Quotes from Evan Osnos

The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.

For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.

China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.

China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.

In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.

China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.

In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.

The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.

Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.

There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.

The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.

If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.

Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it.

When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972, China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

More than four decades after Nixon met Mao, the relationship between the U.S. and China has reached a pivotal moment. To date, even as China has become more powerful and present in our lives, Americans have generally found it to be an unsatisfying 'enemy.'

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.