1,113 Quotes About China

Today’s China is an artifact of an extended and contentious history while the relatively young American Republic is a daring project informed by the enlightenment philosophy espoused by the Founding Fathers.

Today’s connoisseurs of Sino-American relations seem to view the relationship through a dystopian prism; their gloomy commentaries are largely an assemblage of snapshots on contemporary interactions or day-to-day developments without a historical context.

China is constantly reinventing itself and so is the United States.

Outcome-oriented China has enjoyed the fruits of Hamiltonian prosperity; nevertheless, it also endured great human sacrifice and personal agonies along the way to affluence.

The philosophic goal in China was a search for harmony and perfection, not the discovery of truth by reasoning. In China’s Confucian society, the best pathway to perfection was the development of a virtuous life.

It is difficult and even dangerous to make predictions—especially about the future—of the bilateral relationship.

She was a pious Buddhist and every day in her prayers asked Buddha not ro reincarnate her as a woman. "Let me become a cat or dog, but not a woman," was her constant murmur as she shuffled around the house, oozing apology with every step.

Every time she went home she found herself being criticized. She was accused of being "too attached to her family," which was condemned as a "bourgeois habit," and had to see less and less of her own mother.

Instead of sniping at her like Mrs. Mi, Mrs. Ting let my mother do all sorts of things she wanted, like reading novels: before, reading a book without a Marxist cover would bring down a rain of criticism about being a bourgeois intellectual.