I am against portraying China as the demon of the global community. China has grasped more quickly than other countries what globalization means and what it demands. The country has learned how to use other people's innovations for itself. India, incidentally, is not far behind China in this respect. Both are not nations in the European sense, but rather cultural communities with enormous markets. The challenge of the future is to work out how to deal with that.

The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries' experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight.

He [Deng Xiaoping] said that he did not understand why we failed to grasp that the alternative was not democracy, but total chaos and risking all the reforms that had been achieved.

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

To have striven so hard, to have molded a public personality out of so amorphous an identity, to have sustained that superhuman effort only to end with every weakness disclosed and every error compounding the downfall--that was a fate of biblical proportions. Evidently the Deity would not tolerate the presumption that all can be manipulated; an object lesson of the limits of human presumption was necessary.

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be.