Zitat des Tages von Evan Osnos:
The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.
We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.
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.
Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.
When Libya was in turmoil in 2011, the Chinese public was surprised to discover that more than thirty thousand of their countrymen were living there, most of them working on Chinese-run oil projects.
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.
For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could.
I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.
In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.
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.
Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
A generation ago, American war planners made the mistake of believing that short-term Communist sympathies would unite China and Vietnam. We were wrong, and it tragically misshaped our policy in Vietnam.
I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.
When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.
Walking, it turns out, is a sublime way to get to know people in China. They're used to meeting strangers on the road. Many here understand what it feels like to walk a long way.
If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
China doesn't have a single leader. It has - a first among equals is the president, and his name will probably be Xi Jinping, almost certainly.
If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.
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.
When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.
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.
The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.
Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.
In China, inaugurations are frequent affairs, though they have nothing to do with presidents. A news cycle rarely passes without some fanfare over the inaugural ride on a new subway line or the inaugural trip across an unusually large bridge.
China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
I think there's a tendency, and it's an understandable tendency, to imagine that China makes decisions out of a grand strategy. The reality is that I think China today is operating, most of all, based on its domestic needs.
The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.
The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.
Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 - struck by a falling telephone pole.
In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.
For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.
Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.
When the British-Malaysian photographer Ian Teh first worked in China, more than a decade ago, he rendered it as a nation of people in Technicolor.
The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.
Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.
The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.
