While preparing for my first trip to China twenty years ago, George Orwell’s dark masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, seemed a useful lens through which to view this “people’s republic.” Control in China was not nearly rigid enough to make it the embodiment of an all-embracing, authoritarian Big Brother state, but there were parallels, from the disparagement of many forms of “bourgeois” enjoyment and entertainment to periodic propaganda campaigns insisting that two plus two equaled five.