■"Fashion Magazines Rush to Mold China's Sense of Style: Cultural controls seem to stop short of leggy models, rippling abs and lots of brand advertising," by Howard W. French, New York Times, 3 October 2005, p. C10.

Great piece that buttresses my recent posts on China getting more normal by the minute. Granted we're not talking the great unwashed masses (and there are so many in China, roughly 1 out of every 7 people on the planet!), but China's "nascent" middle class is only about . . . oh . . . the size of America!

Listen to the lady who heads up the Chinese edition of Vogue: "Just a few years ago, China definitely wasn't ready and didn't have consumers at the level of Vogue. Two years from now, though, would have definitely been too late. That's the way China is, moving incredibly fast."

Vogue ain't the only mag plying its wares. There are a host of female-focused fashion pubs setting up shop.

And a few men's mags are infiltrating as well. Esquire, I will note, already has a Chinese edition. I know, because it has picked up reprint rights to my stuff in the past.

What about all those strict content controls that have bedeviled the Murdochs of the foreign media in the past? Well, apparently a couple of years ago the Party decided that all those young people needed some tutoring on consumerism.

Yeah baby! That's some hard-core communism!