Which town?

first roundabout, made amorphous by the clamor of our diverging opinions, will benefit from it – or perhaps not. And these first paved roads, in fact, to whom do they belong, or to what? They were built with funds allocated by the Ministry of Hunan Resources, which also subsidizes almost all the schools, as well as the functioning of several working groups, the infrastructure of several collective buildings and even a few residential ones. It is thus a matter of a significant investment implying an interested expectation of results in conformity with the enunciated ideal : this entails the exercise of a constant pressure, the waves of which circulate in all directions and produce all sorts of effects, in the weave of the collective life as on the motivations and behavior of those outside it.

*

The presence of an observer is never indifferent.

We had already had more than once the experience of being watched by the media – such as teams of journalists for audio-visual reportages – and of the modifications of tension and comportment these intrusions were sure to elicit or trigger, but that had been just a fleeting incident, soon dissipated, just as it was when a crowded tourist bus would come to a smoking halt below the structure, where we stood as so many idealist macaques on our rising scaffoldings. His criteria of reference were laid in terms of power: power to initiate, to persuade, to decide, power to act and effectuate, power to corrupt. Any temporal human government is first of all concerned with the exercise and distribution of authority and power – in principle for the good of the people and the nation. But this was now a puissant observer and interested party.

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