Quotes from Gordon G. Chang

Consider these words from Lech Wa??sa: In the past, you could stand with a gun behind a man who had a pick and a spade and tell him to dig a hole two hundred meters long. But you can't put a man behind someone working creatively, behind a computer, and tell him, "Please devise something original." There is no way to do it

Yet Zhongguancun pales when measured against India's Bangalore, where government-sponsored development efforts started at about the same time. Today Bangalore produces original product, which domestic companies in Zhongguancun have not yet mastered, and Zhongguancun's output badly trails Bangalore's. That's just a reflection of something fundamental: "modern" China cannot keep up with "backward" India when it comes to information technology.

the people will show that they have what Chinese military thinker Sun-tzu called "the supreme skill"; that is, to be able to win without fighting. It happened in Berlin and Bucharest and will soon occur in Beijing: the people will take back their government.

Before laissez-faire there was wu wei. "Practise not doing and everything will fall into place," says the Tao Te Ching, Taoism's primer.

History does repeat itself, but must it do so so frequently?

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. —JAMES JOYCE

Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they're no longer alone.

Technocrats evidently believe that to build competitive enterprises they must first eliminate competition.

as long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will be forever young

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored," said Aldous Huxley.

The Internet breaks a 500-year Latin American pattern of monopoly, monopoly of information, economics, social, religious power. It fundamentally gives power to the individual, which is a new development in Latin America. —FERNANDO ESPUELAS

Communism went against life, against man's fundamental needs, against the need for freedom, the need to be enterprising, to associate freely against the will of the nation," Václav Havel noted. "Something that goes against life may last a long time, but sooner or later it will collapse.

in the words of jurist John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, "the power to tax involves the power to destroy.

There are many things which cannot be imagined," the Chinese say, "but there is nothing which may not happen.

Mao Zedong himself would have realized that the Communist Party has become weak. "All reactionaries are paper tigers," he said. And Mao said something else: repression breeds revolution. "[T]he Chinese," he told us, "never submit to tyrannical rule but invariably use revolutionary means to overthrow or change it.

During the Second World War, China, briefly united under Chiang Kai-shek, was split into pieces controlled by the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the Communists, the Tibetans, and the Muslims.

A clean sheet of paper has no blotches," wrote Mao, "and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.

Don't part with your illusions," said Mark Twain. "When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

It had all the elements needed for an industrial revolution centuries before it would occur in Europe. Yet, for one reason or another, China stumbled. Why did the world's dominant civilization falter on the verge of an even more glorious future? It is one of the greatest mysteries of history, and scholars will ponder the question for years to come.

For China, yesterday poisons today and robs tomorrow.

China will make real progress in the fight against corruption only when prosecution and conviction are separated from politics.

Yet the continual stream of tortuous explanations of what socialism means only serves to highlight that ideology's terminal condition. Chinese leaders have not been able to recognize what the rest of the world already knows: socialism, with or without "Chinese characteristics," does not work.

China's Dragon Boat Festival in June honors Qu Yuan, an official who drowned himself in 278 B.C. to protest corruption in the Spring and Autumn Period.

The old saying in defense planning is that one must judge an adversary's capabilities, rather than its intentions.