87 different names stamped on the terracotta warriors. ibid.
Better persons than I have suggested there was no such person as Marco Polo. Dr Frances Wood, author Did Marco Polo Go to China?
Despite what we sometimes think Polo wasn’t the first European – there were other people who were there before him. Dr David Trotter
The Great Wall – magic, majestic and unmoved since construction began in the fifth century it is an engineering feat without equal ... Fifty miles north of Beijing ... locals have reported strange apparitions and mysterious shadows. Destination Truth: s3e11, Skyfy 2011
The Wall stretches as a stone ribbon as far as the eye can see and is truly a wonder to behold. ibid.
China ... has established the world’s only government-sanctioned search for the creature they call the Yeren. The Yeren, or Wildman, is a strange primate said to inhabit the mountains of central China. Destination Truth s3e12
Covered from head to toe in reddish brown hair it stands upright on two feet and ranges from six to a colossal eight feet tall. ibid.
For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China’s suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs. Ai Weiwei
Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don’t have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want – not only you, your whole family and all people like you. Ai Weiwei
We see the tendency in the world to criticise democracy and sometimes even to say that authoritarian countries like China are more efficient. That is very short-sighted. China looks efficient only because it can sacrifice most people’s rights. This is not something the west should be happy about. Ai Weiwei
China has not established the rule of law and if there is a power above the law there is no social justice. Everybody can be subjected to harm. I’m just a citizen: my life is equal in value to any other. But I’m thankful that when I lost my freedom so many people shared feelings and put such touching effort into helping me. Ai Weiwei
Being honest with you, it’s not the ‘great’ wall of China. It’s an all right wall. It’s the ‘All Right Wall of China’. Karl Pilkington
China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial – more advanced industrial centers – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe – and it basically assembles them. Noam Chomsky
In the 1950s, life expectancy in China plunged for several years to far below that of India because of a huge famine, which took an estimated thirty million lives. Sen attributes the famine to the nature of the Chinese regime, which did not react for three years and many not even have been aware of the scale of the famine because totalitarian conditions blocked information flow. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to. Noam Chomsky
Millions of protesting workers in China where the labour share of national income is declining even more rapidly than it is in most of the world. China is indeed playing a major role in these global changes; it’s become pretty largely an assembly plant. Noam Chomsky, lecture Havens Centre 8th April 2010, ‘The Role of the Radical Intellectual’
Chin – he named himself first emperor. Andrew Marr’s History of the World III, BBC 2012
7,000 life-sized figures made of fired clay. ibid.
Opium – the Chinese had a taste for this highly addictive and illegal drug. Andrew Marr’s History of the World VII: Age of Industry
By the 1830s the most successful drug-pushers in the world weren’t Mexican bandits or Afghan warlords but the British. ibid.
China had been forced at gunpoint to open herself up to the modern global economy. ibid.
China was an unknown forbidden. For four centuries her shores hadn’t been touched by the West. Tai-Pan 1986 starring Bryan Brown & John Stanton & Joan Chen & Tim Guinee & Bill Leadbitter & Russell Wong & Katy Behean & Kyra Sedgwick & Janine Turner & Norman Turner & Norman Rodway et al, director Dayle Duke
The foreigners poison us with Opium. ibid. opening address
That quintessential eastern sage – Confucius. His vision was modelled on the power of the past and the family. He believed that education could transform both individuals and society. Bettany Hughes, Confucius: Genius of the Ancient World, BBC 2015
The spiritual master and head of state in Tibet is the Dalai Lama ... Even though the Dalai Lama is a man of peace, he speaks good English and is recognised for his statesmanship. He was refused an audience with Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. However, the British Royal Family who have members that are active Freemasons greeted the leader of the murdering Communist Chinese government with a full state ceremony. Chris Everard, Illuminati II
The Free Tibet campaign is a worldwide movement of volunteers who wish to highlight the illegal killings and imprisonment of Tibetan people. The Free Tibet campaign displayed flags during the state visit of the Chinese premier in London. The Free Tibet flags were confiscated by British police officers. The peaceful protesters were often arrested and dragged away for no apparent reason; some were even assaulted and beaten by British police officers. ibid.
China has made room for a rampant culture of conspicuous consumption that obscures the presence of the shadow. Misha Glenny, McMafia
The money and celebrity also attracted the distinctive blacked-out cars with a K or an O registration, demoting senior Party and Security officials respectively. ibid.
The Political Criminal Nexus (PCN), a profoundly corrupt relationship between the local tycoons and party leaders. ibid.
Like its imperialist predecessors in power, the CCP nurses a visceral fear of the chaos that could ensue were its authority undermined. ibid.
In the last five years, the number of peasant riots has risen spectacularly to roughly 80,000 per year and they continue to proliferate. ibid.
Deng realised that for the Chinese to make money required dumping the traditions of central economic planning, and so for twenty-five years (and especially since the early 1990s) the Government has afforded the provinces considerable autonomy in their economic policy. ibid.
Economic change is fragmenting the country, highlighting its tremendous cultural diversity; reinventing rivalries and alliances; and heightening the tension between ‘the centre’ (Beijing) and ‘the periphery’ (everywhere else). ibid.
The snakeheads, or people traffickers ... pump people relentlessly in boats, planes and trains to replenish what has now become the biggest retail trading and migrant labour network in the world. ibid.
The Government in Beijing completes the virtuous circle of profit by placing all manner of tax and financial incentives for overseas Chinese to invest back in the mainland. ibid.
The snakeheads are smugglers, not traffickers. They do not, on the whole, fix up jobs in the country of destination – they get you there and then it is up to you. Victims of labour-trafficking are kidnapped or duped by traffickers in league with employers, who intend to enslave or coerce the migrant labourers. ibid.
Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s was an international treaty city ... Thanks to the organisational genius of Du Yueh Sheng, known by all as Big-Eared Du, the Shanghai triads were consolidated under his group, the Green Gang. ibid.
Some have argued that the destruction of Shanghai’s triads was one of Mao’s monumental achievements. Others have countered that to do this he turned the Chinese state into one of the most powerful criminal instruments ever devised, a killing machine with the blood of forty million people on its hands. ibid.
Heroin has made a forceful comeback. It returned with the millions of migrant workers that Shanghai needed to construct its hyper-modernist skyline. ibid.
No-one fakes it like the Chinese. And no-one is more determined to enforce intellectual property law, or copyright, than America. ibid.
The world economy has never experienced a change comparable to the release of 1.25 billion people’s energy that followed China's renewed reforms in 1991. ibid.
The Transrapid’s electromagnetic technology enabled this remarkable train to complete the twenty-mile journey in just under eight minutes, travelling at a top speed of 270 miles an hour. ibid.
The European Union Commission estimates that fake goods around the world are worth between $250 and $500 billion a year. Of these about 60 per cent originate in the People's Republic of China. ibid.
The region in southern Fujian is called Da Shan (Big Mountain) and it is home to some of the biggest and more lucrative counterfeit factories in the world. These facilities, built deep into the mountain, produce millions of cigarettes a day. ibid.
China is the oldest nation of Earth. For thousands of years its rulers believed their task was to keep human society in balance with the eternal order of the universe. The emperor who achieved that harmony would receive the mandate of heaven blessed by the ancestors. But in the late nineteenth the collision with the West shook China to the core. Michael Wood, The Story of China I, BBC 2016
The Yellow emperor – the mythical first founder of China – Qin. ibid.