Dr. Jeff Hou

So if you go to a Chinese city, for example, it's just as vibrant and colorful.

in some way even more vibrant and colorful than a lot of cities in liberal democracy.

But it doesn't suggest how the spaces are actually governed.

So there's a disconnect between the appearance of spaces

and then how they actually function in the active democracy.

This is how the state can control a narrative, how they can control what people remember

what people know.

And so I think I come back to, again, the question of democracy is that a public space, a functioning public space is where this kind of story can be told.

And that required not just the actual physical artifact, but also the actual conversation, right?

People speaking up about what might have been marginalized, what might have been forgotten, right?

And so the actual speech, I think, is still critical.

And this is, I think, where we need to be concerned with, you know, when things have been erased, people are being marginalized and stories are not being told.

Thank you.