Non Fiction Authors From China

"I wasn't an especially rebellious child, but I can say I gave my parents a lot of trouble at times. Because I had a lot of guts and was always taking risks, I either got hurt or sometimes broke other people's things and caused problems. I always sparked a lot of trouble."

"When I talk with American politicians, and they ask me if they should begin talking about human rights again, I reply: if you want to talk then do it, I don’t care. What I care about is how to force China into changing its stance towards the law. If you use a trade war to force the Chinese Communist regime to observe its own laws, naturally you will also protect human rights as well. The law protects the rights of every individual. If we are going to talk only about human rights, and we aren’t going to talk about rule of law, ordinary Chinese people will have the feeling that you’re talking about something irrelevant to them. If you talk about establishing a system based on the rule of law, Chinese people will understand immediately. Only when true rule of law has been established throughout society will the rights of every person be taken into account, and that is something that an ordinary Chinese person will understand."

"If you really want to write well, the most important thing is allowing people to believe you. If you want people to believe you, you have to say things exactly the way you think them. You shouldn't deceive people. This is the only way you can gain people's trust. But, I think the hardest thing in the world is to be able to tell the truth. In China, if you tell the truth, you can go to prison. In America, while you won't necessarily go to prison for telling the truth, you might sometimes lose your job. The situation is just as difficult."

"No one is an exception. But at some point, you have to make a choice. Sometimes you have to choose either to live, but not like a person, without value or bones, like a traitor, cheating one's friends. But what meaning is there in that kind of life? Sometimes you have to make the choice: I would rather die than cheat my friends or live without meaning. People sometimes need to make this kind of choice."

"Let me call on our comrades: Rally under the banner of democracy and do not trust the autocrats' talk about "stability and unity." Fascist totalitarianism can only bring us disaster. l have no more illusion. Democracy is our only hope. Abandon our democratic rights and we will be shackled once again. Let us believe in our own strength! Human history was created by us. Let all self-styled leaders and teachers go. They have for decades cheated the people of their most valuable possession. I firmly believe that production will be faster under the people's own management. Because the laborers will produce for their own benefit, their living conditions will be better. Society will thus be more rational, because under democracy all social authority is exercised by the people with a view to improving their livelihood."

"I have waited decades for this chance to exercise my right to free speech, but the Chinese people have been waiting for centuries."

"I live in daily gratitude for everything I have now that would have been unfathomable for Chinese immigrants not so long ago. Our lives are built on the shoulders of giants. Honoring their legacy means living up to our privilege and continuing to push the movement forward. My vision for the beautiful country is this: to every new generation, more rights, more equality, more justice."

"I consider my release to be only a small victory for human rights and democracy."

"So, what I endeavored to do with my book was to speak heart-to-heart, and the childhood lens allowed me the perfect avenue to do so. My vision for my book was that it might allow readers to feel as if they were getting aboard a train, which would carry them through the terrain of my childhood—through that journey, they would be able to see new sights, yes, but also revisit some of their own experiences and familiar landscape. Through this, I hope, people might start to see that underneath the labels and political divides, none of us are all that different from each other, and that at bottom, we all want much of the same things: safety, community, and meaning."

"In our undocumented existence, it was unsafe for me to be fully honest about myself and my reality with any other real person. Fictional characters thus formed my safe circle — the place in which I was safe to be my full self. Overnight, I also saw all my loved ones and family disappear, and I didn’t know whether I would ever see them again. The characters of these books filled that void of loneliness, and in their presence I learned that it was natural to be scared sometimes, or lonely. They also taught me the power of storytelling, and of words."

"The growth of Asian American pride is heartening. The young generations of immigrants, Asian Americans, undocumented Americans, and Americans of color never cease to give me faith for the future. That said, new changes in the right direction do not necessarily erase previous wrongs and old hurts. Once someone has felt the acute pain of being dehumanized, that experience stays with them. It does not disappear overnight, nor do the barriers that are built into the foundation of our society. To achieve real, lasting progress, we must remember that."

"For human beings, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. Rely on yourself, and you can overcome anything."

"If there were normal relationships between the two partners, there would be no problem. But China is a dysfunctional country. Consequently, I am not happy with the attitude of Western European countries that have moved away from the issue of human rights in exchange for trade, especially in the last 10 years."

"Why must human history take the road toward prosperity and modernization? The reason is that people need prosperity so that real goods are available, and so that there is a full opportunity to pursue their first goal of happiness, namely freedom. Democracy means the maximum attainable freedom so far known by human beings. It is quite obvious that democracy has become the goal in contemporary human struggles."

"For me, Qian represents the self and the precocious, mischievous child who went from knowing only love and acceptance to living in daily shame and hunger. And Julie represents the pre-teen, teen, and woman who was determined to survive no matter the cost, even if it meant hiding or obliterating her origin story and her authentic self. Both of these names are integral parts of me, and I can no more choose between them than I can between my left and right legs."

"The biggest problem facing China's democracy movement is how to unite people in order to form an official opposition party. This is the only way we will be strong. If everyone cannot unite into an official opposition party, instead just proclaiming a bunch of empty, meaningless declarations, there's no purpose. The majority of Chinese already understand why we need democracy. In terms of protests, every year there are still thousands of struggles and demonstrations. So, the most crucial task is to get all the activists and demonstrators united into one common effort, because this is the only way we'll succeed."

"The most important thing I learned from my parents is how to conduct myself. Maybe this expression does not exist in English. Chinese are very focused on this "conduct" concept, or what you call "creating oneself," according to Western thought. This is very important. My parents taught me that in order to conduct oneself well, the most important thing is to be responsible toward your friends. If you are not responsible, then you should not make friends. My mother's motto was that the people's interests are more important than anything else. Even if you have great friends, you should not put your friends' interests above the people's or betray people."

"Normally, the entropy of a system is extensive, that is, proportional to its volume. Somehow, a black hole has an entropy proportional to its surface rather than to its volume. This fact has led to the so-called holographic principle. Many fundamental physicists believe that this mysterious property of black holes holds the key to quantum gravity."

"Although group theory is certainly relevant for nineteenth-century physics, it really started to play an important role with the work of Lorentz and Poincaré, and became essential with quantum mechanics. Heisenberg opened up an entirely new world with his vision of an internal symmetry, the exploration of which continues to this day in one form or another. Beginning in the 1950s, group theory has come to play a central role in several areas of physics, perhaps none more so than in what I call fundamental physics ..."

"Rotations in 3-dimensional Euclidean space ... form the poster child of group theory and are almost indispensable in physics. Think of rotating a rigid object, such as a bust of Newton. After two rotations in succession, the bust, being rigid, has not been deformed in any way; it merely has a different orientation. Thus, the composition of two rotations is another rotation."

"That the exchange of a particle can produce a force was one of the most profound conceptual advances in physics. We now associate a particle with each of the known forces: for example, the photon with the electromagnetic force and the graviton with the gravitational force; the former is experimentally well established and while the latter has not yet been detected experimentally hardly anyone doubts its existence."

"It is difficult to overstate the importance (not to speak of the beauty) of what we have learned: The exchange of a spin 0 particle produces an attractive force, of a spin 1 particle a repulsive force, and of a spin 2 particle an attractive force, realized in the hadronic strong interaction, the electromagnetic interaction, and the gravitational interaction, respectively. The universal attraction of gravity produces an instability that drives the formation of structure in the early universe. ... Denser regions become denser yet. The attractive nuclear force mediated by the spin 0 particle eventually ignites the stars. Furthermore, the attractive force between protons and neutrons mediated by the spin 0 particle is able to overcome the repulsive electric force between protons mediated by the spin 1 particle to form a variety of nuclei without which the world would certainly be rather boring. The repulsion between likes and hence attraction between opposites generated by the spin 1 particle allow electrically neutral atoms to form. The world results from a subtle interplay among spin 0, 1, and 2. In this lightning tour of the universe, we did not mention the weak interaction. In fact, the weak interaction plays a crucial role in keeping stars such as our sun burning at a steady rate."

"It is almost an article of faith among theoretical physicists, enunciated forcefully by Einstein among others, that the fundamental laws should be orderly and simple, rather than arbitrarily and complicated."

"In a course on nonrelativistic quantum mechanics you learned about the Pauli exclusion principle2 and its later generalization stating that particles with half integer spins, such as electrons, obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and want to stay apart, while in contrast particles with integer spins, such as photons or pairs of electrons, obey Bose-Einstein statistics and love to stick together. From the microscopic structure of atoms to the macroscopic structure of neutron stars, a dazzling wealth of physical phenomena would be incomprehensible without this spin-statistics rule. Many elements of condensed matter physics, for instance, band structure, Fermi liquid theory, superfluidity, superconductivity, quantum Hall effect, and so on and so forth, are consequences of this rule."

"As was emphasized by Feynman ... among others, the physics of superfluidity lies not in the presence of gapless excitations, but in the paucity of gapless excitations. (After all, the Fermi liquid has a continuum of gapless modes.) There are too few modes that the superfluid can lose energy and momentum to."

"Ah, group theory! The entire subject is amazing and amusing. Who would have expected that three Platonic solids—the cube, tetrahedron, and icosahedron—would pop up in constructing the Dynkin diagrams of the exceptional Lie algebras? Or that finite group theory could determine the remainder when 1010 is divided by 11?"

"... the fight for credit goes on in every field, but in theoretical physics, it is almost a way of life, since ideas are by nature ethereal. And the stakes are high: the victor gets to go to Stockholm, while the loser is consigned to the dustbin of history; a history largely written by the victor with the help of an army of idolaters and science writers."

"The goal of condensed matter physics is to understand the various states of matter. States of matter are characterized by the presence (or absence) of order: a ferromagnet becomes ordered below the transition temperature. In the Landau-Ginzburg theory ... , order is associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, described naturally with group theory. Girvin and MacDonald first noted that the order in Hall fluids does not really fit into the Landau-Ginzburg scheme: We have not broken any obvious symmetry. The topological property of the Hall fluids provides a clue to what is going on. As explained in the preceding chapter, the ground state degeneracy of a Hall fluid depends on the topology of the manifold it lives on, a dependence group theory is incapable of accounting for. Wen has forcefully emphasized that the study of topological order, or more generally quantum order, may open up a vast new vista on the possible states of matter."

"... The quantum Hall system consists of a bunch of electrons moving in a plane in the presence of an external magnetic field B perpendicular to the plane. The magnetic field is assumed to be sufficiently strong so that the electrons all have spin up, say, so they may be treated as spinless fermions. As is well known, this seemingly innocuous and simple physical situation contains a wealth of physics, the elucidation of which has led to two Nobel prizes."

"Electromagnetism becomes stronger as we go to higher energies, or equivalently shorter distances. Physically, the origin of this phenomenon is closely related to the physics of dielectrics. Consider a photon interacting with an electron, which we will call the test electron to avoid confusion in what follows. Due to quantum fluctuations ... , spacetime is full of electron-positron pairs, popping in and out of existence. Near the test electron, the electrons in these virtual pairs are repelled by the test electron and thus tend to move away from the test electron while the positrons tend to move toward the test electron. Thus, at long distances, the charge of the test electron is shielded to some extent by the cloud of positrons, causing a weaker coupling to the photon, while at short distances the coupling to the photon becomes stronger. The quantum vacuum is just as much a dielectric as a lump of actual material."

"We discuss the problem of adding random matrices, which enable us to study Hamiltonians consisting of a deterministic term plus a random term. Using a diagrammatic approach and introducing the concept of "gluon connectedness," we calculate the density of energy levels for a wide class of probability distributions governing the random term, thus generalizing a result obtained recently by Brézin, Hikami, and Zee. The method used here may be applied to a broad class of problems involving random matrices."

"One reason I went to Princeton University as an undergraduate was that I had read about a Professor John Wheeler suggesting that the atomic nucleus might take on the form of a doughnut. When I got there, I learned that Wheeler was going to give a novel type of course for freshmen. A group of us were asked a few physics questions by Wheeler, and those who answered correctly were allowed into the course. The first homework assignment consisted of standing for 15 minutes in front of the house that Albert Einstein had lived in. It turned out that we were to learn physics from the top down: For example, we were taught “F = ma” as a limiting case of special relativity. If I remember correctly, the department did not allow Wheeler to teach the course again. But I learned a lot; in particular, I learned to “never calculate without first knowing the answer.”"

"We show that the introduction of a charged scalar particle into the standard theory leads to numerous phenomenological consequences. In particular, muon-neutrino scattering on electron can resonate in the s-channel, a fact which is potentially important in high-energy neutrino experiments and conceivably relevant in explaining the recently reported underground muon events from Cygnus X-3. We focus on the violation of various quantum numbers, including electron, muon, and tauon numbers."

"In the last few years, an interesting new subject, the study of topological quantum fluids, has emerged. Examples of topological quantum fluids include the Hall fluid, the chiral spin fluid, and the anyon superfluid."

"The question now is not whether we do or do not study but whether we can truly grasp and apply what we study. To grasp and apply truly, we must combine study with reality. Only by linking it with reality can we understand it, fix it in our minds and apply it. Without linking it with reality, we cannot understand it, fix it in our minds and apply it."

"We should regard ourselves as a part of the strength of the revolution and at the same time constantly make ourselves a target of revolution. We should revolutionize ourselves in the revolution. Without doing this is impossible to make the revolution a success."

"The great proletarian- cultural revolution is aimed precisely at eliminating bourgeois ideology, establishing proletarian ideology, remoulding people’s souls, revolutionizing their ideology, digging out the roots of revisionism, and consolidating and developing the socialist system."

"The most fundamental task in our Party’s political and ideological work is at all times to hold high the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, to arm the minds of the people throughout the country with it and to persist in using it to command every field of activity. '"

"With political power, the proletariat and the working people will have everything and without political power, they will lose everything. No matter how innumerable are the issues, we must never, forget political power. Forgetting political power means forgetting the fundamental viewpoint of Marxism. If we do so, we will become muddle headed fools and we will not be able to know how we are killed even when we forfeit our lives."

"It must be emphasized that Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s theory of the establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of the cities from the countryside is of outstanding and universal., practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed nations and peoples, and particularly for the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America against imperialism and its lackeys."

"If the proletariat does not occupy the positions in literature and art, the bourgeoisie certainly will. This is inevitable. And it represents an extremely broad and deep socialist revolution in the realm of ideology. If things are not done properly, revisionism will prevail."

"Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s great merit lies in the fact that he has succeeded in integrating the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution and has enriched and developed Marxism-Leninism by his masterly generalization and summation the experience gained during the Chinese people’s protracted revolutionary struggle."

"In the last analysis, whether one dares to wage a tit-for-tat struggle against armed aggression and suppression by the imperialists and their lackeys, whether one dares to fight a people’s war against them, means whether ono dares to embark on revolution. This is the most effective touchstone for distinguishing genuine from fake revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists."

"Imperialism headed by the United States and modern revisionism with the leadership of the C.P.S.U. as its centre are colluding and actively plotting peace talk swindles for the purpose of stamping out the raging flames of the Vietnamese people's national revolutionary war against U.S. aggression, of the national revolutionary struggles in Asian, African and Latin American countries and of the world revolution."

"With the brilliant leadership of Chairman Mao and having mastered Mao Tse-tung’s thought which is the keenest weapon, we will be invincible and all-conquering and will achieve complete victory in the great proletarian cultural revolution!"

"The Red Guards and other revolutionary organizations of the young people in the colleges and middle schools are the shook force fighting in the van in the great cultural revolution, and a powerful reserve force of the People’s Liberation Army."

"This revolution is a great revolution, an entirely new and creative revolution, carried out after the seizure of political power by the proletariat. It is to overthrow through struggle the small handful of persons within the Party who have been in authority and have taken the capitalist road； to sweep away all ghosts and monsters in our society, and to break the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes and foster the new ideas, culture, customs and habits of the proletariat, with a view to further consolidating the dictatorship of the proletariat and developing the socialist system."

"Our attitude towards imperialist wars of, aggression has always been clear-cut. First, we are against them, and secondly, we are not afraid of them. We will destroy whoever attacks us. As for revolutionary wars waged by the oppressed nations and peoples, so far from opposing them, we invariably give them firm support and active aid. It has been so in the past, it remains so in present and, when we grow in strength as time goes on, we will give them still more support and aid in the future. It is sheer daydreaming for anyone to think that, since our revolution has been victorious, our national construction is forging ahead, our national wealth is increasing and our living conditions are improving, wo too will lose our revolutionary fighting will, abandon the cause of world revolution and discard Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism."

"Lin Biao and the "Gang of Four" completely deviated from the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Lin Biao also separated Mao Zedong Thought from Marxism-Leninism. This is a serious distortion of Mao Zedong Thought, which is extremely detrimental to our Party and socialist cause, and is extremely detrimental to the international communist movement."

"During the autumn, preparations for [Richard Nixon's] visit to Beijing moved rapidly, assisted by a dramatic tilt in China’s internal politics. On September 13 a plane carrying Lin Biao, his family and entourage crashed in Mongolia. The story remains murky but officially it was claimed that the army leader was fleeing after a failed coup. His son certainly seems to have concocted an inept assassination plot. The death of Mao’s handpicked heir amid accusations of betrayal was a damaging blow to his image of infallibility. This sparked a crisis of faith among millions of Chinese about the “continuous revolution” to which they had been subjected so brutally for two decades. A foreign policy triumph was now even more important for Mao. Lin was supposedly an opponent of détente with the United States. Certainly his death and disgrace strengthened Zhou Enlai, even though strong opposition remained to Nixon’s visit from Mao’s estranged wife, Jiang Qing, and from radicals in Shanghai. Zhou pushed ahead with arrangements and in October Kissinger paid a second visit to China—this time in public—to agree the agenda and draft the all-important communiqué."