“Can China be a global power? I don’t think so. It can gain an advantage, that’s true. But it doesn’t have soul. It doesn’t have heart. It doesn’t trust its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system. If those don’t exist, how can you have creativity? How can you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It’s there, it’s large. But nobody can tell you what it is.”

We live so much with representational democracy - so close to it - that we take it entirely for granted. We imagine that our situation would be somehow replicable with other forms of government. That we could have a benign autocracy and everything could be the same. People talk about China as if they're just a slightly different version of us. But instead of a mirror or an aspiration they ought to be a warning.