I was thinking of just how advanced our human sciences are when I thought about China: 1,330,044,544 people in one nation. That’s an impressive degree of social organization. It’s hard enough to get a family of five to agree on a movie or a team of rowers to move in the same direction.
(Yes, there is brutal repression. Not all the techniques developed by the human sciences are just. Nor are all technologies we’ve created productive.)
related: exactly one year ago, I had a similar realization about power in China.