"These constitutions inevitably guarantee the freedoms that many Asian leaders then try to justify restricting. So there are democratic Potemkin villages - like China with its parliament and its pledges about civil liberties - but there are real things too."

"It is not a sign of political apostasy to change one's clothes when the weather changes; the weather and the clothes may change, yet the body remains the same."

"Hubris is always followed by nemesis; pride regularly precedes a fall; what goes up just as surely comes down......Perhaps the greatest truth for all of us - and that includes Asian leaders - to grasp Asia is that the same laws of political and economic gravity apply to everyone, everywhere. The apples and the lychees descend perpendicularly on every continent."

- Chris Pattern

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閱讀香港‧香港研究 Reading Hong Kong; Studying Hong Kong (237)