Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support that the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”

She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.

Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.