When Richard Nixon came to Beijing in the winter of 1972 China was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution so it had a limited array of entertainment to provide.
China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.
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.
Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet and they are at odds with authoritarianism.
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.
By 1979 Chinese people were poorer on average than North Koreans. I mean your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.
Chinese readers are buying books in translation particularly non-fiction about China in large numbers.
Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.
Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.
The subject of human rights in China confounds absolute pronouncements.
Donald Trump has a mantra of despair of loss. He says we don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories but we don't. And he says the American dream is dead.
In Chinese there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.
For my book 'Age of Ambition ' I spent time documenting among other things the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced.
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.
For years China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.
By the Nineties so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards.
Confucius - or Kongzi which means Master Kong - was not born to power but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.
Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.
When you live in Beijing for a while you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.
As a student in Beijing in 1996 I sometimes marveled at the sheer obscurity of the movies that somehow made it onto pirated discs in China.
In my fifth year in Beijing I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.
Christianity is permitted under China's constitution and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.
China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea which is claimed by other countries.
China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.
Confucius who was born in the sixth century B.C. traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.
419 scams ' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.
To Confucius harmony was consensus not conformity. It required loyal opposition.
I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1 2013 the day the government stopped working.
Young Chinese who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way.
Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.
I can tell you going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts.
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.