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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.
Evan Osnos -
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.'
Evan Osnos
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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.
Evan Osnos -
Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos
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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.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
Evan Osnos -
Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.
Evan Osnos
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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.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos -
Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.
Evan Osnos
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I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
Evan Osnos -
When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.
Evan Osnos -
If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse and the likelihood of punishment are minimal.
Evan Osnos -
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.
Evan Osnos