Quotes from Gordon G. Chang

The Communist Party has not done much to change China's traditional notions of governance, and the result has been more sorrow for the Chinese people. Tiananmen was neither the last nor the most tragic result of dictatorial rule during the Communist era.

then head of ING Bank in Shanghai, said it all: "The bad news is that the Big Four are insolvent; the good news is that they're sovereign." Technically, no state-owned commercial bank in China enjoys sovereign backing. In practice, however, the Big Four, as weak as they are, are as solid as China itself. As long as the government stands

Silence," Che Guevara told us, "is argument carried on by other means.

Crime wouldn't pay if the government ran it. —UNKNOWN

You're either an agent of change, or a victim of it

about 900 million people live in the countryside, where more than half the peasants survive on about US$0.73 per day. Incomes there have been declining since 1997, and the end of this trend is nowhere in sight.

Let the past serve the present, let foreign things serve China," said that famous servant of the people Mao Zedong.

Until the tide goes out you don't know who's swimming naked. —WARREN BUFFETT

The limits of Mao's system have just about been reached. Party cadres say they want the benefits of the Internet, but they also want to be able to censor it. They say they want to be a technological leader of this century, but they restrict innovation. They say they want a modern society, but they cannot relinquish their hold. Those who rule from Beijing want the benefits of change, but they do not want change itself.

In China, the only creatures that can really block forward momentum are the leaders of the Communist Party. Zhu Rongji made his career by taming inflation, which reached an annual rate of 21.7 percent in 1994.

In the Deng Xiaoping era China had the highest growth rates in the world, but it now appears that much of the investment in the last quarter century was economically useless.

it will not be long before the Chinese brew more beer than anyone else. China's just a shade behind the United States, and its output has been growing a staggering 25 percent a year for the last decade, the fastest in the world.

So the Communist Party has shown the world that only force will be able to move it. The people are supposed to be intimidated by this colossal display of obstinacy, and, at least for the moment, many are. But they just wait in silence and let their resentments fester. The Party knows how to suppress, but it no longer has the power to lead. It has forgotten what once made it great.

The point is that the Party has lost the power to control what the Chinese people believe.

the traditionally used ratios of deficit to GDP and total debt to GDP, as computed using the official numbers, grossly overstate how much more debt China can incur to jump-start its economy.

SOEs have been called "one of the world's biggest and best collections of obsolete factories and equipment.

If your politics puts you at the unorthodox end of the spectrum, you can remind the Party that Confucius also talked about the Mandate of Heaven, the concept that the people could overthrow unjust rulers.

Today tinkering is the order of the day as Chinese leaders "cross the river by feeling the stones.

The RTC worked because it was a very American solution: recognize a problem, take losses quickly, and move on.

How many people does the Communist Party think it takes to change a lightbulb in China? About 63.5 million, the number of its members

the central government views itself, not competition, as the regulator of industry.

Senior leaders used to rule, but now they merely react.

at any given time about 30 percent of the stocks on China's markets are being manipulated.

the conceptual breakthrough, if any, is the ability to call a retreat and declare victory at the same time.