Chinese are like Indians. They think they're close to whiteness. When they practice racism they even become worse than whites. There are even Blacks who mimic whiteness. All of this needs to be confronted.

For my whole life I had been bound by the tenets of Chinese culture. To be an artist was the option which would enable me ... to be free of Chinese culture’s relentless subjugation of women.

I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain--murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that. How should we be, with a civilization that’s so many times older than that of the West. We have our own virtues. We have our rigid code of behavior, of honor. Why do they never show these on the screen? Why should we always scheme, rob, kill?

The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.

I think that music festivals, clubs, and record companies can really change the Chinese music scene, but I believe there is no festival or record company doing a good job in China. I think the Chinese listening culture is more viewing-like. Everybody takes care of how he/she looks like. They don't care about what they sound like. It could be pretty bad, but there is hope.

[N]early every political evil can be found on display in China: slavery, discrimination, religious persecution, xenophobia, tyranny, mass-political indoctrination, colonialism, cultural genocide, and so on. And yet, the outcry against these things in America and the West is a tiny fraction of what it was with regard to South Africa in the 1980s or Israel today. Why? Some of the political answers are pretty obvious — and have much merit. A few that come to mind: China is non-Western, and many of these sins are supposed to be unique to white Europeans; China is a victim (or “victim”) of colonialism, and so we shouldn’t judge it harshly; China is very powerful, and realpolitik dictates that we be diplomatic; and so on.

We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us, anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

When I say the Chinese are a inbred super mutant class that's in the genetics, and again remember, calling someone a mutant is not a bad thing, the X-Men and all that, which are fictional, but you know like it's good to be a mutant you understand, and the point is the Chinese do have some super geniuses of people. The point is you go to China and your like, 'well damn all these people look exactly the same like clones or something' kay, so the issue is there isn't a lot of genetic diversity.

If you’re singing and writing lyrics in Chinese, then you’re making Chinese music. You have your own story and you try to tell your own feelings, which are different from older generations’—different from the revolution. We were the first generation to try and express our own feelings. You can say this is Western, but I would say it’s human. Anyways, it doesn’t matter. I’m playing rock music and I’m singing in Chinese. That’s it.

Why are you attracted only to Chinese nonsense?

I've been to China many times, I love going to China, I love the Chinese people and in fact I'm more at home intellectually in China than I am in the west, because the Chinese are basically realists, whereas in the west people are instinctively liberal and they instinctively don't like realism, because it's such a pessimistic way of thinking about the world in past years. [...] When I've gone to China I've often started my Talks by saying it's good to be back among my people, I don't speak a word of Chinese and I feel like I'm a fish out of water culturally, when I'm in China. But intellectually the Chinese are my kind of people, they're realists very interested in theory, I've never gone to any country where people are more interested in international relations theory and talking about the big issues.

We should not blame foreigners for problems afflicting China. There are things in the West that should be considered acceptable to us, and things that are unacceptable. It is up to us to decide.

The Chinese are the aristocracy of the East.

In the East, you have to buy a Polish paper to find out what is going on in the world. In the West (with few exceptions), the Press is as outward-looking and reflective as any on earth. The East is shabby, the West is bright. In the West, chance acquaintances tend to measure their words and celebrate with decorum. But in the East, there is a vivacity and alertness, almost a wildness when drinks and music are added, which seems more Slav than German. As a by-product of Communism, meant or unmeant, this lust for experience in thought and deed is something which burns all over Eastern Europe and which has not left the Germans unaffected. To some extent, the East Germans have come to share the mental attitudes of the "Socialist camp" as a whole, and to that extent, their approach to the fact of being German has been modified. This does not mean that, given half a chance, many of them would not pack the smart new tartan suitcases now on sale in the Democratic Republic and come West; they would, and candid supporters of the Ulbricht way of doing things admit it. But even those who find the climate intolerable — one unhappy museum attendant gestured at his Egyptian mummies and growled: "At least they were free when they were alive" — often take the basic social policy of their State for granted and confess to fears that life in West Germany might prove insecure and lonely.