Harlem was the main chance for the east end of New York, for eastsiders, as that real estate boom that took place in the 1890s - and it was a preposterous one where people bought and sold, and everything appreciated with each sale - and eventually, of course, the house of cards would crumble.

Harlem was a development, a developer's dream and a place where residents had more space and more amenities than ever before. The subway reached 145th street about 1904, and it seemed that Harlem's destiny was to become largely a preserve of successful ethnics relocating and arriving. Then, overnight, the bust took place.

It was clear to many American working men and women that the Homestead Steel Strike of the early 1890s, when Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick broke the backs of the steel workers, that that was a watershed.

The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.

Far as the government's reform agenda is concerned, a series of measures have been enacted which should increase the supply potential of the economy.

I left Beijing in the late 1980s to live in Hong Kong because, having been blacklisted by the government, I couldn't publish my works on the mainland.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.