Mr. Wong, the political guidance counselor in the Travel Service, said it was because of Antonioni’s film on China and his denigrating attraction to archaic charm. His middle-power chauvinism looked on China as the soufflé of Europe, to rise and fall according to the nourishment beaten into it by American capital investment and avant-garde art.

He said the high vigilance of the people would not allow us to imitate this filmmaker’s disdain for technologies that visibly assert themselves in urban steel and all along the terraces of rice and soy and wheat.