Korridorium

♫ Jiǎ Píy­ǐngxì ♫

36/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor, which was once an air duct, to reach the multi-story shop­ping dis­trict we built inside Tai He Dian, the Hall of Supreme Har­mony. Here, spread across many lev­els, mil­lions of us live. The young peo­ple in these streets and on the curved bridges regard me with a cer­tain rev­er­ence: an old man. They may sus­pect that I am a relic, belong­ing to the very first gen­er­a­tion of New Chi­nese, the pio­neers of the Great Recon­struc­tion. The idea that the For­bid­den City could accom­mo­date nearly three bil­lion of us moved into the realm of tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity back then; indeed, I was one of the sci­en­tists who pro­posed to the National Peo­ple’s Con­gress that we shrink our peo­ple to con­serve our con­ti­nen­t’s resources and allow our nation a long, happy future of pros­per­ity.

Although we com­pleted the New China project with great grav­ity and metic­u­lous care, I am no longer cer­tain today if that large-scale minia­tur­iza­tion was a good idea. While we—now mea­sur­ing only a thir­ti­eth of our orig­i­nal size—consume barely a hun­dredth of our pre­vi­ous resources, our plan to set a noble exam­ple for the other nations of the world has failed. With the most hon­or­able inten­tions, we have turned the giant empire of China into a king­dom of dwarves. Quite apart from the rat prob­lem we have here in the For­bid­den City—which, though hushed up, per­sists despite the pro­tec­tion of our 13,844 ancient carved dragons—not only did no other coun­try wish to join our Com­mon March to True Great­ness, but we are no longer respected or taken seri­ously. In the eyes of the world, we Chi­nese have shrunk to an insignif­i­cant and, at best, cute curios­ity.

The For­bid­den City (inter­ac­tive map):

View of (and into) the Hall of Supreme Har­mony: