5,300 Quotes About America

Two thousand years of Chinese history have created a strategic culture that advises against fighting unnecessary wars in distant places. The likelihood therefore is that, while China’s strategic weight and influence in the world will grow significantly, it will not behave as an aggressive and belligerent military power.

... despite its openness, America has its own sacred cows. One such sacred cow is that America is number one and will be number one forever

... in the case for China, it should attract American, and Western, investments out of strategic necessity. The strategic reason for doing so is to create a major stabilizer in China’s relations with America and with the Western world.

Chinese people need to realize is that it would serve China’s long-term strategic interests for China to continue opening up its economy even while the Trump administration has been creating more difficulties for foreign businesses to either invest or export to America. Over time, this will mean more countries will be trading and investing more with China than with America.

... any American effort to decouple itself from China could well result in America decoupling itself from the world.

Americans hold sacrosanct the ideals of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion and also believe that every human being is entitled to the same fundamental human rights. The Chinese believe that social needs and social harmony are more important than individual needs and rights and that the prevention of chaos and turbulence is the main goal of governance.

Negotiations only succeed when countries have the flexibility to make compromises at the negotiating table. American diplomats are severely handicapped in this respect. Both absolute power and conflicting demands from domestic agencies leave American negotiators with little room for flexibility.

When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up.