Evan Osnos

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core. ”

Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements. ”

The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire. ”

If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian. ”

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. ”

Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology. ”