The Coming Collapse of China Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“we should listen to Leon Trotsky. “Revolution is impossible until it is inevitable,” he told us.”
― 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

“China’s Dragon Boat Festival in June honors Qu Yuan, an official who drowned himself in 278 B.C. to protest corruption in the Spring and Autumn Period.”
― 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

“You’re either an agent of change, or a victim of it,”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“there is one situation worse than too much information: not enough of it. When hard news is scarce, rumors arise everywhere. Rumors don’t have to be true, they just have to be spread. And these days the Internet is the channel for their communication.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen,” said British politician Enoch Powell.”
― 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

“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

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored,” said Aldous Huxley.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they’re no longer alone.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“Restraint, however, is the essence of modern governance. A government’s self-control permits its people to create, explore, and discover, and that’s what allows a nation to progress.”
― 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

“Although China is short of the people it really needs—scientists, economists, doctors, teachers, practically everybody, in fact, except Indian chiefs—it employs its best and brightest in thinking how to update its theology. A mind, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“China will make real progress in the fight against corruption only when prosecution and conviction are separated from politics.”
― 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

“Silence,” Che Guevara told us, “is argument carried on by other means.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“The Communist Party has not done much to change China’s traditional notions of governance, and the result has been more sorrow for the Chinese people. Tiananmen was neither the last nor the most tragic result of dictatorial rule during the Communist era.”
― Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

“For China, yesterday poisons today and robs tomorrow.”
― 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