Vladimir Putin was awarded an advanced degree by the St. Petersburg Mining Institute with the help of a dissertation that, as two Brookings researchers discovered, included sixteen stolen pages - and, remarkably, not a single set of quotation marks.

I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials.

In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.

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.

'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.

Living abroad has heightened my interest in how foreigners regard the strange places we encounter.

I spent years overseas. I spent 11 years abroad.

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

Donald Trump has a mantra of despair, of loss. He says we don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't. And he says the American dream is dead.

In China, inaugurations are frequent affairs, though they have nothing to do with presidents. A news cycle rarely passes without some fanfare over the inaugural ride on a new subway line or the inaugural trip across an unusually large bridge.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

There was a docudrama that was made, called 'The Death Of A Princess,' which was about a true story in Saudi Arabia. It was about a public execution for adultery. And when the movie was aired on British television, the Saudi government threatened to cut off oil exports and to cut off diplomatic relations.

The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.

If the economy can only provide a diminishing political dividend, Chinese leaders will encourage their people to feel pride and vigor in other ways.

I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.

Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.

In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors' coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home.

Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

Usually when you interview somebody for a number of hours, they'll say something that is self-aggrandizing or is a manipulation of the facts.

The U.S. must differentiate between controversial assertions of power, like those in the South China Sea, and fair reflections of China's growing contribution to the world, such as the new banks.

China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.

There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way.

It's worth being clear - you know, I think that the ideas that somebody like Richard Spencer endorses and that other members of the self-identified white nationalist groups endorse - those ideas really are repellent to most people.

Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.

The Central Propaganda Department is the highest-ranking censorship agency in China. And it has control over everything from the appointment of newspaper editors to university professors to the way that films are cut and distributed.

To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.

The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.

Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.

In 2007, as a condition for hosting the Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese government removed restrictions barring Beijing-based journalists from leaving the capital without prior written permission.

If one is going to plagiarize, it pays to be in politics, where the expectation for remorse and the likelihood of punishment are minimal.

Like most markets, Da Jing is most alive just after dawn, when the elementary-school children in their uniforms and bright red kerchiefs set off through narrow streets, marking the start of another frenzied day of commerce.

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.

Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.

If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

When you live in Beijing for a while, you gain a finely tuned understanding of air.

The United States, of course, in the late 19th century was extraordinarily corrupt.

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 tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

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.

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.