or ‘Shenzhen speed’; and the way speed conjures into being, as if by magic, spectacular skylines – the Pudong area in Shanghai being the most often cited example. However, what is most obvious can also be most elusive. Rem Koolhaas has speculated amusingly that it might be the ‘mutant figure’ of Chinese architecture (‘one-tenth as many architects have to build ten times as much for a tenth of the honorarium’) that accounts for the speed of construction. But this is to forget the many bureaucratic delays that the Chinese architect has to put up with, and the sense, derived from bitter political experience, that the rules can change without warning; so that if you want to do something, you have to do it fast, before the rules change again. There is a paradoxical relation, therefore, between speed and slowness.

The spectacle is equally paradoxical. The best known theorist of the spectacle is, of course, Guy Debord, but if his notion of the spectacle is still relevant today, it is because in his last book, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), he radically revised his earlier position, arguing that a mutation in the form of the spectacle has taken place: from the ‘diffuse’ and ‘concentrated’ forms found in earlier capitalist and authoritarian societies respectively, to a recent merger of the two forms into the ‘integrated spectacle’. If what integrates global society are information networks, then another word for integrated spectacle might be ‘information’. Moreover, because of the speed with which it moves, information does not necessarily take on a visual form. This is tantamount to saying that the integrated spectacle confronts us with something of a paradox: it is a spectacle that is no longer spectacular, a spectacle that has reversed itself in that it is more covert than overt, a spectacle that is secret. In The Society of the Spectacle (1968), Debord had postulated two critical historical shifts in ethical and social life.