There’s no such thing as “fixed” culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems.
How to become a really modern society when today we are so – as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive.
It’s the place they take you before they give you over to the judicial system. You stay there for a year or two and they make you really suffer to confess everything.
The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.
The whole attitude of society has become much more open and realistic. They realize that the only way to make a more democratic and free society is to let different opinions come out.
We should use this public sphere and redefine – beyond China’s borders – what a government is allowed to do, where its powers end and where the realm of a citizen’s privacy begins.
To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical, to experience another life and another level of feeling.
