"The Party has accepted that it cannot eliminate Feng Shui; instead, it has placed itself as the ultimate authority on how it should be used. In this “state-led logic of legitimation,” the layout of China’s cities becomes a map of political authority, leading back to Beijing. Reading [Singapore Management University Professor Andrew] Stokols, I recalled the police officers from 2018, claiming atheism while adjusting their desks to face the right way. They weren’t hypocrites. They were simply navigating a country where the state bans superstition yet practices it, where ideology bends to mountains and rivers, and where even the most secular revolution eventually realizes that the dragon veins run deeper than Marx."