Gordon G. Chang > Quotes

“A clean sheet of paper has no blotches,” wrote Mao, “and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Communism went against life, against man’s fundamental needs, against the need for freedom, the need to be enterprising, to associate freely against the will of the nation,” Václav Havel noted. “Something that goes against life may last a long time, but sooner or later it will collapse.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The Internet breaks a 500-year Latin American pattern of monopoly, monopoly of information, economics, social, religious power. It fundamentally gives power to the individual, which is a new development in Latin America. —FERNANDO ESPUELAS”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Mao Zedong himself would have realized that the Communist Party has become weak. “All reactionaries are paper tigers,” he said. And Mao said something else: repression breeds revolution. “[T]he Chinese,” he told us, “never submit to tyrannical rule but invariably use revolutionary means to overthrow or change it.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Cultures can’t remain static,” says Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step onto the moon. “They evolve or expire, explore or decline.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“It had all the elements needed for an industrial revolution centuries before it would occur in Europe. Yet, for one reason or another, China stumbled. Why did the world’s dominant civilization falter on the verge of an even more glorious future? It is one of the greatest mysteries of history, and scholars will ponder the question for years to come.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“in the words of jurist John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“There are many things which cannot be imagined,” the Chinese say, “but there is nothing which may not happen.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“During the Second World War, China, briefly united under Chiang Kai-shek, was split into pieces controlled by the Kuomintang, the Japanese, the Communists, the Tibetans, and the Muslims.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Don’t part with your illusions,” said Mark Twain. “When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“If your politics puts you at the unorthodox end of the spectrum, you can remind the Party that Confucius also talked about the Mandate of Heaven, the concept that the people could overthrow unjust rulers.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The students who surrendered the square on the morning of June 4 could not begin to imagine, in those sad days of 1989, that their ideas would eventually prevail. They set into motion a chain of events that will one day lead to a free and prosperous China, one better than they could, at that time, imagine—perhaps one better than we can imagine today.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“as long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will be forever young”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Yet the continual stream of tortuous explanations of what socialism means only serves to highlight that ideology’s terminal condition. Chinese leaders have not been able to recognize what the rest of the world already knows: socialism, with or without “Chinese characteristics,” does not work.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Today tinkering is the order of the day as Chinese leaders “cross the river by feeling the stones.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Senior leaders used to rule, but now they merely react.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“For China, yesterday poisons today and robs tomorrow.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The once proud PLA realizes that it is short of everything that it takes to win a modern war.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“As jurist Marshall also noted, “the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“the people will show that they have what Chinese military thinker Sun-tzu called “the supreme skill”; that is, to be able to win without fighting. It happened in Berlin and Bucharest and will soon occur in Beijing: the people will take back their government.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“When you believe that you are the only path to progress, the choice is easy to make. And when they make that choice, their consciences will be clear,”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The old saying in defense planning is that one must judge an adversary’s capabilities, rather than its intentions.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Technocrats evidently believe that to build competitive enterprises they must first eliminate competition.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The “great wall of steel,” the People’s Liberation Army, defends the state against the peasants in Zizhou and all the other peoples of China. But what use is steel when the enemy is an idea? Steel wins the skirmishes, but ultimately it must lose when too many share a thought.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“In the Deng Xiaoping era China had the highest growth rates in the world, but it now appears that much of the investment in the last quarter century was economically useless.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Let the past serve the present, let foreign things serve China,” said that famous servant of the people Mao Zedong.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“at any given time about 30 percent of the stocks on China’s markets are being manipulated.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“How many people does the Communist Party think it takes to change a lightbulb in China? About 63.5 million, the number of its members”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Time waits for no country these days, however, not even one as important, or unimportant, as China. Nero fiddled, Jiang theorizes.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“So the Communist Party has shown the world that only force will be able to move it. The people are supposed to be intimidated by this colossal display of obstinacy, and, at least for the moment, many are. But they just wait in silence and let their resentments fester. The Party knows how to suppress, but it no longer has the power to lead. It has forgotten what once made it great.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China