Some reflections on the challenge of changing from a quantity-obsessed nation to one more focused on quality—quality of products, quality of life, quality of education etc.—while also having to deal with increased inequality in Chinese society. Partly inspired by our new book Polarized Cities.

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I just completed Thoreau’s bio on the last day of 2018. One of the many revelations I gained from reading this wonderful biography Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (2017) is what an amazing scientist he was and how keen were his powers of observation and analysis of the natural world. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise—after all, this is the man who famously spent a year or more living in a cabin in the woods on the edge of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. And yet I’d been used to thinking of him more as a political philosopher and “transcendendalist” than a scientist.