Immigration, of course, in New Hampshire is - it's not something that you see every day. It's not like talking about it in Texas, where people have a much more explicit sense of it.
I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.
Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.
Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.
By 1979, Chinese people were poorer, on average, than North Koreans. I mean, your average per-capita income in China that year was one third of sub-Saharan Africa's.
I can tell you, going out to buy toilet paper in the U.S. is a completely predictable experience.
There's a reason the Chinese government is very concerned about Ai Weiwei. It's because he has all of these ingredients in his life that allow him to attract enormous attention across a very broad spectrum of the population.
On some level, there's a limit to what the government really worries about when it comes to a guy like Ai Weiwei, who's talking to a limited audience of people. He's talking to people who more or less already agree with him.
If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.
There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors.
I think there's a tendency, and it's an understandable tendency, to imagine that China makes decisions out of a grand strategy. The reality is that I think China today is operating, most of all, based on its domestic needs.
If you're going to have a book published in China, that means that you're going to be subject to in-house censorship at the publisher, and then also, of course, the government has an apparatus that is in charge of making sure that ideas that are considered disruptive or overly critical, that those don't get onto bookstore shelves.
Chinese readers are buying books in translation, particularly non-fiction about China, in large numbers.
The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.
If you're trying to write about what the Chinese people are talking about, you can sometimes get a distorted picture if you go online and look at the conversation on social media.
Seventy years after China emerged from the Second World War, the greatest threat facing the nation's leadership is not imperialism but skepticism.
If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.
China doesn't have a single leader. It has - a first among equals is the president, and his name will probably be Xi Jinping, almost certainly.
The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.
China no longer has an ideology that makes any sense to them, but what they do have is great pride in the Chinese nation.
