Photo:General Luo Yuan

Quotes from around China this week.

“They don't want to take me with them to gatherings, because they don't want others to know they have a daughter so old but still not married. They're afraid their friends and neighbors will regard me as abnormal. And my parents would also feel they were totally losing face, when their friends all have grandchildren already.”
- A so-called “leftover woman” surnamed Chen working at a consulting company. BBC News

“In the case of China, teaching patriotism is also teaching anti-Japanese sentiment.”
- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arguing that the Chinese government needs territorial disputes with Japan to win domestic support. Japanese ministers later claimed Abe was misquoted. South China Morning Post

“I almost feel bad for the Chinese hackers. Imagine the junior analysts tasked with picking through the terabytes of e-mails from every low-rent think tank in Washington, trying to figure out what matters and what doesn’t, trying to make everything fit a pattern. Imagine all the spurious connections they’re drawing, all the fundraising bluster they’re taking as fact, all the black humor they’re reading as straight description, all the mundane organizational chatter they’re reading.”
- Washington Post Columnist Ezra Klein. Washington Post

“Even if China dodges a financial crisis, then, it is not likely to dodge a slowdown in its increasingly debt-clogged economy.”
- Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Wall Street Journal

“General Luo Yuan is a soldier as well as a scholar…His suggestions are extremely reasonable and brilliant. The military analysis he gives is the most popular on TV.”
- A Weibo tweet posted from General Luo Yan’s own Weibo account, which widely mocked by netizens. General Luo Yan is the controversial military official who allegedly made a comment about taking thousands of Japanese prisoners in China should conflict erupt. Tea Leaf Nation

"Before the government restrictions we would sell out a development like this in just five months."
- Yang Qiong, a saleswoman trying in vain to sell property on Sanya’s Phoenix Island in the face of plummeting prices due to new government policies. France 24

“They were controlling me too tightly, not letting me on the internet. If I kill them, then there’d be no one to control me, so I’d be happy.”
- 14-year-old Xiao Long from Sichuan, who poisoned his entire family with pesticides because they tried to restrict his internet access. Tech in Asia