Menu

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Evan Osnos Quotes

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.

– 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

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

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

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

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

Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.

– Evan Osnos

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

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.

– Evan Osnos

In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors’ coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home.

– 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

The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise.

– Evan Osnos

I’ve been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

– 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

If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.

– Evan Osnos

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.

– 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

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 Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.

– 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

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

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

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

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.

– 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

I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.

– Evan Osnos

When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.

– Evan Osnos

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.

– 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

Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 – struck by a falling telephone pole.

– Evan Osnos

- 1
- 2
- 3