"I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually, it was really great. It was really, really, really great."

That was Andy Warhol after his only visit to China, in 1982.

He loved what he saw. He loved, he said, that everyone here dressed alike. He loved that the Great Wall, the world's biggest Private Property: Do Not Enter sign, was in a Communist country. He loved that Mao Zedong, whose face he had painted because Life magazine called Mao the most famous man in the world, was still a superstar even though he had been dead for six years.

China was Pop. It still is. It's still a nation of uniforms, but of more and more kinds of uniforms. I saw outfits with matching corsages on department store salesgirls, the slate-gray shirts of guards stationed at luxury high-rises and the Chloë Sevigny T-shirts that teenagers wear on Beijing streets.

Mao's image is less conspicuous here than it once was. His status took a dip when the savageries of the Cultural Revolution began to be told. His face doesn’t appear on a new 10-yuan bank note issued for the Olympics, but it's on all other currency above the small-change level. He remains omnipresent, like some Warholian multiple. Look and you'll find him. His star power holds. [...]