Futurist: No Chinese democracy

'Clean'?

Clean. So Lee says, "OK guys, we have nothing, we are going to start now, there is one thing that is important: clean. You have to be clean. You have to brush your teeth, wash your hands, clean your room. Clean. I want the street to be clean. I want the school to be clean, everything to be clean." So that's the core, the center.

Around clean you start getting discipline. Aha! Discipline. So even today people complain, say, "Ah, Singapore is not a democracy. You cannot chew gum. It's illegal to chew gum."

So I did a lot of work over there, and when I study with young people, I tell them when they come in, "In other parts of the world, they say that in Singapore you cannot chew gum." And younger women18, 19they say, "Yes, but at 2 o'clock in the morning we can walk back home and we never have a problem." So the trade-off is do you want to chew gum or to be attacked when you go back home?

Will China live up to its promise 25 years from now?

I'm not sure. I'm not sure, because part of the Chineseyou know, my work is to study the collective unconscious. The way cultures and their conscious shape the future. When you react as a Chinese, you don't react as a Japanese, and you don't react as an Indian or a Brazilian. But China will never be a democracy, I'm convinced of that.

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Futurist: No Chinese democracy