Osnos China Quotes & Sayings

China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries. — Evan Osnos

The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements. — Evan Osnos

Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches. — Evan Osnos

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

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. — Evan Osnos

The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history - and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival. — Evan Osnos

China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements. — Evan Osnos

To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you ... That's why I've come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own. — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos

Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism. — 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

China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation. — Evan Osnos

But in China, even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries - one of the highest levels in the world. — 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

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

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. — 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

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. — Evan Osnos

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me. — Evan Osnos

Always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
quoted by Evan Osnos to describe the rapidly urbanising China — F Scott Fitzgerald

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. — 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

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos

I think there's a tendency, and it's an understandable tendency, to imagine that China makes decisions out of a grand strategy. The reality is that I think China today is operating, most of all, based on its domestic needs. — Evan Osnos

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. — 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

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — 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

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — 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

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.' — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos

Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers. — 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

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos

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. — Evan Osnos