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Despite its enormous power and wealth, China's ruling elite remains absolutely petrified that the free flow of information will undermine its political legitimacy, particularly among China's younger generation.

Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing - at least sometimes - without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles.

Only science and the spirit of seeking truth from facts can save China. I firmly believe in this.

Everyone in China knows The Topics. The television stations and newspapers run the same state-generated stories all across the country, and the Chinese form their opinions based on these somewhat controlled sources.

What has marked Chinese society is its level of cruelty, not just revolutions and wars. We ought to reject it totally, otherwise in another upheaval there will be further cruelty.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

We should not underestimate that: the Chinese people's ignorance. Thousands of years of despotism had been such a poison that their understanding of modern politics is even inferior to that of the black slaves and other immigrants.

Every time there's an election, people start to criticize China.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

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.