In Chengdu, I’ve discovered a very different debate, yet one that continues just as passionately. Young journalists who have witnessed the emergence of bloggers and social media as a political force wonder how rapidly and to what extent the country’s leaders will allow media to liberalize. So far, the signs are mixed. Take a recent case involving college student Li Qiming, who police say struck two female students, killing one, on the campus of Hebei University while apparently driving drunk last October. As a crowd of witnesses blocked his path as he attempted to flee the scene, Li shouted, “Sue me if you dare; my father is Li Gang.”

Li's father is a local police leader, and his statement underscores a tradition of both arrogance and corruption among officials in China. Subsequent outrage online by Chinese Internet users (“netizens” as they’re being called these days by academics) stoked a national debate. Private news organizations, particularly Web-based outlets less directly controlled by government officials, led the way on this story as government propagandists struggled to understand ramifications of the incident.

In the end, state-controlled media joined in the Chinese blogosphere’s chorus of criticism against Li Qiming. He was charged with various traffic-related offenses, though it’s important to note many netizens continue to complain, the prosecution’s charges are insufficient.

The ongoing protests in Egypt and across the Arab world, however, highlight ongoing paranoia within the Chinese leadership. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the government had “blocked the word ‘Egypt’ from searches on Twitter-like microblogging sites” and was routinely removing many comments from websites of state-owned news organizations. These are the types of actions critics of China have come to expect.

These examples paint an image of a divided China. On one hand, journalists are helping to set a social and political agenda and are pressing the country’s leadership to improve its historically tepid relationship with the rule of law. All the while, those journalists are operating in a legal gray area. They offer pointed criticism of government and particular officials without overtly challenging the Communist Party’s existence or its top leadership.

How they know where to draw the line is a question I ask of formally trained journalists and amateur bloggers alike. One of my friends is a reporter for a large state-owned news organization. She describes a relatively open workplace where journalists themselves are questioning the role of the state-controlled press. Journalists at these organizations can challenge the corrupt, she decided. The press can hold corrupt individuals accountable without questioning institutions as a whole. What remains to be seen is whether anger toward individual officials will snowball, and how both the state-controlled and private media will deal with the broader issues of endemic corruption and ill-governance. How long can China continue to condemn bad apples while at the same time arguing that the tree producing them is healthy?

You yidianr haipa, I usually respond. Just a little scared.

I’ve been in China since May on this most recent stint, living in a comfortable flat and working in downtown Beijing over the summer. I knew that even Chengdu, a sprawling city of 10 million, was to an extent part of China’s wild west. Faulty infrastructure, corrupt local governments, natural disasters and ethnic tensions are among myriad issues facing the region, which stretches from the eastern slopes of the Himalayas in the south to the tip of the Gobi Desert and the gateway to Central Asia in the north.

At the same time, it’s among China’s fastest-growing regions economically, and leaders in Beijing have earmarked the city as western China’s financial center. Leaders are wondering whether the so-called economic miracle witnessed in southeastern boomtowns like Shenzhen – where credit and government regulations are equally loose – can be replicated in the west.

I get a taste of that every day as Maseratis zip alongside rickshaws and the gleaming Shangri-la hotel towers above clapboard markets where live chickens for sale dawdle while awaiting their fate. Wealth disparity is a problem shared across China, but the types of wealth in each place differ.

For example, there’s no denying the wealth in Beijing: China’s prevailing state-owned enterprises are headquartered there, and the city’s real estate prices are quickly surpassing major capitals around the world. In the end, unlike Chengdu or Shanghai or Shenzhen, Beijing is a city of black, tinted-window Audi sedans, plain-clothed police and Soviet-style architecture.

“It’s just not as political here,” a Chinese friend told me one night soon after I arrived in Chengdu. We were walking near Tianfu Square, the city’s social and political center, which features a larger-than-life Mao Zedong statue erected at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1968. “Grandpa Mao,” my friend calls him.

Over the next several months here, I’ll being working to understand those politics and how relations and disagreements between the central government in Beijing and local governments are played out in the various levels of state-run media. Chengdu in many ways may be outside the immediate influence of Beijing, but in a country where until 30 years ago everything was state-controlled, even decisions to relinquish government control over private industry are bogged by politics.

In the university where I’m studying, there’s a lily pond surrounded by trees and benches in the middle of campus. It’s a nice place to sit and escape the bustle of Chengdu and the gaping stares directed at the blonde-haired foreigner. Pensioners sit outside here playing mah-jong in their slippers and Mao-era army caps. There’s one man who attempts to catch goldfish, and no shortage of grandparents doting over babies.

Around 6 one evening, a group of students and professors, dressed identically in black suits, white open-collared shirts, black shoes and white tube socks, wended their way across the park, past the gold-fishing man, on their way to one of the many Communist Party meetings on campus. Sichuan University’s best students are invited – and often cajoled, I’ve recently found – into joining the Party. Even in capitalist-crazed Chengdu, where Ferraris and rickshaws share the road, there’s a sense of security in knowing you’re following the legacy of Grandpa Mao. In Chengdu, where noting seems to dull young people's aspirations, even the Party members’ tube socks are matching.