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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Evan Osnos
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December 6, 2019 - January 14, 2020
China’s metamorphosis told in vast, sweeping strokes involving one-sixth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.
Chinese as collectivist, inscrutable drones endured in part because China’s politics helped sustain them; official China reminded its guests that it was a nation of work units and communes and uncountable sacrifice.
China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards.
The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other. I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “Tongzhi, let’s hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up.
Love stories didn’t become popular in China until the twentieth century.
Mao outlawed arranged marriages and concubines, and established a woman’s right to divorce, but the system left little room for desire.
By promoting the use of condoms on an unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction
Women were barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that if they were still single at thirty, they would be considered “leftover women.”
For a moment, I wondered whether a “national character face” was the choice for patriots, but then I realized that it was for those with a lantern jaw in the shape of the Chinese character for “nation”: .
He favored flamboyantly patriotic slogans such as “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!” On his website, he declared, “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful! What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerated, the happier they are!”
quantity of money passing through Macau would exceed that of Las Vegas six times over.
Gambling towns are shrines to self-invention.
sheer volume of money and people passing through distilled the mixture into an extract so potent that it can seem to be either the city’s greatest strength or its greatest liability.
high rollers in Macau wagered about six hundred billion dollars, roughly the amount of cash withdrawn from all the ATMs in America in a year.
The place had become the “Macau Laundry Service,”
Macau looked as much Mediterranean as Chinese, with baroque Catholic churches and rows of cafés shaded by drooping palms, where old émigrés sipped cafe da manhã over the Jornal Tribuna. But by the time I arrived, it had a touch of the Persian Gulf:
The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino.
“the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence
he successfully courted Chinese leaders in Beijing by emphasizing his influence in Republican politics.
fierce collision of self-interests, a fable of China in its own Gilded Age.
China’s winners—those who built bare-handed fortunes, the members of the new Middle-Income Stratum—could go to indulge in the gains of their prosperity.
art that is detached from or independent of politics.”
“drab uniformity” of what had come before, as a way “to emphasize our individuality.”
Yet, to Chen Danqing, a painter and social critic, the project carried a special resonance in China, where validation from the West, including visas, once carried near-mythic value.
Chinese attitudes toward Western culture were a mix of pity, envy, and resentment: pity for the barbarians outside the Middle Kingdom, envy for their strength, and resentment for their incursions into China. “Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings,” Lu Xun wrote. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”
China Can Say No, the bestselling polemic during my first visit to China.
Most countries begin to send large numbers of tourists overseas only after the average citizen has a disposable income of five thousand dollars. But when China’s urban residents were still at half that level, travel agents made such travel affordable by booking tickets in bulk and bargaining mercilessly for hotels in distant suburbs.
Many young Chinese regarded the notion of the firewall as insulting,
In Beijing, a Chinese dining guide called Dianping offered eighteen separate categories of Chinese cuisine, but everything outside of Asia (Italian, Moroccan, Brazilian) was grouped under one heading: “Western Food.”
“if you don’t elbow your way on to everything you’ll be last.”
(Nearly half of all Chinese tourists in one market survey reported eating no more than one “European-style” meal on a trip to the West.) But Li warned us that Western food can take too long to serve, and if we ate it too fast, it would give us indigestion.
Solo tourism was already growing in popularity among young people,
“Of course, there are benefits: people enjoy freedom of speech and the freedom to elect politicians. But doesn’t the one-party system have its benefits, too?”
in Europe, “young people are allowed to pursue what they want to pursue.”
why do we find it so difficult to discover new things? It’s because our education system has too many constraints.”
China would naturally become a more Western, democratic China was no longer as convincing to me as it had been in my student days, when I was drawn to Beijing by the tragic potential of Tiananmen Square.
The China that I inhabited now was, by turns, inspiring and maddening, home to both Bare-Handed Fortunes and black jails, a fierce curiosity about the world and a defensive pride in China’s new place in it.
Modern Chinese travel, like the modern Chinese state, was predicated on the fragile promise that it would impose order on a chaotic world, by shepherding its citizens and keeping them safe from threats that could include Western thieves, Western cuisine, and Western culture.
behind the prosperity gospel about Chinese one-party efficiency, my busmates caught unredacted flickers of insight, glimpses of humaneness and openness and a world once forbidden.
“When I read a foreign newspaper, I see lots of things I don’t know about.” On this first trip, there was much they would never see, but mile by mile, they were discovering how to see it at all.
no country has devoted more time and care to the art of propaganda than China,
reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat.
Article 35 of the Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, but regulations gave the government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses.
For Wu, who would later become a prominent writer and editor, it introduced him to the world of parallel realities. “One narrative was public,” he told me, “and one was real.”
when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”
Chinese writers “can’t write creatively because their very lives don’t belong to them.”
Web provided only an illusion of openness, and a weak sense of community; that it strengthened authoritarian governments by creating a safety valve and defusing the pressure for deeper change.
if there’s no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ‘It’s only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn’t demand it,’”
China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government,”
“viewing words as crimes.”
