postmodernism

Hopefully someone can explain this passage for me:
"China is the weed in the human cabbage patch... The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor..... Eventually the weed gets the upper hand. Everything falls back into a state of China." (pg 18)
My question is - what is a state of China? And why is China the weed?

When D+G write that long-term memory '(family, race, society, or civilization [TP, 16])' is an arborescent tracing-over of the rhizome of short-term memory relations, and suggest that we 'forget' these 'artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities' (AO, 34), I find myself wondering whether this rhizomic, 'subversive' forgetfulness is a reformulation of 'the death of history.' (For what it's worth, I also find myself wondering this when D+G call for Nomadology, 'the opposite of history' [TP, 23].) There have been a lot of heart-boners on the blog for the 'life-affirming' message or 'so

I've noticed several posts wondering where rhizome theory leaves the individual, or at least where exactly this theory manifests itself in "real world."

In the same way that the Haraway essay answered a lot of my questions about what it means to be an individual agent in postmodernity--how agency and the atomizations etc., of postmodernity are fully compatible and not mutually exclusive--I think that essay has a similar clarifying potential for what a rhizomatic person might look like: a cyborg.

So: where does the subject stand in D&G? It's as if agency is returned to the individual by deterritorializing the individual--"not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I." By emphasizing agency of the collective instead of the subject, or rather by exploding the dichotomy of subject and collective into rhizomic fireworks, D&G suggest that we can create new planes and a politics of desire freed from beliefs. Any other thoughts about (individual?) agency in D&G?

In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari very often describe their multiplicity of concepts in spatial terms: a recording surface covering a body without organs, points of disjunction forming circles on the body without organs, machines that are adjoined next to the desiring-machine. The rhizome is always in the middle, between things. All these prepositions, off-shoots and parabolic sweeps serve to let the reader work out these concepts in space, a picture of machines in motion, gears inter-locked.

Deleuze and Guattari seem to have this nasty habit of introducing words they create or place new meaning on, but do not ever explain, or explain after the fact. He introduces assemblage, machines, and body without organs in the first five pages. I had to stop reading, read the anti-Oedipus, and then come back to have an idea of what machines and a body without organs are. Its impossible to comprehend their writing without know the meaning of these terms, yet they never adequately explain them.

If D&G are affirming the rhizome over the root-tree, which, by the end of the intro to Thousand Plateaus it seems they are, I wonder if this is as subversive as they make it out to be. At times it sounds like 'stick it to power, become rhizome, don't let yourself get hierarchized.' Yet, apropos of the 'is the internet a rhizome?' thread, it seems to me everything is becoming rhizome anyway -- the internet, corporate organization, military organization, guerilla advertising, etc.

I'm having trouble figuring out how much of D&G's rhizome v. arborescence, map v. tracing distinction is simply an ontological description and how much is a an affirmation of the rhizome over arborescence, mapping over tracing.