Evan Osnos Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.
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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.
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China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.
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Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.