That seeming contradiction was one of the biggest surprises during my visit. I was prepared to enter a country that, while embracing the free market, nevertheless kept a tight leash on its people. After all, much of the reporting out of China highlights the government’s jailing of dissidents, crackdowns on protests and censorship. I don’t doubt the truth of those reports.

In fact, things may be getting worse. Tom Plate, a syndicated columnist and UCLA professor, recently wrote that draconian media policies appear to be on the rise in the country. He also argued that censorship threatens the country’s economic success. "People wonder how China can possibly move forward if its media policies are heading backward," Plate wrote.

So yes, China’s free-speech restrictions are disconcerting. But day-to-day life in Beijing and Shanghai feels anything but oppressive—unless you’re talking about the throat-burning smog that is all-too common.

While sitting in a Shanghai park, I saw a young boy mock a security official who was telling him to get away from a pond. The boy ran off before the man could approach him, and I’m not sure whether he was a police officer or one of the many private security guards you see in China. Even so, the lad didn’t seem to fear authority much.

A trip I made to the imperial Summer Palace in Beijing illustrates the sense of extreme laissez faire in China. The complex sits on the shore of a lake, which was frozen in January. You can reach a spectacular Buddhist temple rising on a hill via a conventional footpath, but like many other visitors, I walked across the ice to get there. There was no formal entrance to the temple from the lake bed, however. So people clambered over boats resting by the shore and literally scaled the walls of this national monument.

Then, on a flight of stairs up to a Buddhist statue, an ornamental fence just a foot or two tall separated visitors from a fall of some 30 feet to a courtyard below.

There was something thrilling about these adventures. And it prompted me to question whether the United States is too obsessed with safety precautions and liability concerns. But then, partly because I was climbing those temple stairs with my two young children and the two young children of friends from Beijing, the paltry fencing alarmed me.