Over a meal with QU and Xiao, Qu asks about this paper we are writing. I try to say “micropolitics” in Chinese. He asks, “How can there be politics in the hutong? There is no politics (政治 zhengzhi, in Chinese) between the people in this yard. Politics is something from above; it’s government.” So we try to find a Chinese equivalent of our English sense of the word ‘politics’. We come to ‘relations’, ‘neighbourhood interconnections’, something along these lines… In thinking about it, he recalls for us the story of two other neighbours getting into a huge dispute last year, whereby one neighbour, a 70 year-old woman, tried to build a small coal shed in front of her home, thus making the ‘public’ corridor narrower — a nuisance to the other household who would have to pass it everyday. When the woman went ahead and had workers build the shed for her, the husband of the other family took a hammer and smashed it down. She had the workers build it up again. As the workers carried out their job, the husband began a brawl with them, and the police and chengguan were finally called in to intervene. Yes, a micropolitics of interpersonal relations. A politics inevitably linked to power and space. One becomes the other. Does this serve as a screen for something? A filter for something larger or smaller? I worry about applicability, have fallen into the postmodern traps. And noticed yesterday that you have been identified as a postmodern philosopher… so tell me, under fog of screen and language, how can anything be translated anymore?