Daily Inspiration Quote by Anna Louise Strong

A bureaucratic shrug dressed up as geopolitical drama, Strong’s line exposes how quickly “policy” becomes a mask for simple informational poverty. China’s refusal of American applicants isn’t framed as ideological hostility or moral judgment; it’s portrayed as the default setting of a state operating blind. No embassy, no consular network, no reliable backchannel: without eyes and ears in Washington, the safest move is to treat every applicant as a risk. The sentence is blunt to the point of almost comic fatalism: if you can’t verify anyone, you refuse everyone.

That’s the intent: to redirect the reader’s outrage away from “China is shutting out Americans” and toward the structural cause - diplomatic rupture. Strong, a journalist with a long record of sympathetic reporting on revolutionary movements, is doing something more pointed than describing procedure. She’s arguing that isolation breeds blanket suspicion, and that suspicion gets laundered into administrative routine. “Check the character” is a revealing phrase; it suggests visas as a moral and political filter, not just paperwork. Without representation, China can’t perform the sorting that modern states insist is responsible governance. So the state substitutes a crude algorithm: deny by default.

The subtext is a critique of the U.S.-China standoff of her era: sever ties and you don’t get purity or safety, you get the dumbest kind of security regime - one that can’t distinguish friend from foe. Strong’s rhetorical move is to make that outcome feel less like an iron curtain and more like a self-inflicted fog.