Quotes from Gordon G. Chang

The Maoist mechanisms of social control have been loosened. A totalitarian state has become merely an authoritarian one.

after seeing decades of Maoist campaigns, that idealism mostly resulted in misery. China would be helped only as ordinary citizens went about bettering their own lot

we should listen to Leon Trotsky. "Revolution is impossible until it is inevitable," he told us.

As jurist Marshall also noted, "the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create.

Although China is short of the people it really needs—scientists, economists, doctors, teachers, practically everybody, in fact, except Indian chiefs—it employs its best and brightest in thinking how to update its theology. A mind, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste.

The once proud PLA realizes that it is short of everything that it takes to win a modern war.

Time waits for no country these days, however, not even one as important, or unimportant, as China. Nero fiddled, Jiang theorizes.

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen," said British politician Enoch Powell.

When you believe that you are the only path to progress, the choice is easy to make. And when they make that choice, their consciences will be clear

Among borrowers there is a philosophy that "it's better to repay late than repay early, and it's better not to repay than to repay late." China, in short, is in the process of creating a society "based on the repudiation of debt," warns a prominent Beijing scholar.

The "great wall of steel," the People's Liberation Army, defends the state against the peasants in Zizhou and all the other peoples of China. But what use is steel when the enemy is an idea? Steel wins the skirmishes, but ultimately it must lose when too many share a thought.

there is one situation worse than too much information: not enough of it. When hard news is scarce, rumors arise everywhere. Rumors don't have to be true, they just have to be spread. And these days the Internet is the channel for their communication.

The students who surrendered the square on the morning of June 4 could not begin to imagine, in those sad days of 1989, that their ideas would eventually prevail. They set into motion a chain of events that will one day lead to a free and prosperous China, one better than they could, at that time, imagine—perhaps one better than we can imagine today.