Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me. Evan Osnos More Quotes by Evan Osnos More Quotes From Evan Osnos Orville Schell and John Delury have delivered a brilliantly original and essential book: the road map to China’s quest for national salvation... Vivid, literate, and brimming with insights, Wealth and Power deserves to become a classic. Evan Osnos maps essentials book If you go back and you look at the presidency over the course of history, presidents tend to do what they campaigned on. In the 20th century, presidents between Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter accomplished 73 percent of the things that they said they would do as candidates. Part of that is because once they get into office, their credibility, their ability to do anything depends on doing the things that they said they would. Evan Osnos office president looks Actually the idea of having Mexico pay for the wall on the southern border is a nonstarter. That seems to be generally pretty much recognized on both sides of the border. What you find, though, is that logistically it's not impossible. Evan Osnos wall southern ideas Donald Trump has the ability to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal as he says, but if he were to do so, this would be regarded in Tehran as an abrogation of the deal. This would allow the Iranian side of the deal to in effect withdraw because they could say that the United States has not held up its end of the bargain, and therefore we're going to restart our nuclear program. Evan Osnos iran united-states would-be Often Americans have heard Donald Trump be very hard on China. But that's not how it's heard over there. In China, his message is being interpreted as the sound of an exhausted America, an America that is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to NATO, to holding up, for instance, human rights around the world. Evan Osnos rights america commitment Chinese leaders are saying amongst themselves, according to the Chinese analysts who follow them most closely, that they believe Donald Trump is in the end making hollow threats, and they think that he would be easy to handle, is how one of them put it. Evan Osnos leader believe thinking Donald Trump is an American presidential nominee who was describing Russia in terms that they haven't heard almost ever. And so there is a belief that Donald Trump would be a collaborative, willing and I think perhaps quite able partner. Evan Osnos presidential russia thinking When we remember presidents who didn't fulfill their promises - for instance George H.W. Bush saying no new taxes or Barack Obama saying he would close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay - we remember those because they're the exceptions, not the rule. Evan Osnos saying-no president promise It's down a few hundred minutes from yesterday, but it looks like we've still got 25 million minutes to go, the consensus seems to be that we're using an old operating system that won't let us restart fresh from iTunes. Evan Osnos top-news 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. Evan Osnos city down great tradition If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian. Evan Osnos go you identity way To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition. Evan Osnos harmony opposition conformity loyal In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors' coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home. Evan Osnos friends home life past 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. Evan Osnos roads think ambition sea 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. Evan Osnos event flood today people 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. Evan Osnos river ocean sea long 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. Evan Osnos dead american-dream dream loss Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages - and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks. Evan Osnos quotation help single two I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working. Evan Osnos started working day government It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire. Evan Osnos minute realize satire style
