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" There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible. "

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" On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him. "

Evan Osnos

Government

People

Limit

" I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are. "

" At the age of eighty, the Dalai Lama has begun to discuss a range of prospects for the future disposition of his soul. Traditionally, after he dies, a search party of senior monks would set out to locate his new incarnation, who is most often a boy toddler, who goes on to be trained as a monk and a leader. "

Evan Osnos

Leader

Future

" Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise. "

" It's worth being clear - you know, I think that the ideas that somebody like Richard Spencer endorses and that other members of the self-identified white nationalist groups endorse - those ideas really are repellent to most people. "

" If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian. "

Evan Osnos

You

Back

" There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population. "

" I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad. "

" Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it. "

" There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way. "

" 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. "

" By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's. "

" Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay. "

" To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers. "

" Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts. "

" 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

China

City

" Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism. "

" Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic. "

Evan Osnos

Mine

Epic

" Analysts, scholars, business people, diplomats, and journalists involved with China spend so much time questioning one another's biases and loyalties that they have even settled on two opposing categories: 'panda huggers' versus 'panda sluggers.' "

" To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition. "

" I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience. "