China had refuted the claim that trade with outsiders opened minds and societies. Now the technology was on hand, it might perfect the totalitarian state and offer a new model of social organisation to compete with or replace liberal democracies—a dictatorship sustained by a reliable flow of consumer goods and a degree of targeted genocide. Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for
