Chinese Quotes - Page 18

• The U.S. has the most advanced cyber-weaponry on the planet, and t if you look at the U.S. from the perspective of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, which runs most of its cyber activities, they look at you and they see Google and Facebook - the two largest depositories of personal data in the world - and they see the reach of the National Security Agency, which has huge digital capacity to know what is going on around the world. So the Chinese would see cyber as an un-level playing field, because the U.S. holds all sorts of advantages.

  Misha Glenny

  Running, Army, Perspective

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Many novelists say, "I'm not a political novelist" - myself included. That's a standard, even a default position. Whereas that divide between art and politics simply isn't possible in many countries. In Hungary, you couldn't be a fiction writer and then, when asked about politics, put your hands up in the air and say "But I'm not a political novelist." If you're a Chinese novelist, a novelist in a country where censorship is such an issue, how do you claim that politics has nothing to do with your writing? It's in your writing, it's shaping your words.

  Katie Kitamura

  Country, Art, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.

  Michael Cunningham

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The whole Chinese system - not just the political leadership, the military too, the whole power structure, our education system, the whole of society - is suffering from being cut off from the free flow of information. That's why the country can't face up to open competition - unless it resorts to measures like North Korea.

  Ai Weiwei

  Country, Military, Cutting

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I deal with students every day - from China, Germany, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. And I've noticed that the Chinese students are the least trained in having a sense of aesthetics. They lack any ability to sense what is beautiful or what is proper. They can be learned and skillful, but they lack the ability to make their own free judgment. It is really sad to see young adults of 20, 25 years who were never taught to make their own decisions. People who can't do that don't get a sense of responsibility. And if you lack a sense of responsibility, you push the blame onto the system.

  Ai Weiwei

  Beautiful, Responsibility, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China. It turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn't promote it. There isn't a single Chinese university that can invite me to give a talk. Even though I know there are many students who would like to hear what I have to say.

  Ai Weiwei

  Real, Giving, Feelings

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The relationship between the Chinese government and me is like a Cold War.

  Ai Weiwei

  War, Cold, Cold War

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

  Peter Thiel

  Party, Thinking, Technology

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• It's funny that Chairman Mao's great hero was Napoleon, because Napoleon started out as a revolutionary for the underdogs and then made himself an emperor. In fact, a lot of revolutionary leaders do that, and you think, "Well, that's spoiling your argument. What are you doing?" But on the other hand, the people themselves are enjoying trying out all these different ways to be. I hope that, like the Japanese, the Chinese hang on to their own traditions as well as try out Western ones. I hate it when people just lose so much confidence in who they are that they abandon their own culture.

  Robert Wyatt

  Hate, Hero, Thinking

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

  Stephin Merritt

  Rhyme, Impression, Translations

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

  Elliott Colla

  Moving, Successful, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One thing we know: Things will become even more destabilized if we don't step up Sino-U.S. cooperation. If you want to envisage a worst-case scenario, it is that Putin reveals step by step the inner weaknesses of the West, particularly in Europe, and the Chinese see in that an opportunity for emulation in the Far East, and then step by step through a gradual process we will be witnessing the emergence of Sino-Russian partnership in favor of a drastic change in the global balance of power.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski

  Opportunity, Balance, Weakness

  Source: www.politico.com

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• There is the specter of "realism" that is still haunting Chinese contemporary art - that art is only an instrument, an instrument to reflect society, that it must be useful for society. Also, I have noticed many Western media outlets are very insistent on understanding contemporary art in China through this kind of realist approach. Sometimes I even sense that they are intent on, as we say in China, "picking bones of politics out of an egg of art." Or perhaps they see art as merely an instrument to reflect society.

  Wang Jianwei

  Art, Understanding, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

  Gene Luen Yang

  Emotional, Thinking, Wish

  "It’s a Coder! It’s a Teacher! It’s a Kick-Ass Graphic Novelist!". Interview With Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. September/October 2015.

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• There was - there still is - a big shortage of good Chinese-English literary translators. So for two years in London, I was stuck waiting, not writing, with several Chinese books I couldn't get translated. That's when I decided to write in English, since I had been living here and had decided to reconstruct my life here. Even if I wrote in broken English, it was better than getting bored and weary and bitter on the long queue of authors waiting to be translated by a stranger.

  Xiaolu Guo

  Book, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We're talking about America - a country that's been built on the back of cheap labor. That's addicted to cheap labor. Talk to the Chinese and Irish who built the railroads. Talk to the black people who built the South. So what is the US-Mexico conversation really about?

  Jose Antonio Vargas

  Country, People, Black

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• Chinese people don't care about freedom, but they do care about justice.

  Yiyun Li

  People, Justice, Care

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In China, your freedom is always limited, but this limitation applies to almost everyone. If someone does injustice to you, though, you have to find a way to avenge yourself - even by illegal measures. In a sense, injustice is more personal. This idea has always been in Chinese history. I think we read about freedom of speech, or lack of freedom of speech, in China so often. But I don't think people here in America think about how justice, or the idea of justice, is so important in a Chinese setting. It's probably more important than freedom of speech in the Chinese mindset at this moment.

  Yiyun Li

  Thinking, People, Justice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is a Chinese tradition that everyone has to be in everyone else's life.

  Yiyun Li

  Tradition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We do have to learn poetry at school. Poetry is interesting to me, particularly Chinese poetry. It's like an ancient form of song. There's five sentences, seven sentences - they're very different from English poetry. Chinese poetry is much more rigorous. You can only use this many words, and they will form some kind of rhythm so people can actually sing it. To me, poetry is quite abstract but also quite beautiful.

  Jenova Chen

  Beautiful, Song, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Countries that work with Europe should feel safer than they would if they worked with non-democratic regimes. Why isn't Europe building infrastructure in Africa instead of leaving it to the Chinese? Why haven't we succeeded in promoting the economic development of our neighbors in the Balkans, instead conceding these countries to growing Russian influence? In an uncomfortable world, we Europeans can no longer sit back and wait for the U.S.A.

  Sigmar Gabriel

  Country, Waiting, Leaving

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• The truth is that we have long had a multi-track Europe with very different objectives. The traditional differences between the north and the south in fiscal and economic policy are far less problematic than those that exist between Eastern and Western Europe. In the south and east, China is steadily gaining more influence, such that a few EU member states no longer dare to make decisions that run counter to Chinese interests. You see it everywhere: China is the only country in the world that has a real geopolitical strategy.

  Sigmar Gabriel

  Country, Running, Real

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• Absolutely the United States should lead in space, for the survival of the United States. It's inspiring for the next generation. If we lose leadership, then we'll be using Chinese capability to inspire Americans.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Space, Inspire, Survival

  "Buzz Aldrin on Why We Should Go to Mars". Interview with Amy Crawford, www.smithsonianmag.com. May 19, 2013.

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• All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they'll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he'd be a national hero.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Hero, Moon, One Day

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• To send humans back to the moon would not be advancing. It would be more than 50 years after the first moon landing when we got there, and we'd probably be welcomed by the Chinese. But we should return to the moon without astronauts and build, with robots, an international lunar base, so that we know how to build a base on Mars robotically.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Moon, Years, Robots

  "Buzz Aldrin on Why We Should Go to Mars Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/buzz-aldrin-on-why-we-should-go-to-mars-66260324/#muQovUaWlr5GveW8.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter". Interview with Amy Crawford, www.smithsonianmag.com. May 19, 2013.

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