Ha-Joon Chang Quotes

Education, particularly higher education, will take Africa into the mainstream of globalization.

Things change in different countries as people grow, and as generations change.

America…could within twenty years bring us to a degree of development which Turks, left to themselves, would not be able to achieve in a century. It would make Turkey prosperous, rich and happy and turn Turks into a strong and civilized nation.

Cultural growth, like economic development rarely comes as a steady advance on all fronts at once.

Culture in America and everywhere else comes from the suffering, from those who don't want the old ways. They want to bring in the new, whether it's the ballet, when it started, or Shakespeare.

It is a testament to our naïveté about culture that we think that we can change it by simply declaring new values. Such declarations usually produce only cynicism.

Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.

Haiti has changed a lot.

Our world and our state have been transformed, but, in contrast, we as people have not been.

Belgium is modernizing itself and it gives me joy.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.

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.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

Reform is 'the biggest dividend' for China.

The world has changed profoundly since our programs were first established.

It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.

Russia was culturally isolated for so long that some sort of transformation needs to happen and will happen.

Reform is China's second revolution.

The question of modernization is central to disturbances in the Middle East and in Africa. Everyone is after modernization, no matter where they come from. But you have to be careful about it, and more importantly, you have to have sense about it.

These vast lands [Africa, South America, Asia]... need only assistance from us to be civilized.

The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up.

Reform is one of the priorities of the Arab world. All countries and societies want to move ahead and have their own views of how to move ahead. Reform is an item for all of us to support but we have to be cautious because of the fragility of the security situation and uncertainty on the international scene.

The culture of Saudi Arabia belongs to a past age. It is not appropriate for the age of globalization.