Of course, there [in China] has to be chaos. It has to be crazy, and I don't think there's anything wrong about it except this government, which is really incapable of doing anything meaningful.
When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.
Everything is selected by the central government without good judgment or an understanding of culture to make it really safe. They will become nobody to maintain their power and be raised to the next higher level.
I have always stated I designed the stadium as a toilet seat. I don't care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.
It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we'll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.
Any individual can contribute its own belief. And our society or even our government are made by the people. The people would have the final voice, but it requires each individual to act. If we don't act, then the result is very clear. So for too long Americans take liberty as granted. We think we are in the safe hand, the democracy and the liberty, which is not true. And it can be even getting much worse than today.
I think U.S. and China is a big opportunity, to be seen as partner or some kind of strategic partner maybe. But those kind of powers have a way of getting too big, then we'll have competition. And who is going to win the competition if U.S. cannot hold a strong ideology? And even the U.S. would've lost the ground to win.
We never really see the global situation as a total situation. Today's political leaders are still lacking of the vision. They very often just try to cope with their own election, their own popularity, solving the problem or selling the ideas to meet their own voters. By doing that, it creates a great imbalance in terms of making deals or treaty or all those things. Even today the borders they're seeing the physical borders are very different from the political borders. Because all those powers are so connected, and you cannot even see whose interest in what move.
That's why I always question this sense. The feeling of home really requires a lot of trust. It requires you to identify with it, which I always find myself very contradictory to.
Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.