Evan Osnos Quotes

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 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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.

I’ve been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

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

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

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.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

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

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