Quotes About China

In the past there were too many portraits of Chairman Mao in China. They were hung everywhere. That was not proper and it didn't really show respect for Chairman Mao.

A dreamer: it's the last thing I want to be called, in China or in America. No doubt when my friend in Beijing used the term, she was thinking of traits like persistence, single-mindedness, willfulness, and—particularly—impracticality, which she must have seen plenty of in me. Still, that one possesses a dreamer's personality and that one has dreams do not guarantee that one knows how to dream.

Despite the challenges, Coca-Cola succeeded in the end. China has become Coca-Cola's third largest market in the world, after the United States and Mexico. It has invested over $5 billion in China. More important, Coca-Cola has blazed a trail for other foreign companies—Pepsi, KFC, McDonald's, Coors, Budweiser, IBM, Apple, Dell, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Sheraton,

Sinophilism swiftly developed into Sinomania.

Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That's because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.

As I look back over China's sixty years under communism, I sense that Mao's Cultural Revolution and Deng's open-door reforms have given China's grassroots two huge opportunities: the first to press for a redistribution of political power and the second to press for a redistribution of economic power.

What you are doing is something unprecedented in China and the world. Three hundred million peasants, one-sixth of the world's population, must liberate themselves from thirty centuries of feudal landlord domination. Smashing the landlords' economic power means smashing their political power. Only that can make secure the power of the people.

China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

Somewhere in [China's] soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.

[China] is the least concerned about her own salvation. Like a good gambler, she took the loss of a slice of territory the size of Germany itself without a wince.

Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage.

In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.3

Even powerful nations such as China and Japan are not ecologically sovereign.

If an elephant's brain is in India its eyes and ears in China and its feet in Australia, then this elephant is most probably dead, and even if it is in some mysterious sense alive, it cannot see, hear or walk.

In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.

In the late 1830s the Chinese government issued a ban on drug trafficking, but British drug merchants simply ignored the law. Chinese authorities began to confiscate and destroy drug cargos. The drug cartels had close connections in Westminster and Downing Street – many MPs and Cabinet ministers in fact held stock in the drug companies – so they pressured the government to take action. In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of 'free trade'.

The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly. France and the United States quickly followed in Britain's footsteps because the French and Americans already shared the most important British myths and social structures.

Russian commentators welcomed this development, viewing it as a positive shift in the global correlation of power and as an appropriate response to America's sponsorship of NATO's expansion. Some even sounded gleeful that the Sino-Russian alliance would give America its deserved comeuppance. However, a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously.

The prevailing wisdom that China is the next global power is breeding paranoia about China and fostering megalomania within China. Fears of an aggressive and antagonistic China that before long is destined to be the next global power are, at best, premature; and, at worst, they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

People who try to commit suicide -- don't attempt to save them!... China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people.

It is quite possible that China may reach the stages of socialism and communism considerably later than your countries in the West which are so much more highly developed economically.

We are firmly convinced that private capital, Chinese as well as foreign, must be given liberal opportunities for broad development in postwar China; for China needs industrial growth.