Just look at the statistics: Each university has tens of thousands of applications for students who want to be in art school, but they can only accept a few hundred.
A society is healthy only when it allows its members to discuss their thoughts openly. This is also the only way that a society can gather consensus, let everyone express his or her wish, and foster creativity.
I'm not nostalgic about the old city. I don't enjoy it that much. It was just a city with one emperor and the rest of them just rats or meaningless people.
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.
The IT people who have made such an effort to know and understand computer technology. They are frustrated that you cannot use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China. They are the first to recognize that the situation is terrible.
To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It's a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.
Nationality started as something natural, but we should not be restrained by the old politics that make up these clear lines. It should have its own way of evolving. In some places, it will evolve slower and in others, faster. It's like the mountains, the ocean and the rivers. It has its own geological forms. Societies cannot be flat. But during change, human rights, human dignity and free speech have to be protected. Otherwise, we'll be going backward.
If a society cannot even support somebody like me, then people ask: Who is under protection then? That's why there is such support for me. It is not because I am so beautiful or I am so charming. People feel: This guy is fighting for us.
I deal with students every day - from China, Germany, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And I've noticed that the Chinese students are the least trained in having a sense of aesthetics. They lack any ability to sense what is beautiful or what is proper. They can be learned and skillful, but they lack the ability to make their own free judgment. It is really sad to see young adults of 20, 25 years who were never taught to make their own decisions. People who can't do that don't get a sense of responsibility. And if you lack a sense of responsibility, you push the blame onto the system.
You can never know what is and what is not powerful, but you can always find out what the powerful people are scared of. A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.