Top 60 Evan Osnos Quotes

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.

The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.

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.’

I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.

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.

If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.

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.

When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.

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.

If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse and the likelihood of punishment are minimal.

In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

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.

China’s Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.

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.

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.

Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.

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.

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.

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.

If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.

Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation’s leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.

Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 – struck by a falling telephone pole.

China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed – and people travelled as little as they could.

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.

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.

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.

‘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 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.

Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.

To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It’s tragic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that ‘Gangnam Style’ is satire.

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire.

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.

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.