Quotes About China

I still prefer 'pre-Cleavage' but it makes an unfortunate pun in English

almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out.

I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I'd pay a squirrel?

What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena, where I was quarry.

In the post-blast miasma, all Parisians grew invisible organs that flex in the presence of the marvelous.

This is kraken year zero," Moore said. "This is Anno Teuthis. We're in the end times. What d'you think's been going on?

that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets. 5. The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia. 6. The lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook

For the first and not the last time in American history, a measure was adopted when the leader of the opposing party led the charge for it. The modern cliché is "Only Nixon could go to China"—only such a strong anti-communist could regularize relations with that country.

For every major chip firm, the Chinese consumer market is far more important a customer than the U.S. government.

but the consensus in Washington was that trade and investment would encourage China to become a "responsible stakeholder" of the international system, as influential diplomat Robert Zoellick put it.

China's import of chips—$260 billion in 2017, the year of Xi's Davos debut—was far larger than Saudi Arabia's export of oil or Germany's export of cars. China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft. No product is more central to international trade than semiconductors.

The popular visual imagery of China, as The Times correspondent suggested, came from pantomime and music hall in pre-cinema days; together with comics, press and book illustrations. Reminiscences by visitors to China sometimes noted that this was how they actually saw Peking when first they arrived. Then they discovered that the pantomimes were really about England in fancy dress.

It was inevitable that Red China would invade Tibet, and then there would be no place for us two friends of Tibetan independence.

It is no accident that, of the early Jesuit scholars who were pioneers in making China's culture known in Europe, those who concerned themselves with the Book of Changes were all later declared to be insane or heretic. Indeed, to the Chinese themselves the study of the I Ching is not to be taken lightly. By an unwritten law, only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to learn from it. Confucius is said to have been seventy years old when he first took up the Book of Changes.

Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a 'little pig', and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell's resemblance either to a pig's back or to a sow's glisteningly crinkled vagina.35

The number of Christians increased dramatically in China after public Christian meetings were banned and believers started meeting from house to house in their homes. It was a blessing in disguise; forcing believers to meet in homes brought boldness to believers, and advanced the spread of the gospel.

But Japan drew from the challenge the opposite conclusion as China: it threw open its doors to foreign technology and overhauled its institutions in an attempt to replicate the Western powers' rise.

When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but "Heavenly Envoys" from the Celestial Court.

if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies: Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from fundamentalist Sunni trends.

Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy. China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude.

Like the United States, China thought of itself as playing a special role. But it never espoused the American notion of universalism to spread its values around the world. It

You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.

the kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor's return gifts.

Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China's peer.