26 August

This one's been doing the rounds for a while. It made me think about China, how we tend to see it from the outside as an authoritarian country. It is that, sort of, but I think it's the wrong word. In China tradition is incredibly powerful in defining what happens. My thing about time - the Chinese are like the opposite of us. They look authoritarian because tradition constrains what they do, but it's not just constraint. It's the wisdom of multiple generations acting in the present. We can't understand that, our societies struggle to see more than 3 years backwards or forwards.