There came a startling moment when everything shifted. A man carrying two plastic bags, one in each hand, stood directly in the path of a column of armored tanks, effectively preventing them from proceeding down the avenue toward Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Hindsight:It Looks Like a Landscape created a misty mountain scene from rear ends.

Liu Wei’s 2004

The day before, on June 4, 1989, hundreds of pro-democracy students and workers had been gunned down in and near the square. The image of “Tank Man,” as he’s now called, stays indelibly in the mind. Some have said his name is Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, whereabouts unknown. There is speculation that he either was executed or is living in exile in Taiwan. Whoever he is, wherever he is now, dead or alive, it is certain that for a brief moment he managed to stop the machines with just his body. This unknown rebel, unarmed, stood up against the awesome power of the state and, as the world watched, gained something priceless in return: He liberated his body from the collective, from being subservient to the ideological machine, and opened the floodgates to a next world.

Although direct political confrontation failed, a new sideways rebellion began in the cultural and economic sphere, one that has succeeded. If Mao launched the cultural revolution in 1966 to be rid of “liberal bourgeois” and to continue the revolutionary class struggle, the bourgeois liberals have struck back. The real cultural revolution, stoked by individual desires and ambitions, is happening now. “The level of societal openness and individual freedom now enjoyed by the people in China was unthinkable to the protesters at the Tiananmen Square,” says Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus of Asian American Studies at Berkeley.

As the Olympic Games draw near, it is not ideology or collective yearning that asserts itself in the Middle Kingdom, but the physical self coming to full consciousness. The civilization known for Confucian morals, Taoist mysticism, acupuncture, tai chi, martial arts—radically different ways of looking at the self in relationship with the cosmos—has wholeheartedly embraced Western culture and mores. “Economic and educational opportunities, readily available telecommunications and the Internet have made the people of China highly mobile, and quite well informed,” says Wang, but also “more individual-centered and therefore, less committed to traditional extended family and Confucian social ethics.” Ancestral worship, though allowed under communism, is on the wane as many now flock to the temple of the body. The We of the old traditional world of clanship, of self defined by proper behavior and relationships within the collective, is ceding to the Me of the new generation, one defined by sex.

Premarital sex is now widely practiced. In a 2007 poll by Renmin University of China, more than half the Chinese surveyed in ten provinces found premarital sex acceptable. Only 12.8 percent said it was immoral. In a Beijing study conducted by Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, nearly three-quarters of residents polled said they had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5 percent in 1989, the year of the massacre. And the Internet, to which 200 million now have access in China (according to PC World), has flung open the bedroom door. While the government cracks down on online political dissent, the new socialism allows for a great deal of personal expression.

Women bloggers are becoming famous for discussing their sex lives online. One even taped the sounds of her lovemaking, and managed to crash the host server when too many tried to listen at the same time. The biggest celebrity sex scandal of late on the Internet (what now is called Sexy Photo Gate) features Edison Chen, a young Hong Kong hip-hop artist and actor. In some 1,300 explicit photos, Chen, a heartthrob featured in People magazine’s 2006 “Sexiest Man Alive” issue, is seen having sex with over a half dozen Chinese starlets. So far, over 30 million page views of the images have caused Chinese authorities to wonder about the effectiveness of the firewall.

The body eclectic: In 17th-century China, beauty was achieved through ornament, artifice, and alteration—as in the painted face, modest demeanor, and bracelet of the painted scroll Lady at the Window with a Rosary.

Along with sexual freedom is the celebration of the self. The proliferation of spas, sports clubs, fashion magazines and shows, beauty products, massages, dance clubs, love hotels, talk shows about sex, underground porn, and obsession with athletes and movie and pop stars all speak to the glorification of the body—in stark contrast to the cold war era, when having too big a mirror in one’s home or even wearing makeup in public could be deemed antirevolutionary. Most telling is the growth of the cosmetic surgery industry. In recent years, more than 10,000 clinics have opened. The number of surgeries for straighter noses, double eyelids, and breast augmentation would suggest that a fair number of Chinese with disposable incomes are rushing for extreme makeovers.

This new self—fit, augmented, overtly sexual, and on display—contrasts dramatically with Chinese body images of the past. “The ancient Confucian tradition was criticized for its contempt for physical activity and respect for the intellect,” notes Susan Brownell, author of Beijing’s Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. “‘Those who work with their brains rule, those who work with their brawn are ruled,’ a saying from Mencius, has been used for a century to illustrate the traditional Confucian aversion to physical exercise, including sports.”

In ancient Rome and Greece, the naked body was sculpted to perfection and generally glorified. During the Renaissance, the human form was rendered not only anatomically correct but profound in refined drawings and paintings. In China, though, the body was kept hidden until the dawn of the 20th century. To be sure, there were erotic images in ancient China, but they were created during the Taoist-dominated eras as manuals to educate young married couples. Far more typical were the paintings that depict upper-class men and women perched on carved wooden chairs, their hands hidden in the sleeves of beautiful brocades, their faces stoic, inexpressive, like peg dolls. To project a cold, outward face was akin to moral rectitude.

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