"I can't see any villages!" was what our reporter kept saying when she telephoned back from her trip to the mainland. What she did see at Sun Yat-sen's home village was a place being transformed by skyscrapers and roads. "Spiritual civilization" is of little account there, while grabbing what you can is what holds true. But with plenty of land in the village, why construct such huge building s? "Because that is what Taiwan and Hong Kong have done!" explained an estate agent.

What about Hong Kong then? This year seventeen children have decided to end their lives by jumping from the windows of high-rise blocks. An analysis in the South China Morning Post pointed out that most of Hong Kong's child suicides happen in small families, living in high-rise blocks, with both parents going out to work. For the children of such families, there is little difference in being at home or running away. O ne expert points out that, with the approach of 1997, many parents are working overtime to get more money before the crunch comes.

There was also a cartoon strip that made one both laugh and cry: A secondary school student stands on a window ledge, about to jump, as two experts ask him why he wants to kill himself. The angry answer comes back that it is society's search for simplistic explanations that is the problem and that, at his age, the youth is just discovering what a cold, shallow, arrogant culture he lives in--where the worth of human beings is rated on the basis of the square footage of their homes, their net incomes and exam results, rather than on love and dignity. "If this is living, Sir," demands the young man, "is dying so much worse?" The cartoon ends with the two experts joining him on the window ledge.

Taipei's buildings are getting bigger and bolder; names associating them with beautiful scenery and hints of aristocracy give people a feeling of having really achieved the good life. The estate agents might not have told us "Europe and America are like this!" but their advertisements remind us "This year, such-and-such a place is very European," and "You too can live in the 'Barcelona' of such-and-such a place."

What about Europe then? At the beginning of the 1960s, when the first high-rise blocks were going up in south London, people gave themselves the feeling of having attained the good life by naming them "villages in the sky"; by the 198Os, the buildings were being mercilessly criticized. Prince Charles went on the attack, accusing them of being blights on the landscape; sociologists accused them of destroying neighborly sentiments and being breeding grounds for criminals; psychologists said they made people lose any feeling of "home" and gave rise to teenage gangs; architects also exclaimed that high-rise architecture does not actually save space. One-by-one the high-rises are being knocked down.

Just as with fashions and the changing shape of women, from plump and petite to the physique of the body builders, so it is with "civilization." The recent film Regarding Henry has thus given us something of a surprise. The heroic Harrison Ford plays a successful and arrogant New York lawyer who wears the finest clothes and sends his daughter to the most expensive school, but loses his memory after being shot. He returns to work only to find he can no longer face the competition and empty human relationships of a professional life. Finally, he takes his wife and dog and bursts in to the assembly hall of his daughter's school to take her away, just as the principal is lauding the virtues of competition.

In the 1980s, films told us how we should get rich and follow the lead of lawyers, stockbrokers and bankers, with even their pressure and indifference being the marks of the "successful" city dweller. In Regarding Henry, the main character returns from hospital and asks his maid what he normally does at home. The maid replies that he is usually working. When he wants to know what else he does, the maid replies, "Sir, you are always working!"

After the angry, liberal sixties; the "I can do whatever I want to do" seventies; the materialistic eighties, Regarding Henry now announces that domestic values are again the ideals of life. As the film ends with the family in a golden autumn scene, it seems that we are back to 1950s Hollywood--back to basics.

So what has caused people to go back to basics? Are you prepared to believe some simple truths? That in the early industrial revolution, Thomas Malthus warned that this world could not support too much development, and that the city dwellers of the 1990s have at last seen the light and become willing to give up their materialistic hedonism? Or is there rather a link with economic recession and unemployment? What has become apparent is that technology cannot guarantee prosperity. The situation in Europe and America today is like a clear mirror, but can the people of Taiwan, who are still enjoying an optimistic scene, really have the peace of mind to find themselves in that mirror?

In Chungshan, a young intellectual pointed out to our puzzled reporter, "Don't you have these kinds of hotels and restaurants?" There was hunger in the 1950s, people were sent down to the countryside in the 1970s, so we should keep a friendly and affirmative attitude when looking at the reforms, he maintained. There is just "too much one cannot believe or know about the future. You just grab what you can." An awkward silence followed.