Evan Osnos Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries.
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China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.
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When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.
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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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I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
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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.
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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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In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.
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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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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.'
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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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Donald Trump has the ability to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal as he says, but if he were to do so, this would be regarded in Tehran as an abrogation of the deal. This would allow the Iranian side of the deal to in effect withdraw because they could say that the United States has not held up its end of the bargain, and therefore we're going to restart our nuclear program.
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The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire.
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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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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.