Evan Osnos Quotes
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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.
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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.
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In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
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In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.
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In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs.
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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.
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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.
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By the Nineties, so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards.
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I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
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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.
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Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.
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Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.
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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.
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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.
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If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse and the likelihood of punishment are minimal.
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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.
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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.
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Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
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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.
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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.
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Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world.
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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.
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When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.
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I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.