Quotes About China

Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250 000 in Britain.

Some believe his political vulnerabilities have not only driven him into the arms of Mao but also the clutches of the country's generals and admirals, who run what may effectively be the Party's largest and most powerful faction, the People's Liberation Army. Indeed, some, like veteran China watcher Willy Lam, believe the military is now Xi Jinping's faction.

In a relatively short time, perhaps a decade, the PLA Navy has made a transition from operating only around China's coast to a force that can conduct blue-water operations. China's navy is still no peer of the U.S. Navy, and it is probably inferior to Japan's. However, no other nation in Southeast Asia is able to challenge the PLA Navy currently.

From a financial security perspective, the danger is that China might disrupt U.S. financial markets by engaging in strategic selling of its holdings, which in turn could injure the U.S. economy. This renders the U.S. economy potentially hostage to Chinese policymakers and for that reason constitutes a national security risk.

China-centric globalization is characterized by three features: (1) The emergence of China as the global center of manufacturing—the so-called "factory for the world"; (2) The creation of a new dollar zone shared by the U.S. and China, and supported by China's adoption of a pegged dollar exchange rate; and (3) The emergence of a massive U.S. trade deficit with China, combined with the transfer of a significant chunk of U.S. manufacturing capacity there.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union never could accomplish that because it was a resource exporter and was in competition with these countries. Consequently, it had little to offer economically and, instead, offered guns and ideology. The U.S. used to be the supplier of goods and buyer of resources but, as its manufacturing base has shrunk, it has been increasingly displaced by China. That places the U.S. in a weaker position versus China than it was versus the Soviet Union.

The Communist Party has not done much to change China's traditional notions of governance, and the result has been more sorrow for the Chinese people. Tiananmen was neither the last nor the most tragic result of dictatorial rule during the Communist era.

then head of ING Bank in Shanghai, said it all: "The bad news is that the Big Four are insolvent; the good news is that they're sovereign." Technically, no state-owned commercial bank in China enjoys sovereign backing. In practice, however, the Big Four, as weak as they are, are as solid as China itself. As long as the government stands

Let the past serve the present, let foreign things serve China," said that famous servant of the people Mao Zedong.

In China, the only creatures that can really block forward momentum are the leaders of the Communist Party. Zhu Rongji made his career by taming inflation, which reached an annual rate of 21.7 percent in 1994.

In the Deng Xiaoping era China had the highest growth rates in the world, but it now appears that much of the investment in the last quarter century was economically useless.

it will not be long before the Chinese brew more beer than anyone else. China's just a shade behind the United States, and its output has been growing a staggering 25 percent a year for the last decade, the fastest in the world.

the traditionally used ratios of deficit to GDP and total debt to GDP, as computed using the official numbers, grossly overstate how much more debt China can incur to jump-start its economy.

How many people does the Communist Party think it takes to change a lightbulb in China? About 63.5 million, the number of its members

at any given time about 30 percent of the stocks on China's markets are being manipulated.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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