Evan Osnos Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.
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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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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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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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If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
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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.
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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.
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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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China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.
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'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.
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There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population.
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I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.
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I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.
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Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
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In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.
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The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.
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Chinese leaders are saying amongst themselves, according to the Chinese analysts who follow them most closely, that they believe Donald Trump is in the end making hollow threats, and they think that he would be easy to handle, is how one of them put it.
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Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.
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If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would.
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The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements.