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I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.
Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.
Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.
China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.
The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements.
Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.
I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.
It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire.
In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.
To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.
When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.
The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.
Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.
In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.
I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.
Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 - struck by a falling telephone pole.
Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.
I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.
The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire.
Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.
If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.
China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries.
Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.
For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could.
If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse and the likelihood of punishment are minimal.
As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.
Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts.
China doesn't have a single leader. It has - a first among equals is the president, and his name will probably be Xi Jinping, almost certainly.
China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.
'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.
When the British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh first worked in China, more than a decade ago, he rendered it as a nation of people in Technicolor.
Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.
If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.
Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way.
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.
We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.
Donald Trump has a mantra of despair, of loss. He says we don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't. And he says the American dream is dead.
The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.
When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide.
By the Nineties, so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards.
Walking, it turns out, is a sublime way to get to know people in China. They're used to meeting strangers on the road. Many here understand what it feels like to walk a long way.
There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.
If you're trying to write about what the Chinese people are talking about, you can sometimes get a distorted picture if you go online and look at the conversation on social media.
Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it.