Evan Osnos Quotes

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.

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.

Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.’

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.

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.