Have you ever considered any real freedoms?
~ Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

There’s one and only one optimal way to get around Beijing – on a 150cc scooter. Greenies plump for bicycles, but bicycles limit city-wide range, or else call for bionic legs. The hopelessly middle class pine for and treasure their cars, for no more reason than the opportunity to tell themselves they’ve arrived, when in fact all they do is sit in traffic. I can travel as a car or bicycle at will. And that is freedom.

The only dissenters I take seriously are motorcyclists, scoffing from their hogs at my top speed of 90 or 100km an hour. Still, they sacrifice versatility for macho points. I can weave around both sidewalk pedestrians and mile long traffic jams, for my scooter bobs and weaves like a welterweight Sugar Ray, while their maneuvers are more akin to Butterbean’s. Also, the pitted and bermed conditions of most Beijing roads, even without the perennial congestion, discourage the eternal adolescent, only happy crouched over his crotch rocket, making noises like an excretory orifice writ large.

Zipping along at a low grumble, defying traffic laws but not making a nuisance of myself, that is freedom.

Do I flout licensing regulations, like so many of my foreign-scooter-riding ilk in Beijing? None of your business. The larger point is that the police cannot be bothered to stop us and go through the trouble of busting a big-nose, and that is freedom.

In China, five dollars buys enough beer to kill an Irish poet. As a result, one becomes a raging alcoholic or a moderate tippler, if not a teetotaler. Here, either of the former two may feel free to roam about the streets with an alcoholic beverage in hand. Nonetheless, I’ve yet to encounter a drunken hobo or besotted panhandler. That’s a double dose of freedom.

The greatest freedom is the freedom to be responsible. Yet there is much to be said for these day-to-day freedoms, the absence of encroaching societal rules and regulations, enforced in the name of public good but for the ulterior motive of centralized control. Ironically, this land of so-called strict authoritarian control offers very real freedoms. Take the foregoing as two examples. Riding scooters unlicensed and unhelmeted, then swaggering around with a 1.5 liter bottle of beer publicly, would quickly win one scofflaw treatment in my land of the free - tickets, fines, and eventually penal retribution.

This is not to denigrate the larger freedoms one enjoys in the West, like the ability to choose who will be responsible for running the government in the name of its citizens (ahem).

Fault my philosophical naiveté, but I hereby invoke Ayn Rand to justify my theory that a foreigner can enjoy a much freer lifestyle in China than in his home country. Sure, I could be back home, exhorting Joe Sixpack to turn off the ballgame and Google Ron Paul, but what good would that really do? Ayn says selfishness is a virtue, if you are living with purpose and using your reason. My purpose has nothing to do with political martyrdom, and everything to do with enlightenment. Until then, I have no credit cards, no car lease, and no founded fear of a police state, for I already live in one, and it leaves me largely to my own devices. And that is freedom.