might safely open, develop, and change. They mixed the crouching nervousness of a secret political party with the vivid nightmares of a nation that had been invaded, abused — humiliated, they said - by nine countries since the mid-19" Century Opium Wars. “We used to worry about war and talk about its possibility every year,” Deng told them. “It seems the worry was overdone.” The world was, he felt, entering an era of heping yu fazhan - peace and development. Terrible, nation-demolishing wars would not soon victimize China, Deng thought. Nation building was the nature of the age. Its tools would be science, finance, and trade. If the Chinese people worked hard, he promised his incredulous listeners, they might by the year 2000 grow their thin $250 per capita income to the nearly unimaginable target of $1000. “I don’t care if the cat is white or black,” he famously observed, “as long as it catches mice.” Socialism? Capitalism? No matter so long as it produced progress. Deng’s judgment proved out. There were no major wars. Development was, for China, the name of the age. The cat caught $1000 dollars of per capita income nearly on the old man’s schedule. It is still playing with the string. There is something admirably direct about the Western way of problem solving, of course. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. It has its uses. But it’s also true that this sort of elementary geometry does not describe, always, the best path. Particularly not today, in an era when topological collapse or instant connection means that the distance from a to b can go to zero (or infinity) in a single sudden shift. Yes, you may be stringing a line from a to b, but if you’re putting it up in a tornado? Is the best route to a new Middle East really the tipping over of stable states? Is the quickest path to climate control voluntary compacts? Are faster markets and more unwatched capitalism the safest way to ameliorate our unbalanced economics? Sometimes a more indir