IF you blinked you probably missed it, but on Wednesday there was another unsurprising little moment in the ongoing Nkandla saga. Catherine Mabuza, who chairs Parliament's public works portfolio committee, blocked discussion on Public Protector Thuli Madonsela's investigation into President Jacob Zuma's home.
It was all rather predictable - but it did remind me of a trip I took to China some years back to see the changes brought about by Beijing's policy of economic pragmatism and the mad desire to sling up more skyscrapers than the rest of the world put together.
Despite the novel shininess, there were still pronounced traces of the old authoritarianism, and in Xi'an, the heavily polluted capital of Shaanxi province, the hotel rules no doubt echoed the hard-line dogmatism of this earlier era. Under no circumstances were guests to dry their laundry on the television sets. It was forbidden to store radioactive materials in the rooms, and gambling and prostitution were not allowed after 11pm.
This put paid to my leisure plans, and so I duly trekked off to the nearest World Heritage Site - the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, who reigned as the first emperor of a unified China from 221BC to 210BC.
Qin was a chronic over-achiever, and the projects undertaken in his lifetime included parts of the Great Wall, a national road system, and the life-sized Terracotta Army that guarded his mausoleum. He also, in the interests of stability, banned many books and buried scholars alive.
The stabiliy, such as it was, ended with his death, and the Qin dynasty collapsed amid messy civil wars. It was all very well having an army of statues to protect you in the afterlife. But issuing the "soldiers" with some 40 000 real bronze weapons? When the peasants revolted, they knew exactly where to go to arm themselves.