China

"China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong’s death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry."

"A neighbor with one billion people equipped with nuclear bombs and has expanded its military outlays by double digits for 17 years in a row, and it is unclear as to what this is being used for. It is beginning to be a considerable threat."

"China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the '30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle."

"The most striking cultural shifts in China over the last two decades or so has been the revival, both orchestrated and spontaneous, of tradition. The main trope for culture in the twentieth century, especially since 1949, has been anti-traditionalism. As far back as the in 1919, and before, whether it was the financial elite, the liberals, the Marxists, or anarchists they all agreed that China was poor and that one of the causes of that state of affairs was the backward traditional culture... We have witnessed a dramatic reevaluation of tradition in China, and also in other countries with a Confucian heritage such as Korea. This part of the world has witnessed rapid growth over the last three decades that has sharply reduced poverty and the region has remained at peace. So when people look around and ask what do all these countries have in common, one answer is their Confucian heritage. So whereas the previous narrative was that Confucianism undermined modernization and economic growth, now many argue that it actually helps... Chinese thinkers gave much thought to how to select able and virtuous political leaders, which abilities matter and which virtues matter? Chinese pondered about, and experimented with, mechanisms for selecting leaders. And that tradition continues on today."

"Over the last thirty years in China, the political leadership has been selected first and foremost through examinations, followed by evaluations of performance at lower levels of government. No one rises to the top without extensive experience at all levels. And that approach is quite similar in form to what we have seen throughout much of Chinese imperial history. I do think that the central articulated in Chinese culture ought to serve as the standard for evaluating political progress or regress in China. And I do think those values are different from the liberal ideas embraced... China has been thrust into this global role very quickly, perhaps far more quickly than anybody imagined, including the Chinese. The relative political and economic weight of China has increased so dramatically as to be disorienting to Chinese. When people talk about the achievements of China over the past thirty years the most commonly cited one is poverty reduction. About half a billion people were lifted out of poverty, in part due to energizing the people through market reforms. But that process was only possible because there were public officials overseeing the work and they were promoted based on their performance. Political meritocracy itself is a key to reducing poverty... But the other achievement of China is that it has not fought a war since 1979."

"The February meeting of NATO... defense ministers... revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China... NATO seems oblivious to the changing dynamics of today's world, as if it were living on a different planet. Its one-sided Reflection Group report cites Russia's violation of international law in Crimea as a principal cause of deteriorating relations with the West, and insists that Russia must "return to full compliance with international law." But it ignores the U.S. and NATO's far more numerous violations of international law and leading role in the tensions fueling the renewed Cold War: Illegal invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq... broken agreement over NATO expansion into Eastern Europe... U.S. withdrawals from important arms control treaties... More than 300,000 bombs and missiles dropped on other countries by the U.S. and its allies since 2001... U.S. proxy wars in Libya and Syria, which plunged both countries into chaos, revived Al Qaeda and spawned the Islamic State.. U.S. management of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led to economic collapse, Russian annexation of Crimea and civil war in Eastern Ukraine... The stark reality of the U.S. record as a serial aggressor whose offensive war machine dwarfs Russia's defense spending by 11 to 1 and China's by 2.8 to 1, even without counting other NATO countries' military spending."

"NATO's failure to seriously examine its own role in what it euphemistically calls "uncertain times" should be more alarming to Americans and Europeans than its one-sided criticisms of Russia and China, whose contributions to the uncertainty of our times pale by comparison."

"If I were an Englishman, I should esteem the man who advised a war with China to be the greatest living enemy of my country. You would be beaten in the end, and perhaps a revolution in India would follow."

"A 'superpower' is a country that wields enough military, political and economic might to convince nations in all parts of the world to do things they otherwise wouldn't. Pundits have rushed to label China the next superpower, and so have many ordinary Americans... Little of China's dramatic economic growth is finding its way into the pockets of Chinese consumers; the byproduct of an economy driven by massive state-owned enterprises rather than private industry."

"The United States welcomes the emergence of a China that is peaceful and prosperous and that supports international institutions."

"There is a tendency in parts of Chinese thinking which says: "We need not only to be an important power in the region, we need to dominate the region!"."

"I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. (The United States is) the most warlike nation in the history of the world... How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?... We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion (military spending) ... China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that's why they're ahead of us. In almost every way... And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you'd probably have $2 trillion left over. We'd have high-speed railroad. We'd have bridges that aren't collapsing. We'd have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong."

"We all know that if Russia or China were guilty of what we have done in Vietnam, we would be exploding with moral indignation at these monstrous crimes."

"...I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. [...] There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step."

"The threat of China is not military. The threat of China is they can't be intimidated... Europe you can intimidate. When the US tries to get people to stop investing in Iran, European companies pull out, China disregards it. You look at history and understand why — they've been around for 4,000 years, they have contempt for the barbarians, they just don't give a damn. OK, you scream, we'll go ahead and take over a big piece of Saudi or Iranian oil. And that's the threat, you can't intimidate them — it's driving people in Washington berserk. But, you know, of all the major powers, they've been the least aggressive militarily."

"China is the center of the Asian energy security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia. India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq."

"As the most powerful state, the U.S. makes its own laws, using force and conducting economic warfare at will. It also threatens sanctions against countries that do not abide by its conveniently flexible notions of "free trade." In one important case, Washington has employed such threats with great effectiveness (and GATT approval) to force open Asian markets for U.S. tobacco exports and advertising, aimed primarily at the growing markets of women and children. The U.S. Agriculture Department has provided grants to tobacco firms to promote smoking overseas. Asian countries have attempted to conduct educational anti-smoking campaigns, but they are overwhelmed by the miracles of the market, reinforced by U.S. state power through the sanctions threat. Philip Morris, with an advertising and promotion budget of close to $9 billion in 1992, became China's largest advertiser. The effect of Reaganite sanction threats was to increase advertising and promotion of cigarette smoking (particularly U.S. brands) quite sharply in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with the use of these lethal substances. In South Korea, for example, the rate of growth in smoking more than tripled when markets for U.S. lethal drugs were opened in 1988. The Bush Administration extended the threats to Thailand, at exactly the same time that the "war on drugs" was declared; the media were kind enough to overlook the coincidence, even suppressing the outraged denunciations by the very conservative Surgeon-General. Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto estimates that among Chinese children under 20 today, 50 million will die of cigarette-related diseases, an achievement that ranks high even by 20th century standards."

"There is a hush over all Europe, nay, over all the world, broken only by the dull thud of Japanese bombs falling on Chinese cities, on Chinese Universities or near British and American ships. But then, China is a long way off, so why worry? The Chinese are fighting for what the founders of the American Constitution in their stately language called: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And they seem to be fighting very well. Many good judges think they are going to win. Anyhow, let’s wish them luck! Let’s give them a wave of encouragement – as your President did last week, when he gave notice about ending the commercial treaty. After all, the suffering Chinese are fighting our battle, the battle of democracy. They are defending the soil, the good earth, that has been theirs since the dawn of time against cruel and unprovoked aggression. Give them a cheer across the ocean – no one knows whose turn it may be next. If this habit of military dictatorships’ breaking into other people’s lands with bomb and shell and bullet, stealing the property and killing the proprietors, spreads too widely, we may none of us be able to think of summer holidays for quite a while."

"The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: "China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it." There's another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modern—it dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: "The tail of China is large and will not be wagged." I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honor to be addressing you at this moment."

"The People's Republic of China is still a Marxist, Leninist, Maoist nation. So, you know, communism is still involved there. They haven't figured their way out of that particularly ideological box yet and that's their misfortune."

"China and Iran have drafted a “sweeping economic and security partnership,” according to The New York Times... This “strategic partnership” is the result of Donald Trump’s punishing sanctions against Iran... If China and Iran conclude their partnership agreement, Trump would presumably be less likely to use military force against Iran. If he did, he would have to be willing to take on China as well. That would be most unwise."

"Biden has pretty much picked up Trump’s foreign policy... The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China... there is constant talk about what is called the China threat. You can read it in sober, reasonable, usually reasonable journals, about the terrible China threat, and that we have to move expeditiously to contain and limit the China threat.... What exactly is the China threat? Actually that question is rarely raised here.... the distinguished statesman, former [Australian] Prime Minister Paul Keating, did have an essay in the Australian press about the China threat. He finally concluded realistically that the China threat is China’s existence. The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course. That is the threat. When we talk about the threat of China, we’re talking about the alleged threats at China’s borders. China does plenty of wrong things, terrible things. You can make many criticisms. But are they a threat?... they are not a threat."

"Right at the same time as Keating’s article, Australia’s leading military correspondent Brian Toohey, highly knowledgeable, did an assessment of the relative military power of China, in their own region of China and the United States and its allies Japan and Australia. It’s laughable. One U.S. Trident submarine, now being replaced by even more lethal ones — one U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons. China in the South China Sea has four old noisy submarines which can’t even get out because they’re contained by superior U.S. and Allied Force... In the face of this, the United States is sending a fleet of nuclear submarines to Australia. That’s the AUKUS deal—the Australia, U.K., United States—which have no strategic purpose whatsoever. They will not even be in operation for 15 years, but they do incite China almost certainly to build up its lagging military forces, increasing the level of confrontation. There are problems in the South China Sea that can be met with diplomacy and negotiations, the regional powers taking the lead, could go into the details. But the right measure is not increasing provocation, increasing the threat of an accidental development which could lead to devastating, even Earthly-terminal nuclear war. But that is the direction the Biden administration is following, expansion of the Trump programs. That is the core of their foreign policy programs."

"Do not take it for granted that China is number two, and do not make the assumption that we will be number one sooner or later."

"The emperor hold upon the Chinamen may be strong, but the Chinaman's hold upon himself is stronger... The Chinaman will not long be willing to wear the cast off shoes of the negro, and, if he refuses, there will be trouble again. The negro worked and took his pay in religion and the lash. The Chinaman is a different article and will want the cash. He may, like the negro, accept Christianity, but, unlike the negro, he will not care to pay for it in labor. He had the Golden Rule in substance five hundred years before the coming of Christ, and has notions of justice that are not to be confused by any... Chinese children are in American schools in San Francisco. None of our children are in Chinese schools, and probably never will be, though in some things they might well teach us valuable lessons. Contact with these yellow children of the Celestial Empire would convince us that the points of human difference, great as they, upon first sight, seem, are as nothing compared with the points of human agreement. Such contact would remove mountains of prejudice... The Chinese in themselves have first rate recommendations. They are industrious, docile, cleanly, frugal. They are dexterous of hand, patient in toil, marvelously gifted in the power of imitation, and have but few wants."

"It is objected to the Chinaman that he is secretive and treacherous, and will not tell the truth when he thinks it for his interest to tell a lie. There may be truth in all this; it sounds very much like the account of man’s heart given in the creeds. If he will not tell the truth, except when it is for his interest to do so, let us make it for his interest to tell the truth. We can do it by applying to him the same principle of justice that we apply to ourselves. But I doubt if the Chinese are more untruthful than other people. At this point I have one certain test. Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported. Now a people who have confided in each other for five thousand years; who have extended their empire in all directions until it embraces one-fifth of the population of the globe; who hold important commercial relations with all nations; who are now entering into treaty stipulations with ourselves, and with all the great European powers, cannot be a nation of cheats and liars, but must have some respect for veracity. The very existence of China for so long a period, and her progress in civilization, are proofs of her truthfulness"

"No victory of arms, or tyranny of alien finance, can long suppress a nation so rich in resources and vitality. The invader will lose funds or patience before the loins of China will lose virility; within a century China will have absorbed and civilized her conquerors, and will have learned all the technique of what transiently bears the name of modern industry; roads and communications will give her unity, economy and thrift will give her funds, and a strong government will give her order and peace."

"As India is par excellence the land of metaphysics and religion, China is by like preeminence the home of humanistic, or non-theological, philosophy."

"The average Chinese is at once an animist, a Taoist, a Buddhist and a Confucianist."

"Most people with mental disorders in China never receive treatment. There is often a stigma attached to such ailments. Some think that people with psychiatric conditions are possessed by evil spirits. Many see mental disorders as a sign of weakness, and regard them as socially contagious: a relative of someone with a serious disorder may find it hard to marry. Families sometimes have their kin treated far away to hide the “shame” of their condition, or keep them hidden at home. Even many medical students worry that those working with psychiatric patients risk catching their disease, says Xu Ni of “It Gets Brighter”, a mental-health NGO in Beijing."

"They're not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don't innovate. That's why they're stealing our intellectual property."

"The Chinese are less a nation than a fusion of peoples united by a common culture, and the history of China is the record of an expanding culture."

"[Chinese development has its roots in the 1949 Chinese Revolution, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong, whereby it liberated itself from the imperialist system. This allowed it to develop for decades under a planned economy largely free of constraints from outside forces, establishing a strong agricultural and industrial economic base. This was followed by a shift in the post-Maoist reform period to a hybrid system of more limited state planning along with a much greater reliance on market relations (and a vast expansion of debt and speculation) under conditions—the globalization of the world market—that were particularly fortuitous to its “catching up.” Through s and other pressures aimed at destabilizing China’s position in the world market, the United States is already seeking to challenge the bases of China’s growth in world trade. China, therefore, stands not so much for the successes of but rather for its inherent limitations. The current Chinese model, moreover, carries within it many of the destructive tendencies of the system of capital accumulation. Ultimately, China’s future too depends on a return to the process of revolutionary transition, spurred by its own population."

"The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdowns can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability."

"Like many Chinese people, particularly those of the older generation, she didn't show her love for me by hugging or soliciting emotional outpourings, but through food and fussing."

"China’s capacity to meet new demands for agricultural products has been assessed by analysts inside and outside China since the 1980s. Economists have anticipated that market forces would induce China to import grains and other land-intensive crops, but Chinese officials (motivated by food security and other concerns) have long resisted these forces and sought to maintain self-sufficiency. However, officials are now adjusting their strategies to accommodate their country’s growing reliance on agricultural imports."

"have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed."

"The Chinese are emphatically not a religious people, though they are very superstitious. Belief in a God has come down from the remotest ages, but the old simple creed has been so overlaid by Buddhism as not to be discernible at the present day. Buddhism is now the dominant religion of China. It is closely bound up with the lives of the people, and is a never-failing refuge in sickness or worldly trouble. It is no longer the subtle doctrine which was originally presented to the people of India, but something much more clearly defined and appreciable by the plainest intellect. Buddha is the saviour of the people through righteousness alone, and Buddhist saints are popularly supposed to possess intercessory powers. Yet reverence is always wanting; and crowds will laugh and talk, and buy and sell sweetmeats, in a Buddhist temple, before the very eyes of the most sacred images. So long as divine intervention is not required, an ordinary Chinaman is content to neglect his divinities; but no sooner does sickness or financial trouble come upon the family, than he will hurry off to propitiate the gods. He accomplishes this through the aid of the priests, who receive his offerings of money, and light candles or incense at the shrine of the deity to be invoked. Buddhist priests are not popular with the Chinese, who make fun of their shaven heads, and doubt the sincerity of their convictions as well as the purity of their lives. "No meat nor wine may enter here" is a legend inscribed at the gate of most Buddhist temples, the ordinary diet as served in the refectory being strictly vegetarian. A tipsy priest, however, is not an altogether unheard-of combination, and has provided more than one eminent artist with a subject of an interesting picture."

"Let us now pause to take stock of some of the results which have accrued from the operation and influence of Confucianism during such a long period, and over such swarming myriads of the human race. It is a commonplace in the present day to assert that the Chinese are hardworking, thrifty, and sober—the last-mentioned, by the way, in a land where drunkenness is not regarded as a crime. Shallow observers of the globe-trotter type, who have had their pockets picked by professional thieves in Hong-Kong, and even resident observers who have not much cultivated their powers of observation and comparison, will assert that honesty is a virtue denied to the Chinese; but those who have lived long in China and have more seriously devoted themselves to discover the truth, may one and all be said to be arrayed upon the other side. The amount of solid honesty to be met with in every class, except the professionally criminal class, is simply astonishing. That the word of the Chinese merchant is as good as his bond has long since become a household word, and so it is in other walks of life."

"All this saber-rattling is despicable. Neither Russia nor Iran threaten the U.S. and there is no reason why the U.S. should be eager to defend Taiwan or Ukraine (and also Israel). China’s military budget is miniscule compared to the U.S. and the only real threat it represents is as a competitor on world markets, where it is already dominant in a number of key sectors. The U.S. has to get off this global dominance militarism wagon but how do we do it when both major parties embrace it?"

"[N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious — and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or “victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn’t judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on. But there’s another reason. As you may have noticed, I’ve become much more interested in evolutionary psychology of late, particularly the topic of coalitional instincts. The coalition instinct is the programming that helped us form strategic groups that advance our self-interest. We are a social species and cooperation is what helped us skyrocket to the top of the food chain."

"So far, the world economy, particularly Australia and the United States, have benefited greatly from Chinese economic growth. This is likely to continue to be the case for some time... There is no real alternative to the United States as the global leader. China doesn't want the role. It would only divert its focus from its own development challenges. And to be frank, China would not be trusted by many countries, particularly in the , to be the global leader... Authoritarian state capitalism, seen today in China and Russia. While both countries have introduced elements of a market economy, private companies there operate side-by-side and at a significant disadvantage to state owned entities favored by government regulators. This mixed economy is not paralleled on the political side. What is emerging is an increasingly authoritarian political system with decreasing space for civil society, free media, and dissent. This model is attractive to authoritarian leaders around the world who see it as way to maintain power while still growing their economies."

"We are also seeing a diffusion of power and competition at the nation state level. This competition comes not just from Russia and China, but also from emerging countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the other ASEAN states. These states are also beginning to organize themselves into structures outside of and somewhat in competition... We must find a way to convince the SCO and BRICS institutions to see themselves not as competitors but as collaborators and partners with the rest of us. The role of China will be key in this effort. Neither China nor the United States can solve global challenges by themselves. And both China and the United States need progress in meeting these challenges if they are to achieve their own objectives for the development and economic well being of their people. A way must be found for the United States and China to work together with the rest of the international community to meet the global challenges we face."

"Asia now stands at the dawn a new history of civilization to create its own future, finally emerging from the long tunnel of 150 years of westernization and overcoming the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century. Having achieved advanced industrialization based on market economics in the latter half of the twentieth century, the region is now home to some 900 million people in the middle class and about 1.1 billion 'netizens' connected by the Internet. Within certain East Asian countries, civil society and democracy are flourishing. Now, China and the ASEAN nations are progressing on their own courses. East Asia is on the verge of birthing a new era marked by civil society and democracy."

"As a foreign literature it is studied also by the Coreans, the Japanese, and the Annamites; and it may therefore be quite appropriately called the Classic Literature of the Far East. The civilization of all these nations has been affected by its study, perhaps even in a higher degree than that of the nations of Europe has been by the literatures of Greece and Rome. Millions received from it, in the course of centuries, their mental training. The Chinese who created it have through it perpetuated their national character and imparted some of their idiosyncrasies of thought to their formerly illiterate neighbors."

"The Chinese are industrious, courageous, honest, and intelligent. They created the splendid ancient Chinese civilization, and today, they're firmly committed to the path of peaceful development and are making continuous progress in the modernization drive by carrying out the reform and opening up program."

"The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will definitely be accompanied by the thriving of Chinese culture."

"When China sends its students to the United States, especially when it sends central bankers and planners to the United States to study (and be recruited), they are told by the U.S. “Do as we say, not as we have done.” The United States is not telling China... how to get rich in the way that it did, by protective tariffs, by creating its own money and by making other countries dependent on it. The United States does not want you to be independent and self-reliant. The United States wants China to let itself become dependent on U.S. finance in order to invest in its own industry... The neoliberal plan is not to make you independent, and not to help you grow except to the extent that your growth will be paid to US investors or used to finance U.S. military spending around the world to encircle you and trying to destabilize you in Sichuan to try to pry China apart. Look at what the United States has done in Russia, and at what the International Monetary Fund in Europe has done to Greece, Latvia and the Baltic states. It is a dress rehearsal for what U.S. diplomacy would like to do to you, if it can convince you to follow the neoliberal US economic policy of financialization and privatization. De-dollarization is the alternative to privatization and financialization."

"So the question is, how do China, Russia, Iran and other countries break free of this U.S. dollarization strategy? As now constituted, dollarization creates a circular flow that finances American military spending by forcing the costs onto foreign central banks holding dollars. The solution obviously is to avoid using dollars in order to break free of American control of your economy. To do this, you have to have a non-Dollar currency. This currency alternative has to be large enough to have a critical mass, so that it can be used internationally. That’s why China, Russia, Iran and their allies are trying to create their own currency area, incorporating largely the Shanghai Cooperation Organization."

"The U.S.-China confrontation is not simply a national rivalry, but a conflict of economic and social systems.... From today’s U.S. vantage point... China and Russia are existential threats to the global expansion of financialized rentier wealth. Today’s Cold War 2.0 aims to deter China and potentially other counties from socializing their financial systems, land and natural resources, and keeping infrastructure utilities public to prevent their being monopolized in private hands to siphon off economic rents at the expense of productive investment in economic growth. The United States hoped that China might be as gullible as the Soviet Union and adopt neoliberal policy permitting its wealth to be privatized and turned into rent-extracting privileges, to be sold off to Americans."

"China, like Russia, has been reducing its dollar holdings as much as possible, just keeping enough to prevent the currency from being destabilized by the dollar inflows. China, Russia are buying gold instead of U.S. dollars as much as possible. China is trying to escape from buying Treasury securities. Why would any government want to buy Treasury securities yielding 0.1% when the dollars coming into China are trying to make loans or buying countries, making 15% profit or interest a year? Nobody would want that situation to continue. China doesn’t want it to continue. As long as it [China] is part of an international economy that is dollarized, it [China] is forced to take a loss, a sacrifice, year after year, subsidizing the U.S. economy. The only way that it can avoid that is to isolate itself from the U.S. dollar. No country until this time since 1945 has ever had the critical mass to be able to do it. That is the objective, the stated objective of Russia, China and their allies. Of course, they don’t want to buy treasury bills. That doesn’t mean that, yes, they found a wonderful investment making 0.1% a year and subsidizing the United States. That is not what China or any other country wants."

"With regard to nuclear weapons, the situation is far more dangerous than the last Doomsday Clock report. New weapons systems under development are much more effectively dangerous. The Biden administration, expanding upon Trump’s confrontational approach, has Chomsky at a loss for words to describe the danger at hand. Only recently, Biden met with NATO leaders and instructed them to plan on two wars, China and Russia. According to Chomsky: “This is beyond insanity.” Not only that, the group is carrying out provocative acts when diplomacy is really needed. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation."

"China seems to have been very much similar to the West, both in the production of new religious movements and in attracting to them figures from the political left who were officially promoting the struggle against “superstition.” Reconstructions of “Chinese traditional culture” as “non-religious,” and of the rich Chinese religious pluralism as mere “folk religion” should be viewed as propaganda rather than history."

"The [Chinese Communist] Party doesn’t just want to govern China; it wants to define governance itself."

"In 2012, the Chinese sociologist Sūn Lìpíng (b. 1955) suggested the PRC [People's Republic of China] faced four possible paths. One was return to Mao-style egalitarian populism, reducing inequality and corruption but risking the violence and irrationality of the Mao era. Another was to deepen the reforms – further privatizing the economy regardless of increased inequality. The third was to maintain the status quo. The fourth was to pursue reform while applying notions of fairness, justice, and universal values."

"China’s battle against poverty has benefited the largest number of people in human history. To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”"

"The greatest contribution towards the whole of human race, made by China, to prevent its 1.3 billion people from hunger... There are some foreigners who have eaten their fill and have nothing better to do than point their fingers at our affairs. First, China doesn't export Revolution; second, China doesn't export hunger and poverty; third, China doesn't come and cause you headaches, what more is there to be said?"

"We are ready to expand the friendly people-to-people exchanges and enhance exchanges and cooperation in science, technology, culture, education, and other areas... Enhanced interactions and cooperation between China and the United States serve the interests of our two peoples and are conducive to world peace and development. We should stay firmly rooted in the present while looking ahead to the future, and view and approach China-U.S. relations from a strategic and long-term perspective. We should, on the basis of the principles set forth in the three Sino-U.S. joint communiqués, respect each other as equals and promote closer exchanges and cooperation. This will enable us to make steady progress in advancing constructive and cooperative China-U.S. relations, and bring more benefits to our two peoples and people of the world. We are ready to continue to work with the U.S. side and other parties concerned to peacefully resolve the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, and the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomatic negotiation to uphold the international non-proliferation regime and safeguard global peace and stability."

"China is simply too big and too central to be ostracised. My point is that China is now so big and it is going to grow so large, it will have no precedents in modern social economic history.... we haven’t come to a point of accommodation where it acknowledges China’s pre-eminence in east Asia and the Asian mainland, in which case we can start to move towards a sensible relationship again with China. The key point is – is the rise of China legitimate? Is taking 20 per cent of humanity – 1.4 billion people – from abject poverty something the world should welcome? And in our terms, it has completely remodelled the Australian economy. If we give China the recognition I believe it is due in terms of its legitimacy … then I think a lot of these issues, the so-called 14 points, sort of fall off the table.... We have no relationship with Beijing, so why would the Prime Minister of Malaysia or Singapore or Thailand talk to us about east Asia when we are non-speakers with the biggest power, the Chinese?"

"The Chinese have always struck me as pretty cautious, even crafty, in managing their rise. It's true that they’re a lot more aggressive since 2009, but I don't see them suddenly becoming reckless. I always found that factoid that the PRC spends more on internal than external security to be indicative that CCP is, in fact, very insecure at the top. It's got to have an ideology with foreign enemies, otherwise the Chinese people might see the real enemy, the CCP's corruption, rejection of democracy and unwillingness to admit the horrors of ."

"The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world."

"Contemporaneous with the age of Greek culture, while Rome was yet an infant city and the rest of Europe in a condition of barbarism, the Chinese were a civilised race. Many years before the Christian era they had evolved under the name of Taoism, a set of principles and a mystic teaching based on the writings of Laotzu, which formed a not altogether despicable substitute for a religion, while in Confucianism they enjoyed a sound philosophy. Under these influences the arts of peace gradually achieved the first place among the national ideas. The application of principles of reason to the relationships of daily life, the adjustment of differences by discussion, and the cultivation of respect for age and learning, became cardinal principles."

"China believes it is the center of the universe. Look at its flag; one big star surrounded by satellite stars. Arrogant!"

"China presents Vietnam with a very big problem. China is taking over Vietnam, from Cholon, where there are rich Chinese, to . They are everywhere now with their product. My wife is from the North, people there resent China more than the South feared the . The Chinese are invaders, like any other foreigners, to fight. We must stop the Chinese. You know the dikes built on the Red River? If they break, what happens? A flood!"

"I hear from higher up that China seems to be succeeding on many fronts – engineering, commerce, hotels, agriculture - everything. In many ways, don’t we need to take them as a model example for us?"

"Back in about 1753 it took a letter three days to go from New York City to Washington, and today you can go from here to China in less time than that... Man's scientific genius has been amazing."

"If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there."

"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered... As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it “is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.” Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, “Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.” In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

"Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest. We have no alliance with Taipei. There is no piece of paper sitting in Canberra which has an alliance with Taipei. We do not recognise it as a sovereign state – we’ve always seen it as a part of China... My view is Australia should not be drawn into a military engagement over Taiwan, US-sponsored or otherwise..."

"(On rebuilding relationships with Beijing) At least give it respect. What the Chinese want, I think, is respect for what they’ve created. Our central proposition should be that the rise of China is entirely valid. What the Chinese want is acknowledgement of the validity of what they have done and what they have created: the legitimacy of the rise of China from its colonial past and from poverty."

"(On Xi as president for life: ‘A belief in harmony’) Well, it’s a good way to stay in power, I guess. It’s not my way. I actually believe in a community’s right to dismiss the government. But you’ve got to remember that China is broadly a Confucian society that believes in harmony, in authority, and it is with this background that it accepts, I think broadly, the role of the Chinese Communist party. I mean, the idea that we have that if you don’t vote at the local ballot box, that is, if you are not a Jeffersonian liberal, then you are a savage, belies the fact that China has a 4,000-year history which has these characteristics about it."

"(On Britain’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific: ‘Old theme park’) You know, here’s our old friend – what’s his name – the British prime minister waxing lyrical down there in Cornwall. I mean, Britain is like an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic compared to modern China. China is just going to be huge."

"In October 2020, the IMF in its annual report nominated China as the world’s largest economy. It says China’s economy is now 20% larger than the United States, 24tn versus 20tn – a report which was endorsed by the CIA. So you have the IMF and the CIA out there saying China is 20% bigger than the United States now. These are the key numbers. American GDP per capita is $60,000. China’s GDP per capita is $10,000. But as China is moving out of its old model of cheap manufactured goods, their income is going to rise. But at 10,000 US dollars per capita, China is 20% bigger than the US. How many years is it going to take China to get to 20,000? Not 60 … but with the highly urbanised economy of theirs, it will take a decade, perhaps. If it gets to $20,000 US per capita, it will be 2.5 times bigger than the United States. To which the United States says: “That is all very interesting but, look, if you behave yourselves, you Chinese, you can be a stakeholder in our system.” And you would not have to be Xi Jinping to take the view, if you are a Chinese nationalist, “let me get this right, we are already 1.25 times bigger than you, we will soon be twice as big as you and we may be 2.5 times as big as you, but we can be a stakeholder in your system, is that it?” It would make a cat laugh."

"(China debate ‘informed by the spooks’) Australian public debate is informed by the spooks. Our foreign policy debate now in Canberra is informed by the security agencies, so you are not getting a macro view of China as it really is. China wants its front doorstep and its front porch, that is Taiwan, its sea, it doesn’t want American naval forces influencing that. It wants access out of its coast into the deeper waters of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. That’s what it’s about fundamentally."

"To understand the changes which now appear upon the Chinese mainland, one must understand the changes in Chinese character and culture over the past 50 years. China, up to 50 years ago, was completely non-homogenous, being compartmented into groups divided against each other. The war-making tendency was almost non-existent, as they still followed the tenets of the Confucian ideal of pacifist culture. At the turn of the century, under the regime of Chang Tso Lin, efforts toward greater homogeneity produced the start of a nationalist urge. This was further and more successfully developed under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek, but has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime to the point that it has now taken on the character of a united nationalism of increasingly dominant, aggressive tendencies. Through these past 50 years the Chinese people have thus become militarized in their concepts and in their ideals. They now constitute excellent soldiers, with competent staffs and commanders. This has produced a new and dominant power in Asia, which, for its own purposes, is allied with Soviet Russia but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic, with a lust for expansion and increased power normal to this type of imperialism. There is little of the ideological concept either one way or another in the Chinese make-up. The standard of living is so low and the capital accumulation has been so thoroughly dissipated by war that the masses are desperate and eager to follow any leadership which seems to promise the alleviation of local stringencies. I have from the beginning believed that the Chinese Communists' support of the North Koreans was the dominant one. Their interests are, at present, parallel with those of the Soviet. But I believe that the aggressiveness recently displayed not only in Korea but also in Indo-China and Tibet and pointing potentially toward the South reflects predominantly the same lust for the expansion of power which has animated every would-be conqueror since the beginning of time."

"Both nations [China and India] are to nearly an equal degree tainted with the vices of insincerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society. Both are disposed to excessive exaggeration with regard to everything relating to themselves. Both are cowardly and unfeeling. Both are in the highest degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for others. Both are, in the physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses."

"When it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead."

"For years, Chinese intellectuals distinguished between words and actions. Western political ideas could be discussed in China as long as nobody tried to enact them... Sealing China off from western ideas poses some practical problems... Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have adhered to a principle known as 'Hide your strength, bide your time'... No diplomatic relationship matters more to China's future than its dealings with the United States... For years, American military leaders worried that there was a growing risk of an accidental clash between China and the U.S., in part because Beijing protested U.S. policies by declining meetings between senior commanders... A decade ago, the Chinese Internet was alive with debate, confession, humor, and discovery. Month by month, it is becoming more sterilized and self-contained. To the degree that China's connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating. Voice-over-Internet calls, viral videos, podcasts, the minor accessories of contemporary digital life, are less reachable abroad than they were a year ago. It's an astonishing thing to observe in a rising superpower. How many countries in 2015 have an Internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?"

"China remains the world's largest manufacturer, with four trillion dollars in foreign-exchange reserves, a sum equivalent to the world’s fourth-largest economy... Last spring, China abolished registered-capital and other requirements for new companies, and in November it allowed foreign investors to trade shares directly on the Shanghai stock market for the first time... The risks to China's economy have rarely been more visible. The workforce is aging more quickly than in other countries, because of the one-child policy, and businesses are borrowing money more rapidly than they are earning it... The growth of demand for energy and raw materials has slowed, more houses and malls are empty, and nervous Chinese savers are sending money overseas, to protect it in the event of a crisis... To maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation... After China had spent years investing in science and technology, the share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed Europe's... The era of Xi Jinping has defied the assumption that China's fitful opening to the world is too critical and productive to stall."

"China as a society, a government, an economy and a culture is quite difficult for us to comprehend today. The changes are so rapid in cities like Beijing and Shanghai and the culture remarkably fluid... China is increasingly influential in the world and more and more people have hopes that China will be a leader... China has ended up playing a critical role in geopolitics more quickly than anybody had anticipated."

"The Chinese are rejecting western values and multiparty democracy... It seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet."

"The leadership from the top over the last three American presidencies has steadily pushed US public opinion from being friendly towards China in the direction of hostility. Intellectual property theft is a widely used reason for giving China a hard time. Yet in a recent survey made by the US-China Business Council, intellectual property protection ranked sixth on a list of pressing concerns among American companies which trade with China. In 2014 China created its first specialized court to handle intellectual property cases. In 2015 plaintiffs brought before the court 63 cases. The court ruled for the foreign firms in all 63. China itself is clearly against the theft of business secrets."

"How many people outside China are aware of the responsible way China acts internationally? Take the UN for example. According to the respected journalist Fareed Zakaria, writing in this month’s Foreign Affairs, “Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the UN and UN peacekeepers. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined. Between 2000 and 2008 it supported 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions on nations deemed to have violated international rules or norms”. This is a very different China than the one projected by many Western politicians and journalists. Usually, China is reported as being an impediment at the Security Council, using its veto fast and furiously. China has not gone to war since 1979. It has not used lethal military force abroad since 1988. Nor has it funded proxies or armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the early 1980s... this record of non-intervention China is unique among the world’s great powers. China has had no permanent military presence outside China until recently when it finished building its first overseas base... on the Horn of Africa to protect the shipping of its oil through the unstable political waters of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean... China is angry when... US spy planes flying through Chinese airspace... China does not fly through US airspace. Its flights are on the other side of the world."

"The United States, Arreaza told me, “has gone to the extent of carrying out modern acts of piracy, stopping ships in the middle of the ocean and stealing cargo that was paid for by the Venezuelan people.” Not only has the United States tried to blockade Venezuela, but it continues to interfere in Venezuela’s political affairs; this includes trying to undermine the legislative elections that will be held on December 6....China has largely disregarded the U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, which is the largest recipient of Chinese loans. “When China states that it will continue to trade with Venezuela,” Arreaza told me, “it is standing against the illegality of the U.S. coercive measures that are placed on Venezuela.” Venezuela’s difficulty in servicing the debt to China is seen in Beijing as the fault of the illegal sanctions regime, which has made normal economic activity impossible; China’s “patient capital” strategy and its understanding of the geopolitical pressure on Venezuela are key to understanding its relationship."

"In September 2018, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro visited China, where he met with China’s President Xi Jinping and signed a series of important agreements on trade and culture. Toward the end of his stay, Maduro said that the two countries had built “a relationship of mutual benefit, of shared gain.” Among these agreements was one that highlights the depth of the collaboration: this was for China to participate with the Great Venezuela Housing Mission (GMVV) to build more than 13,000 homes in the El Valle parish in Caracas. The focus of the international media has been on the oil trade between China and Venezuela, and in the aid from China to Venezuela; but the connections go deeper, into the social life of the people who are struggling to emerge from deprivation... China, Arreaza (foreign minister of Venezuela) says, trades with countries without interference in their internal affairs. This is quite different from the Western model, notably that overseen by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which pushes for structural adjustment alongside loans. Because China respects the sovereign choices of a country, Arreaza told me, “China has proven to be a reliable partner for the region and it can continue to play a key role in our development for many years to come.”"

"The big picture in the Middle East isn't Iran or Iraq. The big picture in the Middle East is China. People don't understand that. They don't know what’s going on right now. It's about leveraging control over Middle-Eastern and central-Asian oil, in order to dictate the pace of China's economic growth over the next 30 years. Because China's the biggest threat in the eyes of the neoconservatives. It's this massive Chinese economy that's been expanding by leaps and bounds that’s going to threaten American global economic hegemony. Now I'm not saying this is what I believe, I'm just saying it's what's in the minds of these neoconservatives. You deal with China indirectly at this point in time because you don't want direct confrontation."

"All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security... The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome. What they see now is the West preparing its populations for war. It is this perception for which the West is solely responsible that makes the situation today far more dangerous than it ever was during the long Cold War."

"We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has already found, that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of un-warlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world."

"[W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19. Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component."

"If you want to know what people are worried about look at what they spend their money on. If you’re afraid of burglars you buy a burglar alarm. What are the Chinese spending their money on? We’re told from Chinese figures they’re spending on the People’s Armed Police, the internal security force is about as big as they’re spending on the regular military. This whole great firewall of Chinese, this whole massive effort to control the internet, this effort to use modern information technology not to disseminate information, empowering individuals, but to make people think what you want them to think and to monitor their behavior so that you can isolate and suppress them. That’s because this is a regime which is fundamentally afraid of its own people. And it’s fundamentally hostile to them."

"The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible."

"The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppression by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vices in order to acquire military strength; but they are willing to adopt our virtues in order to advance in wisdom. I think they are the only people in the world who quite genuinely believe that wisdom is more precious than rubies. That is why the West regards them as uncivilized."

"The US is a force for division, not for cooperation... It's a force for trying to create a new cold war with China. If this takes hold - if that kind of approach is used, then we won't go back to normal, indeed we will spiral into greater controversy and greater danger in fact. The US lost its step on 5G, which is a critical part of the new digital economy. And Huawei was taking a greater and greater share of global markets... The US concocted in my opinion, the view that Huawei is a global threat. And has leaned very hard on US allies... to try to break the relations with Huawei."

"The US is a force for division, not for cooperation... Do I believe that China could do more to ease fears that are very real? I do.... The big choice frankly is in China's hands. If China is cooperative, if it engages in diplomacy, regional cooperation and multilateralism…. then I think that Asia has an incredibly bright future."

"Regarding China...you have both the Democrats and Republicans taking an increasingly hostile posture... if you look at the recent comments of Xi Jinping, particularly after his virtual summit with Joe Biden, he has been really hitting the talking point that what is happening is that the United States is taking this neo-Cold War posture. I think he is entirely right. But I sort of see it in the same vein as you. China, the United States and Russia in particular are engaged in a classic capitalist battle for control of natural resources all throughout the world... I think China in particular is very concerned about the aggressive U.S. stance because I think China would be very happy to find a way to just sort of divvy up the world for domination in various regions. The United States is not going to accept that. The U.S. posture is pushing China and Russia into an even closer alliance akin to the relationship during the Cold War."

"Some observers have already proclaimed that China will rule the world, This prospective is profoundly overstated and incorrect in my view... China has a long way to go before it becomes, if it ever becomes a true , and it will never rule the world."

"China is, in essence, a very narrow-minded, self-interested, realist state, seeking only to maximize its own national interests and power. It cares little for global governance and enforcing global standards of behavior, except its much-vaunted doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of countries. Its economic policies are mercantilist and its diplomacy is passive. China is also a lonely strategic power, with no allies and experiencing distrust and strained relationships with much of the world."

"China is a very contradictory country... China punches way below its weight, it is not, it is free-riding... It is not contributing... China is a lonely power... Who wants to seek political asylum in China? Nobody."

"The subsequent evolution of the Chinese state is one where bureaucratic recruitment and rule became ever more routinized, and this occurred at the expense of hereditary lineages. In western Europe, after the fall of Rome rulers pursued a policy of giving grants of land in exchange for military service. These grants tended to be one-way transactions. Over time this led to the creation of a category of members of society with substantial autonomy. The presence of this group would play a prominent role in the early development of medieval assemblies. In China things pushed in the opposite direction. With the perfection of an imperial examination system during the Tang and Song dynasties, Chinese rulers had at their disposal a means of bureaucratic recruitment that did not depend on societal networks outside of their control. Being a member of the elite now meant being part of the state itself."

"The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit...they are just a heap of loose sand...Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat."

"China is now suffering from poverty, not from unequal distribution of wealth. Where there are inequalities of wealth, the methods of Marx can, of course, be used; a class war can be advocated to destroy the inequalities. But in China, where industry is not yet developed, Marx's class war and dictatorship of the proletariat are impracticable."

"This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology, and the United States hasn’t had that before, it’s also striking that this is the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian."

"Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an anti-China speech that was extremist, simplistic, and dangerous. If biblical literalists like Pompeo remain in power past November, they could well bring the world to the brink of a war that they expect and perhaps even seek. According to Pompeo, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic... Pompeo’s zealous excesses have deep roots in American history... Pompeo himself is a biblical literalist who believes that the end time, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, is imminent. Pompeo described his beliefs...: America is a Judeo-Christian nation, the greatest in history, whose task is to fight God’s battles until the Rapture, when Christ’s born-again followers, like Pompeo, will be swept to heaven at the Last Judgment... Pompeo’s inflammatory anti-China rhetoric could become even more apocalyptic in the coming weeks, if only to fire up the Republican base ahead of the election."

"According to Pompeo [U.S. Secretary of State], Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” with “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.”"

"US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent. The US.. has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti). The US has many military bases close to China, which has none anywhere near the US. The US has 5,800 nuclear warheads; China has roughly 320. The US has 11 aircraft carriers; China has one. The US has launched many overseas wars in the past 40 years; China has launched none (though it has been criticized for border skirmishes, most recently with India, that stop short of war)."

"The world took relatively little notice of Pompeo’s speech, which offered no evidence to back up his claims of China’s hegemonic ambition. China’s rejection of US hegemony does not mean that China itself seeks hegemony. Indeed, outside of the US, there is little belief that China aims for global dominance. China’s explicitly stated national goals are to be a “moderately prosperous society” by 2021 (the centenary of the CPC), and a “fully developed country” by 2049 (the centennial of the People’s Republic)."

"Moreover, at an estimated $10,098 in 2019, China’s GDP per capita was less than one-sixth that of the US ($65,112) – hardly the basis for global supremacy. China still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve even its basic economic development goals. Assuming that Trump loses in November’s presidential election, Pompeo’s speech will likely receive no further notice. The Democrats will surely criticize China, but without Pompeo’s brazen exaggerations. Yet, if Trump wins, Pompeo’s speech could be a harbinger of chaos. Pompeo’s evangelism is real, and white evangelicals are the political base of today’s Republican Party. Pompeo’s zealous excesses have deep roots in American history."

"If Trump is defeated, as seems likely, the risk of a US confrontation with China will recede. But if he remains in power, whether by a true electoral victory, vote fraud, or even a coup (anything is possible), Pompeo’s crusade would probably proceed, and could well bring the world to the brink of a war that he expects and perhaps even seeks."

"One of the greatest untold secrets of history is that the 'modern world' in which we live is a unique synthesis of Chinese and Western ingredients. Possibly more than half of the basic inventions and discoveries upon which the 'modern world' rests come from China. And yet few people know this. Why? The Chinese themselves are as ignorant of this fact as Westerners. From the seventeenth century onwards, the Chinese became increasingly dazzled by European technological expertise, having experienced a period of amnesia regarding their own achievements. When the Chinese were shown a mechanical clock by Jesuit missionaries, they were awestruck. They had forgotten that it was they who had invented mechanical clocks in the first place!"

"Arise! All those who don't want to be slaves! Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall! As the Chinese nation has arrived at its most perilous time, every person is forced to expel their very last roar."

"[A]t a time when the crisis of the Coronavirus pandemic is developing rapidly. [...] The currently appears “successful” in its response, but in the first weeks that the new coronavirus appeared, the government offered the denialism typical of restorationist capitalist bureaucracy, ignoring the warnings that could have reduced the number of deaths (including that of , a doctor who warned about the epidemic and was consequently accused by the authorities of “spreading rumors” before he died from COVID-19). China is the most extreme example of authoritarianism around the world, with its tight bureaucratic control that prevents vital news from leaving and other affected areas."

"I know the Chinese. I've made a lot of money with the Chinese. I understand the Chinese mind."

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

"We have a 500 billion dollar deficit, trade deficit with China. We're going to turn it around and we have the cards, don't forget, we're like the piggy bank that's being robbed. We have the cards, we have a lot of power with China. When China doesn't want to fix the problem in North Korea we say "Sorry folks, you've got to fix the problem." Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world."

"No California gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the east. Only the scum of the population do it; they and their children. They, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America."

"A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to find something to do."

"I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature... I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him."

"They [the Chinese] are immensely self-serving, as they would. But a the same time they have a quality that we need in Southern Europe. Actually, I think everyone needs to have foreign direct investment by patient investors. They are patient investors. They don't come in to grab an asset for speculative purposes. They come in order to create a base on which to build and build and build. And their horizon is 20-30 years. What Europe has not done with Greece is to do what the Chinese were prepared to do to come there with their workers, with their engineers, and actully do some serious work."

"They [the Chinese] are far more humanistic than the United States ever was. [...] Of course they're trying... they are peddling for influence, but they are non-interventionists. Absolutely non-interventionists in a way that Europeans, the West, has never managed to fathom. The Chinese never asked Apple to go to Shenzhen and produce all the iPhones, it was Steve Jobs that decided that. It was not China that went to Washington DC and demanded that they buy a third of your national debt. If they hadn't bought it, you would be in serious trouble. [...] When it comes to the influence of China outside its borders, it's quite remarkable that they don't seem to have any military ambitions. Instead of going into Africa with troops, colonially destroying the country, killing people like the West has done for the last hundred years, what they did was they went to Addis Ababa and they said to the government: "We can see you have problems with your infrastructure, we would like to build some new airports and upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads. And we will do this all for free." No strings attached. "We don't want anything from you". And they did. Why did they do it? Because this is soft power."

"The deepening cold war between the US and China will be a bigger worry for the world than coronavirus, according to influential economist Jeffrey Sachs. The world is headed for a period of "massive disruption without any leadership" in the aftermath of the pandemic, he told the BBC. The divide between the two superpowers will exacerbate this, he warned. The Columbia University professor blamed the US administration for the hostilities between the two countries."

"The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party's abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party's strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in "reeducation-through-labor" camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials in 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. Amnesty International has reported that children have been bussed to public executions as field trips."

"The world must understand that millions of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang are being sent to concentration camps and forced into labor."

"There is a strange symmetry to China’s twentieth century, and much of it is linked to the ideological Cold War. At the beginning of the century, China’s republican revolution was overtaken by Communism and conflict. And at the end of the century, Communism was overtaken by money and markets. In between lay a terrible time of destruction and reconstruction, of enthusiasm and cynicism, and of almost never-ending rivers of blood. What marks these Chinese revolutions most of all is their bloodthirst: according to a recent estimate, seventy-seven million Chinese died unnatural deaths as a result of warfare or political mass-murder between the 1920s and the 1980s, and the vast majority of them were killed by other Chinese."

"Chinese is the easiest language when it is learned at ease, dwelling on its spirit rather than on the individual expression. But for inquisitive questioners, this language provides vain pitfalls."

"Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty."

"One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us."

"When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home, you will see how China will transform itself."

"People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people."

"This experience and the historical experiences gained by the Party since its founding can be summarized as follows: Our Party must always represent the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. These are the inexorable requirements for maintaining and developing socialism, and the logical conclusion our Party has reached through hard exploration and great praxis."

"A review of our party's seventy-plus-year history elicits an important conclusion. Our party earned the people's support during the historical periods of revolution, construction and reform because it always represented the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The party also earned popular support because it fought tirelessly to realize the fundamental interests of the country and the people by formulating a correct line, principles and policies. Today, humanity once again stands at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. How our party can better effectuate the Three Represents under the new historical conditions is a major issue all Party comrades, especially high-ranking party cadres, must consider deeply... The Communist Party of China should represent the development trends of advanced productive forces, the orientations of an advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people of China."

"We want to learn from the west about science and technology and how to manage the economy, but this must be combined with specific conditions here. That's how we have made great progress in the last twenty years."

"In front of a lot of princeling friends, I've said that, if the Communist Party can't take sufficient political reform in five or ten years, it could miss the chance entirely. As scholars, we always say it's better to have reform than revolution, but in Chinese history this cycle repeats itself. Mao said we have to get rid of the cycle, but right now we’re still in it. This is very worrying."

"China believes it is the center of the universe. Look at its flag: one big star surrounded by satellite stars. Arrogant!"

"China has one big and four small stars in its flag to signify that its major nation and a number of minor nations are united in a single state. India has the 24-spoked wheel of the chakravarti or universal ruler in its flag, meaning that within his empire, every tribute-paying vassal state had its own autonomy and traditions. In modern and more egalitarian terms: the Indian federation unites many communities into a single civilization-state."

"The biggest advantage the Chinese government has over us is that it doesn’t have to contend with constitutional democracy. The second-biggest advantage it has is that it doesn’t have to be hypocritical, and pretend that it is not doing, and would not do, what it clearly and unapologetically is."

"The day I arrived was about a week after the July 9 crackdown on [civil] rights lawyers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a watershed moment in Chinese politics. It shaped the China I would experience over the next several years."

"have no recourse to anything like an . The Communist Party decides if you’re guilty or innocent. The conviction rate stands in excess of 98 per cent. Torture and are commonplace. Xi has lately embarked on a vicious campaign of harassment and intimidation of activists, ethnic and religious minorities, and feminists. Scores of human rights lawyers have been rounded up and jailed."

"Chinese Communists were no more inclined to respect individual liberties when they ran one of the poorest and most insular nations in the world. If anything, they acted with even more brutality. No state has ever murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and terrorized more of its own people."

"According to statistics compiled in 2003, only 1 to 5 percent of trials in China have witnesses. The conviction rate in criminal trials is 99.7 percent. The criminal code names sixty-eight crimes that are punishable by death, including embezzlement, counterfeiting, bribery, pimping, stealing gasoline, and selling harmful foodstuffs. Exact annual figures for the number of executions in China is not known, although it appears to be in the thousands. Amnesty International's cautious estimate for 2005 was 1,770. The majority of the world's executions take place in China. In March 2004, the government introduced traveling "execution vans.""

"The CCP has long presented the Chinese citizenry with a strict social contract: the CCP enjoys an absolute political monopoly in exchange for providing steadily increasing standards of living. That means no elections. That means no unsanctioned protests. That means never establishing an independent legal or court system which might challenge CCP whim. It means firmly and permanently defining “China’s” interests as those of the CCP."

"要深入实施网络内容建设工程，弘扬主旋律，激发正能量，让科学理论、正确舆论、优秀文化充盈网络空间。发展积极向上的网络文化，引导互联网企业和网民创作生产传播格调健康的网络文学、网络音乐、网络表演、网络电影、网络剧、网络音视频、网络动漫、网络游戏等。加强网上热点话题和突发事件的正确引导、有效引导，明辨是非、分清善恶，让正确道德取向成为网络空间的主流。"

"There's a point where I don't think the [Chinese] Communist Party with any level of censorship is going to be able to control a disgruntled population of almost 1.4 billion people."

"In Canada not everyone will agree with Harper's interpretation of what Vimy means for today. We have a multiplicity of views about the past and its significance for the present. In China, by contrast, the Communist Party does its best to ensure that the public gets only one version of history. When my book on Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 came out, Chinese publishers showed an interest in translating it. There would, however, have to be a few small changes. Mention of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao’s often scandalous private life would have to go. (The book has not been published in China.) Although the Communist Party has repudiated most of Mao’s policies, it still holds him up as the father of the Communist Revolution. To question him would be to undermine the Party’s own authority to rule China."

"Sculpture was not one of the major arts, not even a fine art, to the Chinese. By an act of rare modesty the Far East refused to class the human body under the rubric of beauty; its sculptors played a little with drapery, and used the figures of men—seldom of women—to study or represent certain types of consciousness; but they did not glorify the body. For the most part they confined their portraits of humanity to Buddhist saints and Taoist sages, ignoring the-athletes and courtesans who gave such inspiration to the artists of Greece. In the sculpture of China animals were preferred even to philosophers and saints."

"Meanwhile another influence was entering China, in the form of Buddhist theology and art. It made a home for itself first in Turkestan, and built there a civilization from which Stein and Pelliot have unearthed many tons of ruined statuary; some of it seems equal to Hindu Buddhist art at its best. The Chinese took over those Buddhist forms without much alteration, and produced Buddhas as fair as any in Gandhara or India."

"One of the best of the Chinese Buddhist shrines is the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, near the Summer Palace outside Peking; Fergusson called it “the finest architectural achievement in China.”"

"As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture and art in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism, in the same centuries, effected a theological and esthetic revolution in the life of China. While Confucianism retained its political power, Buddhism, mingling with Taoism, became the dominating force in art, and brought to the Chinese a stimulating contact with Hindu motives, symbols, methods and forms. The greatest genius of the Chinese Buddhist school of painting was Ku K’ai-chih, a man of such unique and positive personality that a web of anecdote or legend has meshed him in."

"The greatest painter of the T’ang epoch, and, by common consent, of all the Far East, rose above distinctions of school, and belonged rather to the Buddhist tradition of Chinese art. Wu Tao-tze deserved his name—Wu, Master of the Tao or Way, for all those impressions and formless thoughts which Lao-tze and Chuang-tze had found too subtle for words seemed to flow naturally into line and color under his brush."

"The much hyped rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has lately been met with equally fervent declarations of their demise. In this article... I contest this assessment by arguing that the emerging powers were never solely, nor most importantly, merely an economic phenomenon. Instead, I show that emerging powers—specifically Brazil, India and China—have become an important political force in the global trading system and have had a profound and lasting impact on the World Trade Organization (WTO)). Contrary to the widespread assumption that these countries are too diverse to ally, I argue that the emerging powers displayed a remarkable degree of unity and cooperation, working in close concert to successfully challenge the dominance of the US and other established powers. As evidenced by the collapse of the Doha Round, the collective rise of Brazil, India and China substantially disrupted the functioning of one of the core institutions of the liberal economic order created under US hegemony."

"The role of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) during COVID-19 has validated the original rationale to create a new multilateral development bank... As the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread from Wuhan in Hubei province to surrounding regions, the Chinese Government turned to the newest multilateral development bank, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) for support. Within weeks of the loan approval, the NDB disbursed $1bn to Hubei, Henan and Guangdong, the three most affected provinces in China. This loan, the single largest of the Bank to date, was earmarked to provide financial support for unplanned emergency health expenditure related to the fight against COVID-19....In 2008 for example, when few financial institutions were lending during the global financial crisis, it was the multilateral development banks which significantly increased their lending.... Under usual circumstances, it can take several months for loans to be disbursed for an infrastructure project. Disbursements for COVID-19 related assistance were made as bullet payments within three to four weeks after the loans were approved.... To date, the Bank approved and largely disbursed $4bn, which comprised of a $1bn COVID-19 response loan each to China, Brazil, India and South Africa. The full $10bn to be allocated during 2020 represents additional development assistance which would not have been available if the NDB was not created five years ago."

"Fruitful exchange of opinions concerning the drug situation in the BRICS states, the international and regional trends of illegal trafficking in narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and their precursors, as well as the impact of various internal and external factors on the situation took place during the summit.... The common points emerged during the discussions include need for real time information sharing among the member states and need to curb increased drug trafficking through maritime routes. Misuse of darknet and other advanced technologies for drug trafficking was one of the key focal areas of the meeting... The growing economic might of BRICS countries, their significance as one of the main driving forces of global economic development, their substantial population and abundant natural resources form the foundation of their influence on the international scene and are the driving forces behind the grouping. Among other areas of collaboration, matters pertaining to drug trafficking is an important area of cooperation among the BRICS member states"

"Eradicating poverty is high on the list of both the Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals. Both, were endorsed by the heads of state or government of the 190-plus member countries of the United Nations, including BRICS. As a member of the UN as well as BRICS, China's contribution to global poverty reduction is much more than its contribution to global economic growth... China is set to eliminate absolute poverty by the end of this year... There is no doubt that the fast economic growth in China and India has played a key role in reducing poverty in the two countries. Slower but positive growth－before the novel coronavirus pandemic broke out－also helped the other BRICS countries to lower their poverty rates... In short, all BRICS countries have made progress in poverty alleviation work, even though the progress has been uneven due to their different growth rates and the levels of inequality in their societies. But despite growth playing a dominant role in poverty reduction, it would be a mistake to overlook inequality, because a high level of inequality directly undermines growth potential and indirectly offsets the beneficial impact of growth on poverty reduction."

"Deputy foreign ministers and special representatives of BRICS countries for the Middle East and Northern Africa have underlined importance of non-interference in the work of Syria’s Constitutional Committee in Geneva, they said in a joint statement following a consultative meeting held via videoconference on Friday. The meeting participants noted the importance of lunching the committee with the decisive contribution of the Astana peace process guarantors and all other countries involved in the peaceful resolution of the conflict and also welcomed efforts of Geir Pedersen, UN Secretary-General Special Envoy for Syria, to establish a sustainable and effective operation of this body. "Conviction was expressed that to reach common ground the Constitutional Committee members should be guided by pursuit of compromise and constructive cooperation without foreign interference," the text reads. The parties also reaffirmed their commitment to sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Syria, noting that the conflict in this country cannot be resolved militarily. "They also reaffirmed their commitment to advancing political process, led and guided by Syrians themselves through the UN cooperation in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which should result in a constitutional reform as well as free and fair elections," the diplomats stressed."

"To you I'm a thief, to my mother, a son, to the Triads I'm a hero."

"14K. First generation Chinese-American, tenth generation Triad. His father sent him to business school, and he's the only man in here who holds a degree from MIT. He's killed four men off the track."

"Looks like you guys should put more "try" in "Triad"."

""The Hakka are able to mould outstanding military men, their hardworking conduct having been developed through years of arduous livelihood in the mountainous regions. Praises of the Guangdong spirit by the Japanese actually refer to the Hakka spirit. A big majority of the officers and soldiers in the Guangdong army are Hakkas, the distinguished successes of Hakka military men have been attested by the modern history of China." – Zhang Fakui, Commander-in-Chief, Republic of China Army (1980)"

""Fortunately for me, I have a very high threshold for pain. I am a Hakka. Hakkas can take a lot of pain. So, I survived." – Lee Kuan Yew, founding father of modern Singapore (1997)"

""All of you should know that I, Lee Teng-hui, am a Hakka. Many of mainland China's leaders are also Hakkas. Hakka people are brilliant, isn't it?" – Lee Teng-hui, President of Taiwan (2000)"

""My grandfather is Hakka. The origin of Hakka is at the Central Plains. A Hakka cultural centre is opening in Zhengdong economic centre. I will be unveiling a statue of my grandfather in the cultural centre, to promote the Hakka spirit." – Sun Huifang, granddaughter of Sun Yat-sen, founding father of modern China (2003)"

""There is a piece of important experience not found in books, that is the Hakka people fine moral qualities in doing business based on integrity. This is the most precious legacy left behind by my Hakka forefathers." – Thaksin Shinawatra, Prime Minister of Thailand (2005)"

""The Hakka spirit in my blood has been calling me to take the challenge and shoulder the responsibility of being president like numerous Hakka women have done for the past hundreds of years." – Tsai Ing-wen, President of Taiwan (2011)"

""And I nearly broke down, but I won't break down. I am a Hakka woman. So farewell, Papa. I will miss you. Rest in peace. And...be as tough as Hakkas come." – Lee Wei Ling, daughter of Lee Kuan Yew (2015)"

"Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity."

"It came shortly after Mao's death in September of that year, and by the end of 1978 Deng had outmaneuvered all of his rivals to become China's "paramount" leader. He had already by then turned the tables on his predecessor by claiming that Mao had been right seventy percent of the time and wrong thirty percent: this now became party doctrine. Among the "right" things Mao had done were reviving China as a great power, maintaining the Communist Party's political monopoly, and opening relations with the United States as a way of countering the Soviet Union. Among the "wrong" things was Mao's embrace of a disastrously administered command economy. With this pronouncement on percentages, Deng won himself room to pursue a very different path. It involved experimenting with markets at local and regional levels, after which Deng would declare whatever worked to be consistent with Marxist-Leninist principles. Through this bottom-up approach, he showed that a communist party could significantly, even radically, improve the lives of the people it ruled—but only by embracing capitalism. Per capita income tripled in China between 1978 and 1994. Gross domestic product quadrupled. Exports expanded by a factor of ten. And by the time of Deng's death in 1997, the Chinese economy had become one of the largest in the world. The contrast with the moribund Soviet economy, which despite high oil prices showed no growth at all in the 1970s and actually contracted during the early 1980s, was an indictment from which Soviet leaders never recovered. "After all," the recently deposed Mikhail Gorbachev commented ruefully in 1993, "China today is capable of feeding its people who number more than one billion.""

"But democracies also took root because they generally outperformed autocracies in raising living standards. Markets do not always require democracy in order to function: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and China all developed successful economies under less than democratic conditions. The Cold War experience showed, though, that it is not easy to keep markets open and ideas constrained at the same time. And since markets proved more efficient than command economies in allocating resources and enhancing productivity, the resulting improvement in people s lives, in turn, strengthened democracies."

"From agrarian economy to global superpower in half a century—China’s transformation has been an economic success story unlike any other. Today, China is the world’s second largest economy, making up 16% of $86 trillion global GDP in nominal terms."

"In 1978, after years of state control of all productive assets, the government of China embarked on a major program of economic reform. In an effort to awaken a dormant economic giant, it encouraged the formation of rural enterprises and private businesses, liberalized foreign trade and investment, relaxed state control over some prices, and invested in industrial production and the education of its workforce. By nearly all accounts, the strategy has worked spectacularly. While pre-1978 China had seen annual growth of 6 percent a year (with some painful ups and downs along the way), post-1978 China saw average real growth of more than 9 percent a year with fewer and less painful ups and downs. In several peak years, the economy grew more than 13 percent. Per capita income has nearly quadrupled in the last 15 years, and a few analysts are even predicting that the Chinese economy will be larger than that of the United States in about 20 years. Such growth compares very favorably to that of the "Asian tigers"--Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan Province of China--which, as a group, had an average growth rate of 7-8 percent over the last 15 years. Curious about why China has done so well, an IMF research team recently examined the sources of that nation's growth and arrived at a surprising conclusion. Although capital accumulation--the growth in the country's stock of capital assets, such as new factories, manufacturing machinery, and communications systems--was important, as were the number of Chinese workers, a sharp, sustained increase in productivity (that is, increased worker efficiency) was the driving force behind the economic boom. During 1979-94 productivity gains accounted for more than 42 percent of China's growth and by the early 1990s had overtaken capital as the most significant source of that growth. This marks a departure from the traditional view of development in which capital investment takes the lead. This jump in productivity originated in the economic reforms begun in 1978."

"On Dec. 13, 1978, at the close of a Communist Party gathering that lasted over a month, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping delivered a speech that laid out a pragmatic vision for China’s future. It was a country that was then not long out of the grip of the chaos and terror of the Cultural Revolution. He proposed that China learn from the example of other, richer countries, allow workers and peasants to “vie” to get ahead so those with a better standard of life would inspire others to work harder, and proposed that provinces and enterprises be given the power to make decisions or try new things.[...] In 1981, just three years after Deng’s reform project was launched, almost 90% of Chinese people lived in extreme poverty by the definition of the World Bank. By 2013, that number had dropped to less than 2%."

"After 40 years of development, China has become the world’s second largest economy. The contribution from China to the global GDP has increased from 2.4 to 14.8%, the per capita GDP from 380 to 54,000 CNY, the per capita disposable income from 170 to 24,000 CNY, and the outward foreign direct investment from 297 to 1,235,925 million CNY."

"The opening up policy has enabled China to learn from other countries, either developed or developing. To strengthen its own capabilities, China has expanded research capacity, emphasized advanced management and increased infrastructure development. China has entered a new stage of development, with growth rate of domestic investment on infrastructure development decreasing and rapidly increasing foreign investment. China has also expanded its foreign direct investment through such international programs as the “Belt and Road Initiative” to promote economic cooperation, technological innovation, and resource sharing between regions and countries. On the basis of its own national conditions, China has taken a “small step, but fast run” rather than a “shock therapy” approach, with new policies or programs. This was first demonstrated on a small scale, and then incrementally spread to the whole country, to ensure success and reduce the trial-and-error cost as far as possible. China has increasingly realized the importance of achieving an “ecological civilization” by learning from the past and promoting an aggressive decoupling of the relationship between environmental pollution and associated loss of natural capital and economic growth, and chosen to make sustainable development a national strategy."

"No country in human history ever grew so fast over such a long period of time. Average annual growth rates of 9.7 percent pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. The policy of reform and openness also led to a fundamental departure from norms in Mao’s China, replacing collectivism and group conformity with individual performance and diversity. The unparalleled rise of China also fundamentally changed the international world order. The country began to wield its economic influence in search of raw materials with the confidence and intentions of a future global superpower. China’s growing economic power inevitably resulted in an increasingly assertive foreign and security policy."

"We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around the world. Places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in the subcontinent mean that in some years India is now a net exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change that are blowing over the People's Republic of China, where one-quarter of the world's population is now getting its first taste of economic freedom. At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin America in the 1970s, only a third of the population lived under democratic government; today over 90 percent does. In the Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured."

"Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created. China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism."

"In China, they started on limited economic reform first but it was beginning to succeed in producing more goods for the people—on a limited scale certainly, but it was beginning to succeed. You cannot get economic reform really going well and with a future unless you get political liberty. That was what they found. We have always known it. Here, I think it was perhaps the wiser way to start: to start with the political reform, the thorough discussion. After all, new ideas come out of discussion and free interplay of ideas and discussion between one and the other. The glasnost as it is called, has gone very far very quickly, far further, far faster than we thought and I think that plus the communication of the ideas will in the end lead to much greater prosperity. I think the point that I have to make again is that although the politicians at the top—led by Mr. Gorbachev—could bring about the glasnost, it requires the practical and willing cooperation of the people to enlarge their responsibility and their activity to bring success in economic reform. I believe that will come about. I believe that the changes—the glasnost—really have become permanent because they have gone so much further than anything we thought and they have given a so much better atmosphere and less tension—the fear seems to have gone—and so I believe that perestroika is now set upon its course and that it will go through to success."

"The reforms also paved the way for things like China's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — an ambitious infrastructural push aimed at expanding China's political and economic influence internationally — and set the stage for the emergence of e-commerce and technology giants like Alibaba and Huawei."

"Socialism was blended with a free-market economy and agricultural collectives were disbanded, allowing peasants to profit from the portion of their production that was designated as surplus."

"We have to thank Japan, without Japan's invasion of China, we would not have been able to achieve the cooperation between the Communist Party of China, we would not have been able to develop and eventually gain power."

"In the sphere of theory, destroy the roots of ultra-democracy. First, it should be pointed out that the danger of ultrademocracy lies in the fact that it damages or even completely wrecks the Party organization and weakens or even completely undermines the Party's fighting capacity, rendering the Party incapable of fulfilling its fighting tasks and thereby causing the defeat of the revolution. Next, it should be pointed out that the source of ultra-democracy consists in the petty bourgeoisie's individualistic aversion to discipline. When this characteristic is brought into the Party, it develops into ultra-democratic ideas politically and organizationally. These ideas are utterly incompatible with the fighting tasks of the proletariat."

"For the [Chinese Communist Party] it is better to have a bureaucrat who is not very bright but is fanatically loyal to the Party than a very intelligent bureaucrat who thinks independently."

"[The] Yan’an [Soviet] is [a] synonym of crushing dissent, real or invented, by torturing and killing. As [Communist Party member] Cai Qi reminded the audience at the April 28 [2024] symposium, the Yan’an Rectification Campaign was plotted by Mao, but its main organizer was Ren Bishi."

"…Summing up, the CCP, through [the China Anti-Xie jiao Association (中國反協會)], tells us that the Tokyo verdict applies the same categories used against religion in China, benefits [the Chinese Communist Party's] interests, destroys an anti-communist organization, prepares a broader crackdown on religions in Japan, and may inspire other countries to do the same. We knew it all along."

"The [Chinese Communist] Party doesn’t just want to govern China; it wants to define governance itself."

"Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity."

"The warrior generations to which the remilitarisations gave birth in Algeria, China, Vietnam, and what was once Yugoslavia, are growing old today. The revolutions for which they and millions of unwilling participants paid such a terrible price in blood and anguish have withered at the roots… The Chinese greybeards of the Long March have preserved the authority of the party only by conceding economic freedoms wholly at variance with Marxist doctrine."

"is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet’s direction of travel – towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information – and decided to reverse it."

"The CCP’s goal is not silence but isolation: you can say things, but you can’t organise."

"Since the 1990s, the CCP has shown a technocratic capacity to respond to the developmental stresses brought on by China’s dizzying economic rise. Today, the party has harnessed the rewards of globalization and economic development, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. The CCP has reimagined itself as a driver of change, guiding the country’s path to wealth and fueling a sentiment of national pride."

"To counter threats to its control, the CCP has sought to further embed itself across layers of Chinese society and the economy."

"Authoritarian regimes also find a judicious use of the past a useful means of social control. In the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party grew concerned about the waning of communist ideology and the demands for greater democracy, which had led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they called in Chinese history In 1994, a member of the Politburo, the central body of the Party, attended a memorial for the Yellow Emperor, a probably mythical figure from five thousand years ago who was said to be the father of all ethnic Chinese. It looked suspiciously like ancestor worship, one of the many traditional practices the Communists had condemned. The following year the authorities allowed a major conference on Confucius. Twenty years earlier under the approving eyes of Mao, Red Guards had burned the great Confucian classics and done their best to destroy the sages tomb. The Party also sponsored a major campaign for Patriotic Education, which emphasized, as the official directive put it, “the Chinese peoples patriotism and brave patriotic deeds.” The Great Wall, which had in previous decades been condemned for its cost in ordinary Chinese lives, now became the symbol of the Chinese will to survive and triumph. Very little was said about the joys of socialism, but Chinas past achievements were neatly linked to Communist Party rule: “Patriotism is a historical concept, which has different specific connotations in different stages and periods of social development. In contemporary China, patriotism is in essence identical to socialism.” In other words, being loyal to China means being loyal to the Party. Chinese history was presented as the story of the centuries-old struggle of the Chinese people to unite and to progress in the face of determined interference and oppression from outside. China's failure to get the 2000 Olympic games, the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century, foreigners condemning the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Japanese invasion in the twentieth century were all wrapped up into one uninterrupted imperialist design to destroy the Chinese nation."

"The CCP’s presence on overseas campuses subverts academic freedom, while undermining the integrity and security of the international research enterprise by enticing foreign researchers to engage in deceptive and illegal activities for the PRC’s economic, scientific, and military gains."

"Driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology and imperialist nostalgia, the CCP silences dissent and restricts the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, to include forced population control, arbitrary detention, censorship, forced labor, violations of religious freedom, and pervasive media and internet censorship. The CCP continues to commit abuses against Uyghurs, Christians, and other religious and ethnic minorities. It maintains an iron grip on Tibet while continuing to assert control and silence foreign critics in Hong Kong. The CCP manipulates international organizations, democratically elected governments, and companies to mask its human rights abuses at home and abroad."

"The Party is always there, but you can’t always see it. And yet, citizens always know that there is a limit to what they can do that is bound by whatever the Party is deciding at a particular time. It is obviously the core institution in China at a political level. Even though there are a number of other political parties, they’re irrelevant in any genuine sense. So if you want to understand China, you need to understand the Party and its relationships with different aspects of society and the system."

"Yet China remained a one-party dictatorship and its labour camps – the infamous laogai – continued to hold between four and six million inmates in shocking conditions. Mao’s gigantic image was still displayed in Tiananmen Square. There was no true pluralism of intellectual and political discourse at the highest official levels. Interest groups of employers were not allowed to function. Trade unions were emasculated. The importance of military power went on being promoted. Tibet languished under China’s despotism and its levels of literacy and material provision remained low; and the construction of a railway across its territory, much vaunted in Beijing as showing its wish to share the benefits of modernisation, was seen by Tibetans as a means of reinforcing central control. Great regions such as Xinjiang in the north-west of the People’s Republic were held in a suffocating grip. There the Chinese authorities feared that Islam and Uigur nationalism might breed a separatist movement. Freedom of religious expression was only patchily respected across China. Falun Gong, an indigenous faith of massive popularity, was systematically persecuted. Communist doctrines remained an obligatory ingredient in the school curriculum and a qualification for a serious public career. Marxism-Leninism was otherwise honoured only in the breach."

"Rural discontent was spreading. Peasants had benefited from the dissolution of the land communes under Deng Xiaoping and traded their growing harvests for profit. But they were taxed ever more heavily. Regional and local administrators illegally dispossessed them of their fields on the edges of cities. The cranes and bulldozers were kept working twenty-four hours a day in the great cities as the massive economic boom continued. Where was it going to end? There was no equivalent in the history of world communism. Ideas of ‘market socialism’ – for example, in the USSR in the 1920s, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Hungary in the 1970s – had never proposed a system with the capitalist sector outgrowing the parts of the economy owned by the state. Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping onwards asserted that they were developing a ‘communism with Chinese characteristics’. The red-dyed gauze no longer occluded reality. The communist order was retained only as a means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social components were blown to the winds. Concepts of Mao Zedong Thought were abandoned except insofar as they promoted the goals of national identity, centralised administration and superpower status. An extraordinary hybrid was created."

"China had become the only communist state which developed a vibrant economy by giving it over to capitalism. By the beginning of the third millennium the country was already pointed in the direction of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It was its social cohesion and political durability that remained questionable. Deng was the last supreme ruler to have taken part in the Long March; his successors lacked the aureole of legitimacy as revolutionary veterans. Measures to deal with popular discontent were either crudely punitive or merely palliative. Party officials, faced with a choice between Maoist ideology and self-enrichment, invested in apartment blocks, coal-mines and computer technology. No one was able to tell how long this situation could last. No one today can tell any better."

"The CCP remains alert at all times to its historic mission and responsibility; it is always acutely sensitive to the political tasks that lie before it in the present transitional phase. History and politics delineate its mission. Neither permits it to relax its initiative or to share its responsibility fully with others. Both require it to devise practical working methods that ensure to it the substance of absolute control. For the present, it mouths democratic slogans and operates behind a formal fade o interparty government, considering these to correspond to the political necessities of a Marxist-Leninist revolution now in a pre-socialist stage."

"The party has led the country from the era of Chairman Mao to become the economic powerhouse is it today, but along the way has tolerated no opposition and quashed dissent."

"The Chinese Communist Party’s drive to revive public faith in its history and values goes well beyond textbooks to include film, television, museum exhibitions — and even ice cream wrappers."

"The irony, at least for westerners, is that Chinese communism has survived and prospered because of the very thing that Marxism was meant to wipe out – a profit-hungry private sector."

"The CPC’s longevity is due in large measure to its ability to sum up the lessons of history and change course quite drastically, if required."

"It is more important than ever to understand the nature and power of this organisation; its strengths and weaknesses; its ability to capture the imagination of the people — and interestingly, the youth. It has refuted prognostications of its demise with its capacity for reinventing, regenerating and renewing its compact with the people, strengthened, among other things, by its ability to continue learning from history. The world is dealing not merely with a nation state but with an authoritarian party-state that foregrounds its civilisational culture — and at its helm is an organisation that is steering the country towards its own tryst with destiny. It remains to be seen whether the CPC is still on the right side of history, but the party is by no means over."

"The CCP is aware of the myriad challenges Beijing faces, but it believes its top-down system is capable of handling today’s complex environment. The party trusts that it can marshal the resources necessary to eradicate poverty, redress inequality, and drive innovation, as well as respond to major global trends: deglobalization, climate change, technological disruption, and shifts in the international balance of power."

"China is not a monarchy or a declared dictatorship. But it is ruled with dictatorial zeal by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."

"Awareness of the reprehensible and ongoing actions carried out by the CCP under Xi Jinping is crucial at a time when the regime is exporting its malign activities outside mainland China. The free world must do all it can to stop the CCP from using its economic muscle to hoodwink gullible leaders into supporting its self-interested aims, which run counter to freedom and democracy. The CCP and its rogue leaders must be held accountable for their crimes against humanity over the past 100 years."

"As China grew richer and stronger, we believed, the Chinese Communist Party would liberalize to meet the rising democratic aspirations of its people. This was a bold, quintessentially American idea, born of our innate optimism and by the experience of our triumph over Soviet Communism. Unfortunately, it turned out to be very naïve."

"Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education institutions for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and American national security. If we don’t educate ourselves, if we’re not honest about what’s taking place, we’ll get schooled by Beijing."

"But our approach can’t just be about getting tough. That’s unlikely to achieve the outcome that we desire. We must also engage and empower the Chinese people – a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party."

"A century after the Party was founded by a young Mao Zedong and other students of Marxism-Leninism, it aspires to achieve the ultimate dream of authoritarian politics: an encompassing awareness of everything in its realm; the ability to prevent threats even before they are fully realized, a force of anticipation and control powered by new technology; and economic influence that allows it to rewrite international rules to its liking."

"Xi Jinping has done his best to dismantle Deng Xiaoping’s achievements. He brought the private companies established under Deng under the control of the CCP and undermined the dynamism that used to characterize them. Rather than letting private enterprise blossom, Xi Jinping introduced his own “China Dream” that can be summed up in two words: total control. That has had disastrous consequences. / In contrast to Deng, Xi Jinping is a true believer in Communism. Mao Zedong and Vladimir Lenin are his idols. At the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the CCP he was dressed like Mao while the rest of the audience was wearing business suits."

"The United States and other democratic nations do so much business with China that there is a tendency to turn a blind eye towards the Communist Party’s abysmal human rights record. The Chinese Communist Party’s strategy of liberalizing its national economy while harshly rejecting democracy has become the model for modern dictatorships. Hu Jintao and his party control all media in China, between 250,000 and 300,000 Chinese citizens, including political dissidents, are incarcerated in “reeducation-through-labor” camps and the conviction rate in normal criminal trials is 99.7 percent. Less than 5 percent of trials include witnesses. China executes more people than all other nations combined most of those executions are for nonviolent crimes. Amnesty International has reported that school children have been bused to public executions as field trips."

"Communism was to be China’s weapon for modernization, according to the party’s propaganda. It would make the country rich and strong. But Mao’s agenda went further than the creation of a modern, wealthy country. He wanted to transform Chinese society and people’s ways of thinking. It was “old China” that was to blame for the country’s weakness, Mao thought, more than even British, Japanese, or American imperialists. He liked to compare traditional, Confucian forms of thinking to women with bound feet, hobbling along while being disdained by others. His “new China,” on the other hand, should be youthful, progressive, and militant. Those who stood in the way were “pests” to be exterminated; landlords, priests, and capitalists were holding China back on purpose, in order to serve their own interests. They had to go, as did all those forces that blocked the new society the Communists would create. For Mao this was a millennial struggle. It was China’s last chance to redeem itself and retake its rightful position in the world."

"Westerners are never far away from [CCP ideologist Qiu Jini’s] argument [about national security, which Qiu defines as the protection of the absolute control on the country by the CCP, its Central Committee, and its General Secretary], but they are seen like a threat, a continuous conspiracy to impose on the Chinese something different from Marxism and from the control of everything by the Party, the Central Committee, and Xi Jinping. They should read more texts like Qiu’s, which would help them understand that more economic development does not mean for China less Marxism and less totalitarian control by the Party."

"The Chinese Communist Party turns every walk of life into a battlefield."

"The irony is rich. In a country that officially espouses atheism, the Party has become the most zealous proselytizer of all. Its gospel is nationalism, its saints are revolutionaries, and its miracles are economic statistics. The faithful are expected to genuflect not to gods, but to growth charts and five-year plans. Xi [Jinping] is not just the architect, he is the icon. His personal involvement in religious affairs is no longer symbolic; it’s structural. The message is clear: religion must serve socialism, not the other way around. The Party is the new clergy, and Xi its infallible pontiff."

"Was the policy a success? It depends on who you ask. Supporters say it worked: since the late 1970s, China’s economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That would not have been possible, they say, without controlling population growth."

"But critics say the policy was unnecessary, and ultimately replaced one problem—too many people—with another—too few. Specifically, China now has too few females and will soon have too few young people. These imbalances are creating social tensions that will be difficult to un-do, even now that the one-child restriction has been replaced with a two-child policy. These tensions are felt at a very personal level, and are challenging long-held values in China about the importance of marriage, family, and children’s sense of duty to their parents."

"Some families defied the policy by having a second or third child. If the “population police” found out, they punished the parents by imposing fines that were well beyond most families’ ability to pay. Many such parents therefore kept their “above quota” children hidden from public view. Their official invisibility meant that these children were not given a residence permit, called a hukou, which meant they could not get health care, attend school, or even get a library card."

"Peer pressure and an extensive propaganda campaign were aimed at persuading Chinese people to embrace the ideal of a one-child family. Most Chinese did not own a television, and cell phones and the Internet did not exist during the policy’s first two decades, so the government made use of public spaces to display slogans and images depicting happy, healthy, and prosperous one-child families."

"Finally, the jury is still out on how Chinese people will respond to this loosening of the rules. One of the side-effects of the old policy is that there is now an expectation that parents will spend so much money and resources on a child, that even many middle class couples say they cannot comprehend being able to afford two children.5 China therefore may continue to have a generation of children who feel either lucky or lonely, or both."

"The one-child policy was designed in 1980 as a temporary measure to put a brake on China’s population growth and to facilitate economic growth under a planned economy that faced severe shortages of capital, natural resources, and consumer goods. However, the answer to China’s underdevelopment did not come from its extreme birth control measures, but from reform policies that loosened state control over the economy. China’s economic boom over the last few decades has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sent almost 100 million young men and women to college, and inspired generations of Chinese, both young and old, to purse their economic goals. As observed in many other countries and societies, socioeconomic and cultural transformations accelerated the pace of fertility decline. By the turn of the new century, China’s fertility was well below the replacement level, and China began to face the mounting pressures associated with continued low fertility. To continue the one-child policy within such a demographic context was clearly no longer defensible."

"China’s one-child policy will be remembered as one of the costliest lessons of misguided public policymaking. Contrary to the claims of some Chinese officials, much of China’s fertility decline to date was realized prior to the launch of the one-child policy, under a much less strict policy in the 1970s calling for later marriage, longer birth intervals, and fewer births. In countries that had similar levels of fertility in the early 1970s without extreme measures such as the one-child policy, fertility also declined, and some achieved a level similar to China’s today. While playing a limited role in reducing China’s population growth, the one-child policy in the 35 years of its existence has created tens of millions, perhaps as many as 100 million, of China’s 150 million one-child families today. For these families, the harm caused by the policy is long-term and irreparable."

"Though often labeled one of China's most draconian laws, China's one-child policy, introduced at the end of the 1970s and abandoned at the beginning of 2016, achieved what it set out to do -- rein in growth of the country's already vast population. More than three decades on, as economic prosperity and nature have taken their course, the country faces a new demographic issue: it looks set to become old before it becomes rich."

"In families that already had one child, the births of additional children—in violation of the one-child policy—were often undocumented, leading to many problems later on for those children as they struggled to receive an education or find work."

"A consensus has emerged that the sex ratio distortion in China is due to prenatal discrimination against female conceptions. This consensus is based primarily on evidence from fertility surveys, field work and census data."

"In China, parents have historically preferred sons to daughters and in some circumstances discarded daughters upon birth. In the 1960s, when fertility was high and infant mortality was low, this pattern was temporarily muted by the fact that most mothers were likely to have at least one surviving son without resorting to sex selection. However, while the female deficit was reduced, high fertility and low infant mortality were contributing to unsustainable population growth."

"While the sex ratio distortion in China is a long-standing demo-graphic pattern, fertility policies instituted to slow population growth have exacerbated the female deficit. Under the One Child Policy, parents in China who exceed their fertility limit are forced to pay a fine and are subject to a variety of other monetary punishments, including the seizure of property and forced dismissal from government employment."

"The fertility policy in China is enforced by a complex system of financial disincentives for excess fertility, including reduction of land allotments, denial of public services, and fines for unauthorized births."

"When you create a system where you would shrink the size of a family and people would have to choose, then people would ... choose sons."

"The one-child policy drastically reshaped the composition of China's people. So now they have a population that's basically too old and too male and down the line, maybe too few. So the too old issue is that right now China has a dependency ratio of about five working adults to support one retiree. That's pretty good, that's a very healthy ratio. In about 20 years that's going to jump to about 1.6 working adults to support one retiree, and that's because that big population boom that we talked about, that big cohort of people are all living longer and getting older and therefore hitting their 70s, 80s and 90s, so by the time 2050 comes around one in four Chinese people will be a retiree."

"For 36 years, the ruling Communist Party enforced an extreme form of social engineering to regulate birthrates. It was part of a strategy to simultaneously grow the economy and improve living standards. It was easier to increase income per head, the policymakers decided, when there weren’t so many heads."

"Faced with a population that is shrinking and ageing, Chinese policymakers are attempting to engineer a baby boom after more than three decades of a Malthusian family planning regime better-known as the one-child policy. Central policy planners have loosened restrictions on family sizes, and now all married couples can have two children. There is talk of the limits being dropped altogether, and amid aggressive propaganda drives, local officials are experimenting with subsidies and incentives for parents."

"It has led to a huge gender imbalance in China, where there are now 34.9 million more males than females, according to the latest census data released in May. The census, conducted in 2020, showed that the sex ratio of the total population was 105.1 males to 100 females – about the same as a decade ago."

"A boom in second children was exactly what the central government was hoping for when it announced the lifting of the world’s most controversial family planning scheme, commonly known as the “one-child policy” in October 2015. As of 2015, after 35 years of severe restrictions, the demographic implications for the 150 million families in China of having only one child were becoming increasingly apparent and the government was forced to act in an attempt to, at least in part, correct an upcoming demographic disaster for the rapidly ageing country."

"That longstanding policy, enforced with harsh consequences, fostered an anti-natalist mindset that Party slogans cannot easily change. The Party has never openly acknowledged that the policy was wrong—only that it was “adjusted”—meaning there is no moral reset, no cultural accountability, and no space for genuine persuasion. You cannot ask people to have more children while refusing to admit that you [had] previously unjustly punished them for doing just that."

"Critics often point out the damages to peasants’ welfare and to women’s reproductive health, the aggravated discrimination and violence to infant girls, imbalanced sex ratios, accelerated population aging, and other social suffering and trauma resulted from the One-Child Policy. Among international critics, the US shifted its focus from indicting the policy as a manifestation of communist coercion incriminating it as a violation of human rights."

"Although both male and female births are underreported, the birth of a girl is twice as likely to be ignored. Underreporting is believed to account for about half to two thirds of the difference in infant sex ratios, which by the early 1990s had risen to 114 boys for every 100 girls. Unrecorded daughters may be left with relatives, adopted out, or abandoned to orphanages,13 which are increasingly unable to cope with the influx. Sex ratios are further skewed by widespread abortion, after the illegal but lucrative use of ultrasound to identify fetal sex."

"Western media outlets and politicians have criticized the family planning policy from the day it was implemented, alleging it is a violation of human rights. But to us, a generation which made a big sacrifice to control the national population, such accusations appear vacuous. Had the Chinese government allowed the population to grow and reach, say, 2 billion which would have drastically increased unemployment and poverty in the country, the very same Western outlets and politicians would have attacked China and its ruling party, accusing them of poor governance."

"As an old Chinese saying goes, none but the wearer knows where the shoe pinches. As a member of a generation that experienced and, in fact, sacrificed to make the family planning policy a success, we know only too well that it is a sacrifice that had to be made for the betterment of the country and the Chinese people."

"It’s not just a problem of whether you permit ordinary people to have one or two kids. It’s about returning their reproductive rights to them. In over 200 countries and regions around the world, which of them nowadays controls people’s reproduction like this?"

"The policy led to sex-selective abortions or infanticide targeting girls, because of a centuries-old social preference for boys."

"Female infanticide and sex-selective abortions are one of the many unintended consequences of the one-child policy. For every 118 boys in China, there are now only 100 girls."

"For China’s leaders, the controls were a triumphant demonstration of the party’s capacity to reshape even the most intimate dimensions of citizens’ lives. But they bred intense resentment over the brutal intrusions involved, including forced abortions and crippling fines, especially in the countryside."

"For more than 35 years, China enforced a controversial one-child policy initially imposed to halt a population explosion. Its replacement, a two-child limit, failed to result in a sustained surge in the number of births as the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities deterred many couples from starting families."

"The problem for China of not having children must be very painful, because the pyramid is then inverted and a child has to bear the burden of his father, mother, grandfather and grandmother. And this is exhausting, demanding, disorientating. It is not the natural way. I understand that China has opened up possibilities on this front."

"In Guangxi Province, where family-planning regulations are strictly enforced, parents trying for sons sell their baby girls on the black market. At the time, 80 percent of trafficked babies were girls, according to a Chinese academic."

"As a result of the one-child policy and the tradition of male heirs, there is currently a national gender imbalance. In China, there are 30 million more men than women."

"The one-child policy, however, extends beyond the borders of mainland China. Throughout the globe, many children adopted from China have been trafficked into orphanages. Women are currently being trafficked from Myanmar, due to the gender imbalance, to marry Chinese men. The lesson from the impact of the one-child policy is that when a government regulates a woman’s reproductive rights, it is detrimental for the world."

"For thousands of years, sons have been highly revered in Chinese culture. Sons were expected to carry on the honor of the family name, wealth, and the expectation to provide for his parents. Males dominated all aspects of Chinese life. In 1979, China introduced one of the world's most extreme state mandated policies for population control, one in which all married couples were to be restricted to having only one child. Even immediately after its implementation, the Chinese continued to believe in this cultural value in males."

"After the signing of China's One-Child Policy in 1979, all married urban couples were allowed to only have one child. This creates a typical family of four grandparents and two parents to one singleton child (also referred to as an only child). This singleton child would therefore not be replacing the prior generations, dramatically reducing the expected population growth within the country. Enforcement of this policy is held at the provincial level. For any additional child, the couple must pay a fine based upon the province of residence, family income, etc."

"While some couples have complied with the government's family planning policy, others choose to avoid it. Some couples have found this population control policy to contradict their own beliefs; rather than adapting to the country's mandated policy, they move from Mainland China so that the policy does not apply to them anymore. Some immigrate to other nations where they are allowed more freedom in their reproductive choices. Others move to Chinese territories such as Hong Kong or Macau, who have been granted a 50-year grace period after the transfer of colonial rule to Chinese rule. While these territories will eventually come under Chinese rules and regulations, at this moment they have their own government and policies in place. The One-Child policy does not apply there; therefore, families are moving from Mainland China in order to have more children."

"The situation in China is different from that overseas. Other countries also have families who have lost an only child, but not as many. Such parents comprise just a small segment in other countries, but since family-planning is a national policy in China, this demographic group has ballooned. Among the Chinese up to 25 years old, four out of every 10,000 die for various reasons every year. This translates into 76,000 deaths each year. Over the past few decades, some 10 million families have been affected by these deaths."

"Why did we follow such a wrong policy for so long? The Chinese government doesn’t want to admit it’s wrong. It says the policy was right but now is the time to change. If it just says the policy was wrong, the public will become angry."

"Chinese officials say they will begin studying how to move away from the country’s one-child restriction, but caution that any changes would come gradually and would not mean an elimination of family-planning policies. Though enforcement of the policy has softened in many places, there are still reports of forced sterilizations and abortions."

"The purpose of the family-planning policy was not to make hundreds of families lose their only child, but this situation did occur. If the government does not address this, the situation will only get worse."

"Defendants did not create the Challenge; rather, they made it readily available on their site. Defendants’ algorithm was a way to bring the Challenge to the attention of those likely to be most interested in it. In thus promoting the work of others, Defendants published that work — exactly the activity Section 230 shields from liability."

"You can't use TikTok for now"

""Pakistan Wants to Ban TikTok for “Immorality”" by Marco Respinti, Bitter Winter (January 6, 2025)"

""How TikTok Killed The Preteen Era by Evita Duffy-Alfonso, The Federalist (January 6, 2024)"

"Not satisfied with this, after entering Peking, Lord Elgin ordered the burning of the Summer Palace `whose splendours' the conquerors themselves had `found it difficult to describe'. This action Elgin in his ignorance had imagined would impress the Oriental and leave a lasting fear of the European in the Chinese mind. By a strange process of reasoning, the Europeans have, throughout their relations with Asians, convinced themselves that acts of savagery and inhumanity will increase their prestige in the eyes of Asian people. ... The Elgins have been unfortunate in their historical imagination- — whether it be in respect of Greek marbles or Chinese palaces."

"I believe, however, that the hatred of the Chinese Communists, hatred which dates back to Mao Zedong, is much more violent towards Tibetan Buddhism than it is against the Islamic separatists of Xinjiang. Moreover, recently, a senior Chinese official commented that Tibetan separatism is more dangerous than that of Xinjiang. Strange, when we are a religion that preaches absolute non-violence. Besides, I will give you an example of this hateful partiality against my people: in Chinese prisons, the prison guards respect Muslim customs by not serving pork, but they force Buddhist monks to kill cows and pigs, knowing that our religion forbids it."

"Frankly, I don’t know much about it... If I had enough knowledge I would speak about it. It is not so much in the papers."

"I did not find any instance of forced labor or cultural and religious repression. The imams we met at the mosques and the students and teachers at the Xinjiang Islamic Institute told us that they enjoy freedom in practicing Islam and that the Chinese government extends support for maintenance of mosques all over Xinjiang. I learned that there are over 30,000 mosques all over Xinjiang that form part of the religious life of the people there. Similarly, I did not see any sign of cultural repression... My country is also plagued by terrorism. I hope my country can adopt some of these measures, such as setting up a vocational education and training center and carrying out poverty alleviation work, to help de-extremization. But they don't have so much money to do this."

"I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uyghurs, the Yazidi -- what ISIS did to them was truly cruel -- or Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that went off while they prayed in church."

"[W]e are a 100% satisfied that it’s a non-issue. The West can say what it wants. I am telling you as a responsible official, we know everything we need to know about the Uighurs and everything else in China as they do about us. We have zero concerns, absolutely zero concerns."

"After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that since at least March 2017, the People’s Republic of China, under the direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party, has committed crimes against humanity against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other members of ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang."

"Because of our extreme proximity and relationship with China, we actually accept the Chinese version... It is hypocritical. There are much worse human rights violations taking place in other parts of the world… But Western media hardly comment on this."

"I’m not sure that’s what’s happening in China. In our conversations with China, they have drawn a different picture of the issue. And whatever issues we do have with the Chinese, we will always discuss them behind closed doors."

"But Khan’s work in championing the world’s Muslims is undercut by his deafening silence on the oppression of the Uighur community in China... When asked publicly about the Uighurs, Khan’s responses range from declaring he knows little about the issue to saying he is discussing the matter privately with Beijing."

"Pakistan remains of the firm view that the perspective and consent of the concerned States should be given utmost importance when dealing with the affairs which fall exclusively within their sovereign jurisdiction."

"By receiving billions of dollars from China, these countries are not only forced to remain quiet on the genocidal atrocities against Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan but also commanded from Beijing to do whatever the PRC wants."

"The Turkish side never uses Xinjiang-related issues as a tool against China and has long designated the ETIM (East Turkistan Islamic Movement) as a terrorist organization and banned its activities in Turkey."

"In China, Uyghurs and other Muslims have difficulties protecting their religious rights and cultural identity... Is it right to ignore the situation of the Uyghurs?"

"Why is it wrong for [the] Uyghurs to seek help from other states to protect their national existence and gain national freedom and to seek partners in international conflicts, while the country of Pakistan, where you studied, has the right to receive help from [the Communist régime ruling] China at the expense of sacrificing the rights of Uyghur Muslims to feed its own people with blood-tainted Chinese [Communist Party] money?"

", an [American] anthropologist, is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and a specialist of Xinjiang. In new, fascinating research he reports a strange phenomenon. Irrigation channels are clogged in Southern Xinjiang but there have been no landslides or other natural incidents. They are clogged by books. Villagers go there at night and dump all the volumes they kept at home. The police are visiting their homes and would arrest them if they find religious, subversive, or otherwise “dissident” literature. Since they don’t know what books may be regarded as subversive, to be on the safer side they dump all of them. Elsewhere, books are dumped in the sewers, and they are also obstructed."

"The spark that ignited the [June 15, 1988 Uyghur Xinjiang University students'] protest came after years of systematic discrimination and humiliation of Uyghur students. On May 5, 1988, racist and degrading graffiti were scrawled in the restroom of the Physics Department at Xinjiang University in Urumqi. The words included vile slogans such as: “Let’s make Uyghur men slaves, and turn their girls into prostitutes.” Despite the disgraceful nature of this incident, the university administration and authorities remained silent. Uyghur students attempted to voice their concerns through legal and official channels, submitting petitions and seeking dialogue. All efforts were either rejected or ignored. It became clear—silence was no longer an option. …What started as discrimination in the 1980s has now escalated into full-scale genocide."

"“In ancient Tibet there was a kind of feudal discrimination against women; however, compared to the fate of Chinese women, Tibetan women had a much better status, almost equal to that of men. » ... “many of the high reincarnations of our lamas are women – so, at least from a religious point of view, women have been well treated”."

"For the untrained eye, Tai Ji Men’s Dragon Dance might appear to be merely a cultural showcase. It is undoubtedly a colorful and vibrant performance of Chinese cultural heritage, which is made possible by hand-crafting artisanal dragon heads and sometimes dozens of meters-long dragon bodies. This massive mythical creature is then brought to life by syncretizing the movements of , who are led by the dragon ball, before the creature’s head. For scholars of religion, however, the arduous preparation process and the practice of the Dragon Dance also unveil further interpretative layers."

"Every academic in China works under a censorship and ideological regime that distorts and repackages his work to make China appear like a normal and free society. …Offending phrases or topics may lead to sanctions such as failing an “ethical evaluation.” Party leaders in China’s universities also make use of student informants who report any politically banned speech from their professors in the classroom. The system generates a constant rumor mill about topics that are off-limits, and also has the consequence of denying China’s rulers useful information about governance issues like corruption."

"It was a foot in name only. The misshapen mass looked more like a hoof bisected by a crack."

"Strange to think it was an erotic thing. To us, the smell of rotting flesh would be unbearable. But back then men wrote poems about the rich smell."

"The bandages that women used for footbinding were about 10 feet long, so it was difficult for them to wash their feet. They only washed once every two weeks, so it was very, very stinky. But when I was young I was very free, because when I was naughty my mother couldn't run fast enough with her bound feet to catch me and beat me."

"There's not a single other woman in Liuyicun who could fit their feet into my shoes. When my generation dies, people won't be able to see bound feet, even if they want to."

"Looking back on it, I am not sure what I was expecting. Such cruel and ugly words are used to describe bound feet. I held her naked foot in my hands and was surprised how soft to the touch her feet were. I was also taken aback because in some ways the form of her foot was quite beautiful. I think this also stems from a feeling of empathy that she had gone to such extreme lengths to be considered beautiful, desirable, marriage potential. It really resonated with me and I became even more excited about the project and eager to find more women to tell their stories."

"Most people’s immediate reaction is how bad this custom was. I now see it as more of a means to an end. In their society it was the only way forward for women: It would garner them a better future, a better life; in their society it was considered beautiful and then later on it was considered backward. Can you imagine first of all being praised for going to such extreme measures and the torture you went through to be aesthetically pleasing only to be demonized as an adult for complying with standard practices?"

"I came into this project with preconceptions like most people have, that this was a custom only done by the elite who lived lives of luxury in beautifully embroidered shoes, only to discover that this tradition transcended different classes just like any fashion statement. The women in my project all come from rural areas and are typically peasant farmers who have lived through some of the harshest times in China. I have learned so much from hearing their stories and being part of their lives. As a photographer, I am a storyteller and I hope people can have a better understanding of this tradition through looking at my work. It has been an honor to have been part of their lives."

"Certainly the "three-inch golden lotuses" were seen as the ultimate erogenous zone, with Qing dynasty pornographic books listing 48 different ways of playing with women's bound feet."

"For one of my pieces on camera, I balanced a pair of embroidered doll shoes in the palm of my hand, as I talked about Lady Huang and the origins of foot-binding. When it was over, I turned to the museum curator who had given me the shoes and made some comment about the silliness of using toy shoes. This was when I was informed that I had been holding the real thing. The miniature “doll” shoes had in fact been worn by a human. The shock of discovery was like being doused with a bucket of freezing water."

"The truth, no matter how unpalatable, is that foot-binding was experienced, perpetuated and administered by women. Though utterly rejected in China now— the last shoe factory making lotus shoes closed in 1999 —it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s emotional investment in the practice. The lotus shoe is a reminder that the history of women did not follow a straight line from misery to progress, nor is it merely a scroll of patriarchy writ large. Shangguan, Li and Liang had few peers in Europe in their own time. But with the advent of foot-binding, their spiritual descendants were in the West. Meanwhile, for the next 1,000 years, Chinese women directed their energies and talents toward achieving a three-inch version of physical perfection."

"Old Testament criticism was never bound by the same rules and prejudices as the study of China or of India, and vice versa."

"...the anachronistic conception that Greece and Rome alone should be considered sources of culture for us, and that therefore they must remain for all time the focal point of historical-philological research. [Classicists] still practice that orthodox philology, which claims and possesses an influence, which it has not for a long time deserved, [and] that intolerant onesidedness which only accords the oriental sciences a hearing in so far as they are related to the history and culture of Greece, but otherwise are blind and want to be blind to the enormous field of Asian knowledge, which has brought us into contact with the modern world. [They are still beholden to] that real “unworldliness” in the scholarly sense, which takes no part in the widened historical conceptions of our day. Those are the forces with which Orientalistik has always had to struggle, and which today too block Sinology’s path, ... And added to this is another fact, that one ought to think, should offer [Sinology] a leg up, but actually because of the weirdness of our academic [canons of] scientificness hinders it; and that is its vital connection with the present. If Sinology only had to do exclusively with a long finished, ruined and then re-excavated culture, then perhaps there would be a possibility of finding grace in the eyes of the philological right-thinkers. .."

"The Party has accepted that it cannot eliminate Feng Shui; instead, it has placed itself as the ultimate authority on how it should be used. In this “state-led logic of legitimation,” the layout of China’s cities becomes a map of political authority, leading back to Beijing. Reading [Singapore Management University Professor Andrew] Stokols, I recalled the police officers from 2018, claiming atheism while adjusting their desks to face the right way. They weren’t hypocrites. They were simply navigating a country where the state bans superstition yet practices it, where ideology bends to mountains and rivers, and where even the most secular revolution eventually realizes that the dragon veins run deeper than Marx."