Evan Osnos Beijing Quotations

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

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.

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.

Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.

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.

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.

When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.

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.