Quotes from Evan Osnos

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries.

As a student in Beijing in 1996, I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.

Analysts, scholars, business people, diplomats, and journalists involved with China spend so much time questioning one another's biases and loyalties that they have even settled on two opposing categories: 'panda huggers' versus 'panda sluggers.'

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today.

Donald Trump has a mantra of despair, of loss. He says we don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't. And he says the American dream is dead.

A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.

China doesn't have a single leader. It has - a first among equals is the president, and his name will probably be Xi Jinping, almost certainly.

If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.

If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.

I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.