Industrial evolution: Beijing, Jianguomen from 1987(top), to 1997, to 2007.

At noon one day before Chinese New Year, my landlord rapped on the red lacquered doors leading into the small traditional courtyard house in which I live. My courtyard lies near the southern end of Zhuzhong Hutong, or Bell Foundry Lane, a cramped passageway that wiggles and waggles toward the 15th-century Bell Tower. Legend has it that the tower's bell was cast in a foundry on my lane, and children today are still told bedtime tales of the goddess of the bell.

Standing with my landlord, a pudgy and balding engineer for China's dominant Internet provider, was a Buddhist monk, swaddled on this frigid day not in the saffron robes of his calling but in a cozy down coat and thick woolen slacks. They had come to bless the house and to paste duilian, paired red paper scrolls emblazoned with gold couplets about luck, fortune, and wealth, to the front doors. As my landlord struggled with the flimsy scrolls in a skittery breeze, the monk paced the courtyard, sprinkling each building and the ground with blessed water. Facing south toward my bamboo garden and a low, pale winter sun, he intoned a series of sutras from a small volume plucked from his coat pocket. When he finished, we all shook hands, wished each other a happy new year, and the small ceremony was over.

Here, deep in what is left of old Beijing—those sparse patches of ancient alleyways and courtyard houses—gestures of China's traditional ways still cling to life. But while there remain echoes of its vast cultural history, particularly in many rural areas, China is undergoing a cultural transformation as profound as the economic revolution that is reshaping this country, and in ways unimaginable just a generation ago.

History provides no comparable antecedents for the deep and rapid economic and cultural change China has experienced in little more than two decades. Japan recovered quickly from the Second World War but emerged from that cataclysm largely unbruised culturally. Europe rebounded from the war as well, and today retains its cultural distinctions. But for China, so rapid and startlingly widespread is its reorientation that many familiar handholds, the sort of habits that define and condition a society, are eroding. Cultural alternatives now spill into Chinese life in dizzying abundance, and how they are embraced or rejected by the Chinese people over the coming years will lay the foundation of a new 21st-century China. Before our eyes, a new society is being fashioned. What will emerge from this maelstrom of change is impossible to know.

The Chinese are not polled about feelings of national identity; such questions, much less their answers, would too dangerously approach the political nerve of China's ruling mandarins. Polling on other issues, however—tastes in carbonated drinks, preferences for shampoos, ratings of certain sports celebrities, the appeal of mobile phone designs—is commonplace and, in a real way, reflects a changing social landscape. Despite the lack of significant data, after many years in China I am most acutely struck by China's confusion over what, in the end, it means to be Chinese. All of this ambivalence lurks very close to the surface of the national spectacle that will begin on August 8 of this year: the Olympic Games.

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