China Famous Quotes

It was sort of like Macbeth, thought Fat Charlie, an hour later; in fact, if the witches in Macbeth had been four little old ladies and if, instead of stirring cauldrons and intoning dread incantations, they had just welcomed Macbeth in and fed him turkey and rice and peas spread out on white china plates on a red-and-white patterned plastic tablecloth -- not to mention sweet potato pudding and spice cabbage -- and encouraged him to take second helpings, and thirds, and then, when Macbeth had declaimed that nay, he was stuffed nigh unto bursting and on his oath could truly eat no more, the witches had pressed upon him their own special island rice pudding and a large slice of Mrs. Bustamonte's famous pineapple upside-down cake, it would have been exactly like Macbeth.

The man who once famously pronounced “I know words, I have the best words” scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla (“China—money—bad!”).

Other times I just lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, imagining the kind of life I want to have when I get older. I picture myself at the top of the Eiffel Tower, climbing pyramids in Egypt, dancing in the streets in Spain, riding in a boat in Venice, and walking on the Great Wall of China. In these dreams, I’m a famous writer who wears flamboyant scarves and travels all around the world, meeting fascinating people. No one tells me what to do. I go wherever I want and do whatever I please.

China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice it is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do anything it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about

The Obama administration has a strange theory. Terrorism is a response of uneducated human beings who have been disenfranchised politically and economically. If we can solve the ‘root grievances’ of the poor and oppressed around the world, there will be no more terrorists, and Americans will be safe. This view is of course absurd. If poverty, lack of education, and political disenfranchisement were the causes of terrorism, then much of India and most of China would be populated by terrorists. But they are not. And this is because terrorism is the violent expression of ideology, not objective conditions—what has famously been called ‘propaganda of the deed.’ The terrorist’s ideology may be secular and political—communist or fascist, for example—or it may be religious—Christian, Islamic, or even Hindu.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy--'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate"--to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy--'You are either for us or against us'--was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs.

physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET

The classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China00howdy Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong—ah, so, me eatee!—no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see? pretty soon Fong’s coming back for more and more, so you create an inelastic demand for that shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your merchants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You win, China loses. Fantastic.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up.

In China our professional artists or craftsman used to carve large pieces of white ivory into models of famous buildings, such as the Peking Palace or the Temple of Heaven, with streets and people to the minutest detail. I have been fortunate enough to see a few of theses, and the snow-covered Oxford High, with its yellow stone, resembled one of these exquisite ivory carvings, yellowed with age. I was happy to have discovered such affinity between Oxford and Ancient China.

In the Roman psyche the East had long been a place of danger, but also a place of plenty. The first Emperor Augustus famously said of Rome that he found a city built in brick but left it in marble – all that money had to come from somewhere. India was repeatedly described in Roman sources as a land of unimaginable wealth. Pliny the Elder complained that the Roman taste for exotic silks, perfumes and pearls consumed the city. ‘India and China [and Arabia] together drain our Empire. That is the price that our luxuries and our womankind cost us.’ It was the construction of the Via Egnatia and attendant road-systems that physically allowed Rome to expand eastwards, while the capture of Egypt intensified this magnetic pull. Rome had got the oriental bug, and Byzantium, entering into a truce with the Romans in 129 BC following the Roman victory in the Macedonian Wars that kick-started Gnaeus Egnatius’ construction of the Via Egnatia, was a critical and vital destination before all longer Asian journeys began.

In 2002, after the huge success of Who Moved my Cheese? a management manual that sold 1.6million copies in China, there was a rush of books inspired by it. Titles included Whose Cheese Should I Move?; Can I Move Your Cheese?; Who Dares to Move my Cheese?; I Don’t Bother to Move Your Cheese; Agitating, Alluring Cheese; No One Can Move My Cheese! The New Allegory of Cheese; Make the Cheese by Yourself!; A Piece of Cheese: Reading World Famous Fairy Tales; Management Advice 52 from the Cheese; and No More Cheese! Finally, there was my personal favorite: Chinese People Eat Cheese? - Who Took My Meat Bun?

Abelard was a great philosopher in the twelfth century who was hired to teach Héloïse, a young noble woman who was the niece of Notre Dame’s Canon Fulbert. They fell in love and had an affair, which led to Héloïse becoming pregnant and the two of them getting married in secret. When Héloïse’s uncle discovered the affair, he had Abelard castrated and Héloïse sent to a nunnery. They could never see each other again, but they sent each other passionate letters for the rest of their lives, letters that have become among the most famous in history. The bones of the lovers were finally reunited here in 1817, and ever since, lovers from all over the world have been leaving letters on this tomb.

11. Let Go of your Idle Thoughts.[FN#263] [FN#263] A famous Zenist, Mu-go-koku-shi, is said to have replied to every questioner, saying: "Let go of your idle thoughts." A Brahmin, having troubled himself a long while with reference to the problem of life and of the world, went out to call on Shakya Muni that he might be instructed by the Master. He got some beautiful flowers to offer them as a present to the Muni, and proceeded to the place where He was addressing his disciples and believers. No sooner had he come in sight of the Master than he read in his mien the struggles going on within him. "Let go of that," said the Muni to the Brahmin, who was going to offer the flowers in both his hands. He dropped on the ground the flowers in his right hand, but still holding those in his left. "Let go of that," demanded the Master, and the Brahmin dropped the flowers in his left hand rather reluctantly. "Let go of that, I say," the Muni commanded again; but the Brahmin, having nothing to let go of, asked: "What shall I let go of, Reverend Sir? I have nothing in my hands, you know." "Let go of that, you have neither in your right nor in your left band, but in the middle." Upon these words of the Muni a light came into the sufferer's mind, and he went home satisfied and in joy.[FN#264] "Not to attach to all things is Dhyana," writes an ancient Zenist, "and if you understand this, going out, staying in, sitting, and lying are in Dhyana." Therefore allow not your mind to be a receptacle for the dust of society, or the ashes of life, or rags and waste paper of the world. You bear too much burden upon your shoulders with which you have nothing to do. [FN#264]

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.2

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up. Deng made the decision on pragmatic grounds. And the opening up worked: China’s economy soared. Yet, do the Chinese view this opening up as a temporary measure until China becomes strong again? Do they have a desire to return eventually to their Middle Kingdom mentality, trading with the world while remaining culturally detached from it? When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world. Only such a major change of mind would enable the Chinese officials to lay out the red carpet for foreign businesses, including American businesses.

Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, often regarded as the most famous decorated US army officer of the early twentieth century, wrote a book after World War I aptly called War Is a Racket. Upon retirement in the 1930s, he gave speeches around the country to spread his message—a message that sheds light upon the hidden internal dialogue underlying US military history. In 1935, Butler boldly stated: I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Favorite painting...?" "Painting? Odalisque," I said. "Really.His non-nude nude. Interesting." It was,to me. Edward's most famous painting of Diana is Troie, where he painted her as Helen of Troy: naked except for the diamond bracelet and the occasional tendril of auburn hair. It had caused quite a stir at its exhibition. Apparently, Millicent Carnegie Biddle fainted on seeing it. It wasn't quite what she was used to viewing when she sat across from Mrs. Edward Willing every few weeks, sipping tea from Wedgewood china cups. Odalisque was more daring in its way, and infinitely more interesting to me. Most of the Post-Impressionist painters did an odalisque, or harem girl, reclining on a sofa or carpet, promising with their eyes that whatever it was that they did to men, they did it well. An odalisque was almost compulsory material.But unlike any of them,Edward had painted his subject-Diana-covered from neck to ankle in shimmery gauze.Covered,but still the ultimate object of desire. "Why that one?" Dr. Rothaus asked. "I don't know-" "Oh,please.Don't go all stupid teenager on me now.You know exactly why you like the painting.Humor me and articulate it." I felt myself beginning the ubiquitos shoulder dip. "Okay. Everyone is covering up something. I guess I think there's an interesting question there." "'What are they hiding?'" I shook my head. "'Does it make a difference?'" "Ah." One sharp corner of her mouth lifted. I would hesitate to call it a smile. "That is interesting.But your favorite Willing piece isn't a painting." "How-" "You hesitated when I asked. Let me guess...Ravaged Man?" "How-" "You're a young woman. And-" Dr. Rothaus levered herself off the desk-"you went through the 1899 file. I know the archive.

We aren’t simply looking at a demographically induced economic breakdown; we are looking at the end of a half millennium of economic history. At present, I see only two preexisting economic models that might work for the world we’re (d)evolving into. Both are very old-school: The first is plain ol’ imperialism. For this to work, the country in question must have a military, especially one with a powerful navy capable of large-scale amphibious assault. That military ventures forth to conquer territories and peoples, and then exploits said territories and peoples in whatever way it wishes: forcing conquered labor to craft products, stripping conquered territories of resources, treating conquered people as a captive market for its own products, etc. The British Empire at its height excelled at this, but to be honest, so did any other post-Columbus political entity that used the word “empire” in its name. If this sounds like mass slavery with some geographic and legal displacement between master and slave, you’re thinking in the right general direction. The second is something called mercantilism, an economic system in which you heavily restrict the ability of anyone to export anything to your consumer base, but in which you also ram whatever of your production you can down the throats of anyone else. Such ramming is often done with a secondary goal of wrecking local production capacity so the target market is dependent upon you in the long term. The imperial-era French engaged in mercantilism as a matter of course, but so too did any up-and-coming industrial power. The British famously product-dumped on the Germans in the early 1800s, while the Germans did the same to anyone they could reach in the late 1800s. One could argue (fairly easily) that mercantilism was more or less the standard national economic operating policy for China in the 2000s and 2010s (under American strategic cover, no less). In essence, both possible models would be implemented with an eye toward sucking other peoples dry, and transferring the pain of general economic dislocation from the invaders to the invaded. Getting a larger slice of a smaller pie, as it were. Both models might theoretically work in a poorer, more violent, more fractured world—particularly if they are married. But even together, some version of imperialist mercantilism faces a singular, overarching, likely condemning problem: Too many guns, not enough boots.

China’s building binge is the most striking example of what Prime Minister Wen Jiabao famously, but impotently, denounced in 2007 as the country’s “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated and unsustainable” model of economic development.

The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true. The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.

I love a mysterious underground and have exploited this in many of my books: the ice tunnels of Greenland, the volcanic tubes of Iceland, the mysterious passageways beneath an ancient African hillside or a Buddhist monastery in central China. And of course, London's famous tube system, setting for my book LONDON UNDERGROUND. It's a funny sort of fixation, especially given my mother's claustrophobia, which I saw her deal with on many occasions. We once lined up to take a tour into the Lascaux Caverns in France to see the ancient cave paintings. My mother didn't make it past the first quirky turn into the depths, and she sent me on by myself. Given her interest in history and archaeology, which she used as the basis for a series of mysteries she published and which inspired my own writing, it always surprised me she still loved to write about places she could never visit.

But sharing has its limits. It might make you famous, but chances are it won’t earn you a buck. It might find you new people to connect with, but it won’t make it any easier to click with them. And it might let you tell the world what’s on your mind; but it won’t make the world listen.

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more “evolved” than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin’s model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others.

The most famous and highest ranking Chinese in the Red Army was Ren Fuchen, aged thirty-three at the time of the Revolution and considered China’s first Bolshevik.

Kenneth Pomeranz made coal famous, arguing in The Great Divergence that Europe succeeded because British mines were close to start-up factories, whereas China lagged behind because bituminous deposits there were out of reach.

Yuguo fell apart, into a thousand little pieces. He felt it happen, fragments of his mind detaching from the rest, splitting off, becoming their own, being mapped by Nexus. Here was Yuguo’s knowledge of coding, his comprehension of data structures, of objects and methods, of intents and game players, of threads and loops and conditions. Here was football Yuguo, the precise way his left foot grounded into the grass and his hips swiveled and his arm balanced as his right foot shot forward to kick the checked ball at the goal. Here was Yuguo’s shy lust for girls, the patterns his eyes drew over their curves when he saw them, the anxiety that struck him dumb when they were near. Here was Yuguo’s despair that had led him to this room, his quiet dread that his country and the world were getting worse instead of better, that the future was one of slow strangulation at the electronic hands of smiling tame AIs with famous faces, their forked tongues lapping out of the viewscreens to feed saccharine to the masses, the old men who’d always ruled China laughing and holding their leashes. Here were the words a young woman had said to him just minutes ago. “Critical mass. Weak apart, strong together.” Here were her eyes, fiery eyes, hanging in space. Here was her name: Lifen. Then those pieces fell apart, into smaller pieces, which fell apart into fragments even smaller: Yuguo’s sensation of red. Yuguo’s concept of 1 and 0. Yuguo’s left thumb. The sound in Yuguo’s head when he heard the third note of his favorite pop song. Yuguo’s yes. Yuguo’s no. Yuguo’s and. Yuguo’s or. Yuguo’s xor. Yuguo’s now. Yuguo’s future. Yuguo’s past. He could see himself now. He was a golden statue of Yuguo, immobile, one foot in front of the other, standing in a space of white light. But the statue wasn’t solid, it was made of grains, millions of grains, flecks of gold dust, millions of parts of him. And as he watched they were separating, pulling gradually apart, so that he was no longer a single entity but a cloud, a fog, a fog of Yuguo, and if a strong wind came, he would just blow away, and if the pieces split any more he knew there wouldn’t be any such thing as Yuguo left at all. Yuguo’s fear. Yuguo’s end. And then the pieces rushed together, and he was inside that statue, he was that statue, and he was all of it, 1 and 0, yes and no, future and past, sound and sight, football and coding. He was all of it. He was whole. He was a mind. I’m Yuguo, he realized. I’m him. I’m me. I’m Yuguo! His eyes snapped open. He was in his body. His body made of molten gold. No, not gold, flesh and blood.

The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too—another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting—a dreadful toll, to be sure—American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And

On the one hand, these filmmakers are the descendants of the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the century. One of the important ideological components of the May Fourth movement was its radical antitraditional stance, exemplified by its famous slogan: "Smash the Confucian Temple" (zalan kongjiadian).

All the crockery in China had been smashed – flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors’ portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment

Some of the choices that Chinese consumers made did not translate easily to outsiders. A brand of stylish eyeglass frames appeared on the market, named “Helen Keller.” Reporters asked the company why it had chosen to advertise its eyeglasses with the world’s most famous blind person. The company replied that Chinese schools teach the story of Helen Keller primarily as an icon of fortitude, and sure enough, sales of the frames were brisk. Helen Keller glasses were selling under the slogan “You see the world, and the world sees you.

Wonder Woman’s war adventures were extensive. She shut down Japanese bases all over the world, from Mexico to South America to China. She, by herself, seized a German U-boat, overturned a Japanese dreadnought, and captured an entire fleet of Nazi battleships. The Nazis attempted to infiltrate America several times and were stopped by Wonder Woman at every turn. Whether it was a plot to poison the water supply or disrupt American industry, or a Nazi spy impersonating an American general to find out their military plans, Wonder Woman thwarted every Axis foe.

Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn’t keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob. Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him.

Like many sons of famous men who can’t live up to their fathers, Big Wang covered up his insecurity with a belligerent jocularity. Or to put it another way, he was an annoying prick who thought he was hilarious. He liked to make his power known by publicly berating

There is an ancient saying in China, one of the famous “Thirty-Six Stratagems” for dealing with an enemy. The stratagem is this: “Conceal a dagger behind a smile.

During the era of the Warring States in ancient China, the state of Qi found itself threatened by the powerful armies of the state of Wei. The Qi general consulted the famous strategist Sun Pin (a descendant of Suntzu himself), who told him that the Wei general looked down on the armies of Qi, believing that their soldiers were cowards. That, said Sun Pin, was the key to victory. He proposed a plan: Enter Wei territory with a large army and make thousands of campfires. The next day make half that number of campfires, and the day after that, half that number again. Putting his trust in Sun Pin, the Qi general did as he was told. The Wei general, of course, was carefully monitoring the invasion, and he noted the dwindling campfires. Given his predisposition to see the Qi soldiers as cowards, what could this mean but that they were defecting? He would advance with his cavalry and crush this weak army; his infantry would follow, and they would march into Qi itself. Sun Pin, hearing of the approaching Wei cavalry and calculating how fast they were moving, retreated and stationed the Qi army in a narrow pass in the mountains. He had a large tree cut down and stripped of its bark, then wrote on the bare log, “The general of Wei will die at this tree.” He set the log in the path of the pursuing Wei army, then hid archers on both sides of the pass. In the middle of the night, the Wei general, at the head of his cavalry, reached the place where the log blocked the road. Something was written on it; he ordered a torch lit to read it. The torchlight was the signal and the lure: the Qi archers rained arrows on the trapped Wei horsemen. The Wei general, realizing he had been tricked, killed himself. Sun Pin based his baiting of the Wei general on his knowledge of the man’s personality, which was arrogant and violent. By turning these qualities to his advantage, encouraging his enemy’s greed and aggression, Sun Pin could control the man’s mind. You, too, should look for the emotion that your enemies are least able to manage, then bring it to the surface. With a little work on your part, they will lay themselves open to your counterattack.

Staffordshire was called The Potteries, where all the fine china was produced for the rich and famous. Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, Minton and hundreds more factories,

49.​TRUE OR FALSE: 2006’S CASINO ROYALE WAS THE FIRST BOND MOVIE THAT COULD BE WATCHED IN CHINA. True. It was the first film in the James Bond series that the Chinese censor board approved. 50.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE FIRST INTERRACIAL KISS IN TELEVISION HISTORY HAPPENED ON STAR TREK. True. Although the network originally didn’t want to air it, William Shatner reportedly sabotaged all of the other shoots, forcing the network to run the kiss. 51.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE FIRST TELEVISION COMMERCIAL EVER WAS A CAR COMMERCIAL. False. It was actually a commercial for watches, and it aired in 1941. 52.​TRUE OR FALSE: ACTOR JIM CAVIEZEL WAS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING WHILE PORTRAYING JESUS IN THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. True. Caviezel suffered a large number of calamities during the filming, but this one seemed like a bit of an omen. 53.​TRUE OR FALSE: BRYAN ADAMS’ FAMOUS SONG “SUMMER OF ‘69” IS NAMED AFTER THE SEX POSITION, NOT THE YEAR. True. In fact, Adams was just 9 years old during the summer of 1969. 54.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE ROLLING STONES PERFORMED IN BACK TO THE FUTURE 3. False. But ZZ Top did! 55.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE WORD “FUCK” WAS ONCE SAID OVER 1,000 TIMES IN ONE MOVIE. False. But Swearnet: The Movie came close with the word appearing 935 times—a record amount! 56.​TRUE OR FALSE: BATTLEFIELD EARTH WAS WRITTEN BY THE FOUNDER OF SCIENTOLOGY. True. L. Ron Hubbard was a well-known science fiction writer in addition to being the founder of Scientology.

Lest some might gather an impression that this story is an exposé, I wish to say I have no intention of such. If I had chosen to write an exposé, I could have taken fiendish delight in doing a dilly fifteen years ago, when even our government was not too certain about things that went on. But to make one man’s story interesting to others he must run into good and bad situations. I have long since discovered that there is no such thing as bad people. There are just two kinds of people, because people are people. There are those who know and those who don’t know. And I don’t wish you to think I have any intention of shoving onto a few the entire blame for China becoming communistic instead of something else. In a way, even though I didn’t make a fortune like some of the others, and my main motives were not greed and power, I honestly feel that I am guilty along with them. And even though my main crime was ignorance, which is a by-product of emotional immaturity, I deserve to be included with the China gang.

Lest some might gather an impression that this story is an exposé, I wish to say I have no intention of such. If I had chosen to write an exposé, I could have taken fiendish delight in doing a dilly fifteen years ago, when even our government was not too certain about things that went on. But to make one man’s story interesting to others he must run into good and bad situations. I have long since discovered that there is no such thing as bad people. There are just two kinds of people, because people are people. There are those who know and those who don’t know. And I don’t wish you to think I have any intention of shoving onto a few the entire blame for China becoming communistic instead of something else. In a way, even though I didn’t make a fortune like some of the others, and my main motives were not greed and power, I honestly feel that I am guilty along with them. And even though my main crime was ignorance, which is a by-product of emotional immaturity, I deserve to be included with the China gang. My only hope is that we didn’t louse up the future generations too greatly, so that they may have a chance in the years to come.

Liu was taken at bayonet point from his Shandong village in 1944 and sent to work in the Showa coal mine in Hokkaido. Unlike those at Hanaoka who rose up in rebellion, he fled into the mountains. He escaped in July 1945, just about one month before the end of the war, but he was so terrified that he remained in hiding, living off grasses and nuts, and occasionally descending to the remote coastline to collect seaweed, less afraid of bears than of human beings, and with no knowledge that the war was over, until he was by chance discovered by a rabbit trapper in 1958. When he emerged, not only was the war over, but Kishi Nobosuke, the Tojo Cabinet's Minister for Commerce and Labor, who had been responsible for the forced-labor program, had become prime minister. When Kishi's government ordered an investigation of Liu on suspicion of illegal entry into the country, Liu published a famous statement of protest and then returned to China. As of the early 1990s, he was still pursuing his case for justice against the Japanese government, and still waiting for a response from it.

Zi zhi tong jian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in governance), the famous annalistic history on the period written between 1067 and 1084 A.D.,

Let the past serve the present, let foreign things serve China,” said that famous servant of the people Mao Zedong.

When he returned to Florida in the early part of 1939, Hemingway took his boat the Pilar across the Straits of Florida to Havana, where he checked into the Hotel Ambos Mundos. Shortly thereafter, Martha joined him in Cuba and they first rented, and later in 1940, purchased their home for $12,500. Located 10 miles to the east of Havana, in the small town of San Francisco de Paula, they settled into what they called Finca Vigía, the Lookout Farm. On November 20, 1940, after a difficult divorce from Pauline, Ernest and Martha got married. Even though Cuba had become their home, they still took editorial assignments overseas, including one in China that Martha had for Collier’s magazine. Returning to Cuba just prior to the outbreak of World War II, he convinced the Cuban government to outfit his boat with armaments, with which he intended to ambush German submarines. As the war progressed, Hemingway went to London as a war correspondent, where he met Mary Welsh. His infatuation prompted him to propose to her, which of course did not sit well with Martha. Hemingway was present at the liberation of Paris and attended a party hosted by Sylvia Beach. He, incidentally, also renewed a friendship with Gertrude Stein. Becoming a famous war correspondence he covered the Battle of the Bulge, however he then spent the rest of the war on the sidelines hospitalized with pneumonia. Even so, Ernest was awarded the Bronze Star for bravery. Once again, Hemingway fell in lust, this time with a 19-year-old girl, Adriana Ivancich. This so-called platonic, wink, wink, love affair was the essence of his novel Across the River and Into the Trees, which he wrote in Cuba.

The Treaty of Tianjin and the Convention of Peking that ended the Second Opium War gave Kowloon – an area next to Hong Kong – to Britain, legalised the opium trade and granted Christians full civil rights. Importantly, foreign powers were given the right to carry Chinese workers to labour in their own lands and colonies. This launched the ‘coolie’ trade and Chinese workers were conveyed to work in plantations and mines in places such as Malaya, while in America they famously built the railroads.

Like many successful Chinese firms, it is caught at the bottom of what Taiwanese technology baron Stan Shih famously called the “smile.” Shih observed that in the tech industry, high profits are earned at one end by companies that control the design of core technologies (such as Intel), and at the other by companies that control the design and distribution of products to consumers (such as Apple). In between are commodity firms that manufacture and assemble the products, in high volumes but for low profit margins. Taiwan is filled with such low-margin bottom-of-the-smile firms, such as Shih’s own Acer, TSMC (the world’s biggest contract maker of integrated circuits), and Foxconn (the world’s biggest contract assembler of consumer electronics). For the most part, China’s technology companies seem to be heading in the same direction.

In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future: [W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

does it matter if Joe Biden has a different view of China? It does, because there is evidence that the CCP has been currying his favour by awarding business deals that have enriched his son, Hunter Biden. One account of this is given by Peter Schweizer in his 2019 book Secret Empires.30 Some of his key claims were subsequently challenged and Schweizer refined them in an op-ed in the New York Times (famous for fact-checking).31 In short, when Vice President Biden travelled to China in December 2013 on an official trip, his son flew with him on Airforce Two. While Biden senior was engaging in soft diplomacy with China’s leaders, Hunter was having other kinds of meetings. Then, ‘less than two weeks after the trip, Hunter’s firm … which he founded with two other businessmen [including John Kerry’s stepson] in June 2013, finalized a deal to open a fund, BHR Partners, whose largest shareholder is the government-run Bank of China, even though he had scant background in private equity’.

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic and – crucially – the agricultural centre of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite it being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 327 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions which surrounded them, especially Mongolia with its nomadic bands of violent warriors. China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951. By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilised China and the ‘barbarous’ regions which surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.

The first notable spinout was Kathy Xu, another woman who managed to flourish in China's venture industry. Rather than studying in the United States, Xu had experienced U.S. instruction at Nanjing University, where she had majored in English. One teacher, an impressive African American woman named Donda West, instilled in her pupils an American ethos. 'You are unique, you are a marvel. There has been no person like you in the last 500 years, and there will be no person like you in the next 500 years,' she lectured. The paean to individualism was, as Xu recalled vividly, an eye-opening experience for a Chinese teenager from Sichuan. Donda West also stuck in Xu's memory because of her son, who was often seen performing acrobatic tricks on campus. Years later, Xu was intrigued to discover that the boy, named Kanye, had become famous.

As Napoleon Bonaparte famously said, “Never stop your enemy when he is making a mistake.

The Zen sect had been favored by the Ashikaga shogunate and had, during the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and the earlier Kamakura periods, supervised commercial and cultural relations with China through the famous Tenryūbune (Tenryūji ships) sponsored by the Tenryūji branch of the Rinzai school in Kyoto. Zen temples played an important cultural role with their schools, the so-called terakoya, and they controlled the celebrated Ashikaga College (referred to by Xavier as the "University of Bando"), a major center for classical Chinese learning. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, the temples still had important administrative and diplomatic privileges, for instance in the issuing of passports (Boxer 1951, 262). Only later in that period did Zen suffer a setback owing to the rising tide of Confucian orthodoxy.

Vietnam was originally a matriarchy and, in 111 B.C. China tried to integrate it into the Han Empire, the first resistance leaders were women. A female military commander who managed, for a time, to successfully oppose the Chinese occupation of Vietnam, famously exhorted her troops: 'I'd like to ride storms, kill sharks in the open sea, drive out the aggressors, reconquer the country, undo the ties of serfdom, and never bend my back to be the concubine of whatever man.' Such heroines became iconic symbols of Vietnamese patriotism. The Chinese ruled Vietnam for one thousand five hundred years, imposing Confucian principles of male superiority. This provoked a deep divide between the north of the country, strongly influenced by China, and the south which kept alive the more relaxed culture of feminine sensuality. The nation's struggle for independence, finally won in 1428, was shaped by women's struggles for liberation from (Chinese) patriarchy. The whore was a distinct image of South Vietnam during two decades of the Vietnam War until the communist North's victory in 1975. Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — the 'Paris of the East' was dominated by corrupt politicians, army officers and gangsters who enjoyed and profited from prostitution rackets. After Communists seized power, a decade of severe repression followed, then an increasingly flagrant resurrection from prostitution in the late 1980s in reaction to poverty and austerity and austerity under communism.

Humans should avoid getting famous, and pigs should avoid getting chubby.”)

by refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001—“Space Oddity” and “After the Gold Rush.” Both did classic songs about imperialism that name-checked Marlon Brando—“China Girl” and “Pocahontas.” Both were prodigiously prolific even when they were trying to eat Peru through their nostrils. They were mutual fans, though they floundered when they tried to copy each other (Trans and Tin Machine). Both sang their fears of losing their youth when they were still basically kids; both aged mysteriously well. Neither ever did anything remotely sane. But there’s a key difference: Bowie liked working with smart people, whereas Young always liked working with . . . well, let’s go ahead and call them “not quite as smart as Neil Young” people. Young made his most famous music with two backing groups—the awesomely inept Crazy Horse and the expensively addled CSN—whose collective IQ barely leaves room temperature. He knows they’re not going to challenge him with ideas of their own, so he knows how to use them—brilliantly in the first case, lucratively in the second. But Bowie never made any of his memorable music that way—he always preferred collaborating with (and stealing from) artists who knew tricks he didn’t know, well educated in musical worlds where he was just a visitor. Just look at the guitarists he worked with: Carlos Alomar from James Brown’s band vs. Robert Fripp from King Crimson. Stevie Ray Vaughan from Texas vs. Mick Ronson from Hull. Adrian Belew from Kentucky vs. Earl Slick from Brooklyn. Nile Rodgers. Peter Frampton. Ricky Gardiner, who played all that fantastic fuzz guitar on Low (and who made the mistake of demanding a raise, which is why he dropped out of the story so fast). Together, Young and Bowie laid claim to a jilted generation left high and dry by the dashed hippie dreams. “The

The Great Trigonometrical Survey WHEN I WAS IN SECOND grade, I did my should-be-famous person report on one Nain Singh, who surveyed over 2,000 kilometers from Nepal to China. That alone might not sound entirely worthy of a report, but consider he accomplished this in 1865 and on threat of death. Tibet wasn’t so tolerant of foreigners back then, famous for beheading uninvited visitors. So Nain set out, disguised as a lama on a pilgrimage to Lhasa, to conduct the Great Trigonometrical Survey and triangulated his way across the Himalayas, using two known points for every unknown to measure the length of his country. He survived. I wasn’t so sure I’d be that lucky as I mounted the last few steps that led to my two known points: Jacob, who was standing next to Erik. They couldn’t have been more different, those two. And I was the unknown in this triangulation problem.

For this was Jingdezhen, porcelain capital of China, where the pottery made from local clay was shaped, painted, glazed, and fired in the town’s kilns—of which, if one counted even the smallest, there were more than nine thousand. The potters of Jingdezhen had been making porcelain since the Han dynasty, more than fifteen hundred years ago. There were many varieties, but the most famous was the blue and white.

Walter Benjamin’s famous vision of history as a vast heap of wreckage of incidents and events that keeps piling higher and higher into infinity, with progress signifying merely more wreckage waiting to happen.

The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort.” The author is Seneca, born in Spain 2,000 years ago. ​China’s Lao-Tzu, born nearly six centuries earlier than Seneca, had this to say: “To know you have enough is to be rich.” ​This next quotation is my favorite. It is by actor Jim Carrey, who is both rich and famous: ​“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.” ​However, if being rich and famous will not make you happy, what will?

Chinese internet dissidents are especially famous for using puns. For example, they might write héxiè, "river crab", which sounds like héxié, the Mandarin word for "harmony", but with different tones. "Harmony" itself is a Chinese euphemism for "censorship", derived from the purported goal of a 2004 internet censorship law to create a "Harmonius society".

There was no doubt that Shen Yu was extremely good-looking. After all, he was famous for his beauty throughout the capital. Against the crimson backdrop of the bed quilt his fair face was even more enticing, and now this beauty in read was seated on the bed, his gaze glowing with affection as if the man before him was the only one who could enter his eyes and his heart. Absolutely anyone would be moved. 毫无疑问，沈雨长得非常好看。毕竟，他以美丽闻名于整个首都。在床被子的深红色背景下，他白皙的脸更加迷人，现在这位阅读中的美女坐在床上，他的目光充满了爱意，仿佛眼前的男人是唯一能进入他的眼睛和心灵的人。任何人都会被感动。

I'd wanted to travel through Asia most of my life, sample all the incredible street food in Thailand and Vietnam, tour Japan's famous convenience stores that sold food as good as their restaurants, slurp cumin lamb hand-torn noodles in China.

Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.

stars, the Gang of Four and China (and Japan in earlier decades) are all in East Asia. The idea of a regional growth effect has been especially unwelcome to development experts and aid officials who want to give advice on growth. They can advise the national policy makers, but they cannot give advice to the nonexistent regional policy makers. Another sign that regional growth is an important part of the action is that regions move together from one decade to the next. For example, Latin American nations in the 1980s collectively had a famous “lost decade.” A regional credit bubble had burst: global banks had given the region a supply of easy credit at low interest rates in the 1970s, then interest rates went up and credit was cut off in the 1980s. A sensible principle for attribution for national growth performance is that a nation does not get special recognition if its performance is just at the average. It would be foolish for a nation to claim credit for growth that is the same as the average for its region. If a nation is above (or below) these averages, then we can talk about special recognition for the nation’s growth performance. This principle further reduces the share of growth variation explained by permanent national differences. Some of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences was really explained by regional differences. Recalculating, we now get only a little more than a tenth of the variation in decade growth rates explained by national differences. Regional growth

Richard Kay Richard Kay became friends with Diana, Princess of Wales, through his job as royal correspondent for London’s Daily Mail. After her separation in 1992, he used his knowledge to give a penetrating and unique insight into Diana’s troubled life, and they remained friends until the end. Richard is now diary editor or the Daily Mail and lives in London with his wife and three children. Over the years, I saw her at her happiest and in her darkest moments. There were moments of confusion and despair when I believed Diana was being driven by the incredible pressures made on her almost to the point of destruction. She talked of being strengthened by events, and anyone could see how the bride of twenty had grown into a mature woman, but I never found her strong. She was as unsure of herself at her death as when I first talked to her on that airplane, and she wanted reassurance about the role she was creating for herself. In private, she was a completely different person form the manicured clotheshorse that the public’s insatiable demand for icons had created. She was natural and witty and did a wonderful impression of the Queen. This was the person, she told me, that she would have been all the time if she hadn’t married into the world’s most famous family. What she hated most of all was being called “manipulative” and privately railed against those who used the word to describe her. “They don’t even know me,” she would say bitterly, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment in Kensington Palace and pouring tea from a china pot. It was this blindness, as she saw it, to what she really was that led her seriously to consider living in another country where she hoped she would be understood. The idea first emerged in her mind about three years before her death. “I’ve got to find a place where I can have peace of mind,” she said to me. She considered France, because I was near enough to stay in close touch with William and Harry. She thought of America because she--naively, it must be said--saw it as a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to “disappear.” She also thought of South Africa, where her brother, Charles, made a home, and even Australia, because it was the farthest place she could think of from the seat of her unhappiness. But that would have separated her form her sons. Everyone said she would go anywhere, do anything, to have her picture taken, but in my view the truth was completely different. A good day for her was one where her picture was not taken and the paparazzi photographers did not pursue her and clamber over her car. “Why are they so obsessed with me?” she would ask me. I would try to explain, but I never felt she fully understood. Millions of women dreamed of changing places with her, but the Princess that I knew yearned for the ordinary humdrum routine of their lives. “They don’t know how lucky they are,” she would say. On Saturday, just before she was joined by Dodi Al Fayed for their last fateful dinner at the Ritz in Pairs, she told me how fed up she was being compared with Camilla. “It’s all so meaningless,” she said. She didn’t say--she never said--whether she thought Charles and Camilla should marry. Then, knowing that as a journalist I often work at weekends, she said to me, “Unplug your phone and get a good night’s sleep.

The dementia that is caused by the same vascular problems that lead to stroke is clearly affected by diet. In a publication from the famous Framingham Study, researchers conclude that for every three additional servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the risk of stroke will be reduced by 22%.73

No matter how highly placed they were, they were still officials, their views were well established and well known, famous. It could have rained frogs over Tan Son Nhut and they wouldn’t have been upset; Cam Ranh Bay could have dropped into the South China Sea and they would have found some way to make it sound good for you; the Bo Doi Division (Ho’s Own) could have marched by the American embassy and they would have characterized it as “desperate”—what did even the reporters closest to the Mission Council ever find to write about when they’d finished their interviews? (My own interview with General Westmoreland had been hopelessly awkward. He’d noticed that I was accredited to Esquire and asked me if I planned to be doing “humoristical” pieces. Beyond that, very little was really said. I came away feeling as though I’d just had a conversation with a man who touches a chair and says, “This is a chair,” points to a desk and says, “This is a desk.” I couldn’t think of anything to ask him, and the interview didn’t happen.) I honestly wanted to know what the form was for those interviews, but some of the reporters I’d ask would get very officious, saying something about “Command postures,” and look at me as though I was insane. It was probably the kind of look that I gave one of them when he asked me once what I found to talk about with the grunts all the time, expecting me to confide (I think) that I found them as boring as he did. And just-like-in-the-movies, there were a lot of correspondents who did their work, met their deadlines, filled the most preposterous assignments the best they could and withdrew, watching the war and all its hideous secrets, earning their cynicism the hard way and turning their self-contempt back out again in laughter. If New York wanted to know how the troops felt about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, they’d go out and get it. (“Would you have voted for him?” “Yeah, he was a real good man, a real good man. He was, uh, young.” “Who will you vote for now?” “Wallace, I guess.”) They’d even gather troop reflections on the choice of Paris as the site of the peace talks. (“Paris? I dunno, sure, why not? I mean, they ain’t gonna hold ’em in Hanoi, now are they?”), but they’d know how funny that was, how wasteful, how profane. They knew that, no matter how honestly they worked, their best work would somehow be lost in the wash of news, all the facts, all the Vietnam stories. Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it, all it could do was take the most profound event of the American decade and turn it into a communications pudding, taking its most obvious, undeniable history and making it into a secret history. And the very best correspondents knew even more than that.

To have followed the speculative vision of Behaim in his famous globe, or of others like him, would have been disastrous, even though their work represents the cream of fifteenth-century mapmaking and was known to Columbus. Indeed, as one commentator has observed, if his chart had been based on the Behaim scenario, 'Columbus could not even have known of the whereabouts of the New World, much less discover it.' Yet not only does he seem to have known where he was going but, on some accounts, when he was going to get there: 'Now and then Pinzón and Columbus consult and deliberate -- mutually discuss their route. The map or chart passes not infrequently from the one captain to the other; the observations and calculations as to their position are daily recorded, their conduct and course for the night duly agreed upon. On the eve of their due arrival Columbus issues the order to stay the course of the armada, to shorten sail, because he knew that he was close to the New World and was afraid of going ashore during the obscurity of the night ... How does he know the place and the hour? 'His Genius' says the Columbus legend in explanation. But the Map? The critics will ask, what did it contain? Whose was it? What did that map contain that was so frequently passed from Columbus to Pinzón during the voyage?' I've presented my case that what the map may have contained was an accurate but ancient, and indeed antediluvian, representation of the coast and islands of Central America, notably the north-south-oriented Great Bahama Bank island, which Columbus -- no less ignorant than any of his contemporaries about the existence of the Americas -- took to be an accurate map of part of the coast of China and the islands of Japan.

Consider these facts: the source of much of the world’s food – seeds – is mostly in the control of just four corporations; half of all the world’s cheeses are produced with bacteria or enzymes manufactured by a single company; one in four beers drunk around the world is the product of one brewer; from the USA to China, most global pork production is based around the genetics of a single breed of pig; and, perhaps most famously, although there are more than 1,500 different varieties of banana, global trade is dominated by just one, the Cavendish, a cloned fruit grown in monocultures so vast their scale can only be comprehended from the view of an aeroplane or by satellite.

Most famous for his work the Art of War, Sun Tzu is credited for creating empathetic warfare, whereby understanding an enemy would inevitably lead to their defeat. The book is a treatise on the formation, equipping, training, and leading of an army. Sun Tzu’s work delves into many non-military aspects of life, as he believed that knowledge was the most effective weapon