‘Among the many forces shaping China's domestic transformation and its role on the world stage, none may prove more significant than the rapid emergence and explosive growth of the Chinese middle-class.’

‘Among the many forces shaping China's domestic transformation and its role on the world stage, none may prove more significant than the rapid emergence and explosive growth of the Chinese middle-class.’

‘My book, Middle Class Shanghai, is a humble effort to provide a different angle, based the cultural and the educational fronts, from the perspective of shared middle-class lifestyles, aspirations, concerns, and values.’

‘Just as New York and Washington are profoundly different from each other, the same can be said about Shanghai and Beijing.’

‘Middle-Class Shanghai actually reveals China's unsettled future because Shanghai embodies what I call two tales of a city. Now in my view, Shanghai was, is, and will be paradoxical.’

‘It is premature to conclude that the U.S. engagement policy with China under the eight presidents prior to the Trump administration has failed.’

As the Chinese Communist Party begins its second century, it’s useful to identify enduring patterns that might aid us in understanding China today and the directions it might be heading.

‘In our discussions, you've identified five themes that have been more or less consistent throughout the history of the party but have oscillated between different points on a continuum:’

Clyde Prestowitz has influenced U.S. foreign trade and investment policy for many decades, both inside and outside government.

‘We must make regime change in China the highest goal of our strategy towards that country.’ ‘The US and its allies cannot dictate to China the political system by which it is governed. But they can and must engineer conditions which embolden and enable those in China who also want regime change to achieve it.’

‘But what's happened now is that Southeast Asia is rich enough to contemplate such infrastructure and that the Chinese have the technology, money, and high-speed rail industry so that they can both finance or help finance and build it.’

‘First is China's relatively aggressive and decisive measures on the COVID public health crisis itself that managed to get the pandemic under control much faster than the other large economies.’ ‘The relative success in controlling the pandemic translates into how much people are willing to go back to their normal lives, to their jobs, and the like.’

‘The propaganda ministry - within four to six weeks - managed to turn China into a problem for Europeans. China’s standing in Europe is eroding by the day.'

'The Hong Kong demonstrations can never be because of policy mistakes by the Communist Party itself.’ During our interview, Tony Saich of the Harvard Kennedy School told me: ‘Hong Kong, with its responses to the demonstrations, and the Coronavirus are both illustrative examples of how the culture of the Communist Party and the traditions it's built up over almost a hundred years reflect the way it behaves when it's confronted by certain crises.’

‘The good news is that 80% of our members said they thought the Phase One agreement was a good thing.' 'But only 19% said it was worth it.' 'What the 80% said they are happy about was that there no more new tariffs were coming immediately.’

'It would not be accurate to say China claims the entire South China Sea as its sovereign territory because the Chinese are unclear about what exactly their claim is and what it is based on.'

‘This is a crisis where the first chair is held by the public health officials, and the second chair is held by the fiscal authorities. We at the Fed have the freedom to be able to move relatively quickly, but we're the third chair here, trying to help out where we can.’

‘Both Trump and Xi have a fundamental political divide problem that the COVID-19 epidemic has exposed and made more apparent – and made substantially worse.’