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Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.
For my book, 'Age of Ambition,' I spent time documenting, among other things, the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced.
For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.
The U.S. must differentiate between controversial assertions of power, like those in the South China Sea, and fair reflections of China's growing contribution to the world, such as the new banks.
In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.
When Libya was in turmoil in 2011, the Chinese public was surprised to discover that more than thirty thousand of their countrymen were living there, most of them working on Chinese-run oil projects.
A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.
The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise.
The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.
In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today.
For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.
When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.
I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.
There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way.
Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.
By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.
For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.
Like most markets, Da Jing is most alive just after dawn, when the elementary-school children in their uniforms and bright red kerchiefs set off through narrow streets, marking the start of another frenzied day of commerce.
I think there's a tendency, and it's an understandable tendency, to imagine that China makes decisions out of a grand strategy. The reality is that I think China today is operating, most of all, based on its domestic needs.
There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population.
On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him.
It's worth being clear - you know, I think that the ideas that somebody like Richard Spencer endorses and that other members of the self-identified white nationalist groups endorse - those ideas really are repellent to most people.
The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.
In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors' coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home.
Actually the idea of having Mexico pay for the wall on the southern border is a nonstarter. That seems to be generally pretty much recognized on both sides of the border. What you find, though, is that logistically it's not impossible.
Orville Schell and John Delury have delivered a brilliantly original and essential book: the road map to China’s quest for national salvation... Vivid, literate, and brimming with insights, Wealth and Power deserves to become a classic.
Donald Trump is an American presidential nominee who was describing Russia in terms that they haven't heard almost ever. And so there is a belief that Donald Trump would be a collaborative, willing and I think perhaps quite able partner.
In China, inaugurations are frequent affairs, though they have nothing to do with presidents. A news cycle rarely passes without some fanfare over the inaugural ride on a new subway line or the inaugural trip across an unusually large bridge.
Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.
Analysts, scholars, business people, diplomats, and journalists involved with China spend so much time questioning one another's biases and loyalties that they have even settled on two opposing categories: 'panda huggers' versus 'panda sluggers.'
Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages - and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks.
To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Chinese leaders are saying amongst themselves, according to the Chinese analysts who follow them most closely, that they believe Donald Trump is in the end making hollow threats, and they think that he would be easy to handle, is how one of them put it.
In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs.
The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.
More than four decades after Nixon met Mao, the relationship between the U.S. and China has reached a pivotal moment. To date, even as China has become more powerful and present in our lives, Americans have generally found it to be an unsatisfying 'enemy.'
When we remember presidents who didn't fulfill their promises - for instance George H.W. Bush saying no new taxes or Barack Obama saying he would close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay - we remember those because they're the exceptions, not the rule.
When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.
Deng Xiaoping made a calculation. He bet on demographics. What he knew was that China had this enormous population of young, underemployed people, people who he could move from the farms to the coast and put them to work in factories, and that would be the lifeblood of China's economy.
The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.
In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.
When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.
There was a docudrama that was made, called 'The Death Of A Princess,' which was about a true story in Saudi Arabia. It was about a public execution for adultery. And when the movie was aired on British television, the Saudi government threatened to cut off oil exports and to cut off diplomatic relations.
At the age of eighty, the Dalai Lama has begun to discuss a range of prospects for the future disposition of his soul. Traditionally, after he dies, a search party of senior monks would set out to locate his new incarnation, who is most often a boy toddler, who goes on to be trained as a monk and a leader.
Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.
Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world.
There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.
If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.
Donald Trump has the ability to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal as he says, but if he were to do so, this would be regarded in Tehran as an abrogation of the deal. This would allow the Iranian side of the deal to in effect withdraw because they could say that the United States has not held up its end of the bargain, and therefore we're going to restart our nuclear program.
If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would.