The heat of the East’s summer only hit me after I left the demographic digestive system underneath Shanghai’s surface. The metro tunnels have banned the undifferentiating darkness in favour of the light of digital advertisements, which remain fixed at the same speed as the train itself. A gimmick that did impress me and is clearly demonstrative of where this place is at, but in itself and towards the world it allows entry. Another light of reason, one might say. And light always follows primordial static darkness. It creates form, time and thus life. Light is indeed creation itself. And creation itself in modern China comes in the form of commerce. At least that is the modern viewpoint, which considers any cultural form derived from agriculture in the same way civilizations after Sumer conceived the hunting-gathering/horti past before the arrival of land owning elites as a faceless and nameless abyss. Only the…