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Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalist
Winner of the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction.
An Economist Best Book of 2014.
A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation
From abroad, we often see China as a a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy-or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don't see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.
As the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In Age of Ambition, he describes the greatest collision taking place in that the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control. He asks probing Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals-fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture-consider themselves "angry youth," dedicated to resisting the West's influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth?
Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail.
417 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 13, 2014
1081 people are currently reading
14530 people want to read
About the author
Evan Osnos
16 books377 followersEvan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He is a correspondent in Washington, D.C. who writes about politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2014). Based on eight years of living in Beijing, the book traces the rise of the individual in China, and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. He was the China Correspondent at The New Yorker magazine from 2008 to 2013. He is a contributor to This American Life on public radio, and Frontline, the PBS series. Prior to The New Yorker, he worked as the Beijing bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He has received the Asia Society’s Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia, the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and a Mirror Award for profile-writing. Before his appointment in China, he worked in the Middle East, reporting mostly from Iraq.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 896 reviews
June 29, 2014
This book, more so than any other I've read on China, best captures the country's current situation, challenges and contradictions. Osnos did a good job of weaving together the characters and themes that he explores--built around the triad of fortune, truth and faith--capturing the way that prosperity and development co-exist with political dissent and spiritual exploration.
I lived in China from 2007 to 2011 and, like many aspiring Western 'half-pats' in China, learned a great deal about my surrounds from reading the reportage and books of Evan Osnos, Peter Hessler (his predecessor as the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent) and others. Many of us were partly inspired to visit China because of Peter Hessler's “River Town”, and a 'Hessler versus Osnos' debate made for common conversation. For those fellow Hessler enthusiasts, you'll find Osnos by comparison in book length to be similar to his longform journalism: more macro-inclined, focused on bigger issues and mover-shaker types, less personal and comical. While I loved reading Hessler on China for all the adventure and insights into the working class he provides, Osnos excels at analyzing the grand themes and intellectual debates that China observers engage in. For those who haven't read Hessler and want a more personal, street-level insight into contemporary China, I suggest the entire trilogy, preferably in chronological order.
Osnos does an above-average job of balancing between the biases of various sides: the domestic and Western media, Chinese liberals and conservatives, etc. While his own politics appear clear--he comes across as a pragmatic liberal--he presents competing beliefs, at least beyond the official Party line, in an insightful, unobstructed manner.
I would love to hear what more Chinese readers think of the book - I'm sure that translations are/will make their way to the curious.
I lived in China from 2007 to 2011 and, like many aspiring Western 'half-pats' in China, learned a great deal about my surrounds from reading the reportage and books of Evan Osnos, Peter Hessler (his predecessor as the New Yorker's Beijing correspondent) and others. Many of us were partly inspired to visit China because of Peter Hessler's “River Town”, and a 'Hessler versus Osnos' debate made for common conversation. For those fellow Hessler enthusiasts, you'll find Osnos by comparison in book length to be similar to his longform journalism: more macro-inclined, focused on bigger issues and mover-shaker types, less personal and comical. While I loved reading Hessler on China for all the adventure and insights into the working class he provides, Osnos excels at analyzing the grand themes and intellectual debates that China observers engage in. For those who haven't read Hessler and want a more personal, street-level insight into contemporary China, I suggest the entire trilogy, preferably in chronological order.
Osnos does an above-average job of balancing between the biases of various sides: the domestic and Western media, Chinese liberals and conservatives, etc. While his own politics appear clear--he comes across as a pragmatic liberal--he presents competing beliefs, at least beyond the official Party line, in an insightful, unobstructed manner.
I would love to hear what more Chinese readers think of the book - I'm sure that translations are/will make their way to the curious.
May 22, 2023
4.5 ☆
That's what kickstarted China's economic reforms, according to the revisionist Communist Party historians. In reality, the shift from a planned economy to capitalism began in the winter of 1978-79 because farmers in the inland village of Xiaogang had designated illicit plots, from which they agreed that produce could be sold for private profit. They dared because Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward had succeeded in two undesirable ways - starving 30 to 45 million people to death and in catapulting China up in the ranks of the world's poorest nations.
In Age of Ambition, Osnos compared China's tremendous economic boom with America's Gilded Age for its proliferation of both millionaires and corruption. The average Chinese income increased by a factor of 30 - from $200 in 1978 to $6,000 in 2014.
Millions have escaped poverty, but the increase in average income could also be partially attributed to the outsized impact from China's newly-minted billionaires (which is second in the world). The Chinese initially described those individuals' wealth as baishon qijia for "bare-handed fortune." Their riches didn't always come from honest effort, however, but from having a high connection with the Communist Party. By 2012, the corruption was so pervasive that a new word maiguan - "to buy a government promotion" - was added to the Modern Chinese Dictionary in 2012.
The Communist Party has been in charge of China since 1949, and they seriously desire to outlast their Soviet counterparts in maintaining an one-party government. At their beginning, the Party promised equality. After Mao's demise, they promised "prosperity, pride, and strength." The Party leaders tried to "evolve" only enough to placate their citizens, especially since the internet arrived in China in 1994 and rising incomes enabled widespread access to it. The Party uses its Central Propaganda Department, which is absolutely Orwellian, and the Great China Firewall in its incessant campaign to control the type of information their people can see.
Osnos included stories about several dissidents and their personal efforts, despite arrests and imprisonment, to enact policy change. In particular, the author described Liu Xiaobo (who later received the Nobel Peace Prize), the blind and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and artist Ai Weiwei. The artist Ai fittingly had the most creative way of giving the proverbial finger to the Party; how he incorporated the Grass Mud Horse in his protest appealed to my inner rebellious teenager.
But to balance his coverage and to reveal the complexity of China, Osnos also wrote about individuals with great national pride. Unique in this group was a Taiwanese soldier, Lin Yifu, who defected to the motherland of China in 1979. By the end of Osnos' time in Beijing, Taiwan remained steadfast with their intention to arrest Lin if he ever steps foot back in Taiwan.
Just like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs predicts, once people obtain their basic necessities, such as for food and shelter, their desires progress in abstraction.
The Chinese use the words jingshen kongxu for "spiritual void." Osnos believed that this will be a big challenge for the Communist Party's future. More specifically, Osnos opined that President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign was launched in order to fill that spiritual void by restoring people's faith in the Party. And, of course, it also helped to solidify Xi's power base if he was selective as to whom to expose and prosecute.
Age of Ambition was published in 2014 and primarily covered 2005 to 2013 when Osnos worked as the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. To try and capture the zeitgeist of nearly 1.4 billion people is an ambitious undertaking. Whether Osnos accurately accomplished that is not for me to judge as I possess neither the experience nor the requisite language. I felt that Osnos wrote with empathy, not condescension, even though his book is filtered through his personal assessment and biases. His linguistic skills conveyed the wry humor of a people under constant surveillance and doing their best to get on with their lives, including a brief description of dating practices and marriages. As Osnos characterized his book, The Age of Ambition is "an account of the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism."
I found it fascinating and read it with the NFBC. If you're curious, here's the discussion thread -
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
"Let some people get rich first and gradually all the people can get rich together." - Chairman Deng Xiaoping 1979
That's what kickstarted China's economic reforms, according to the revisionist Communist Party historians. In reality, the shift from a planned economy to capitalism began in the winter of 1978-79 because farmers in the inland village of Xiaogang had designated illicit plots, from which they agreed that produce could be sold for private profit. They dared because Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward had succeeded in two undesirable ways - starving 30 to 45 million people to death and in catapulting China up in the ranks of the world's poorest nations.
In Age of Ambition, Osnos compared China's tremendous economic boom with America's Gilded Age for its proliferation of both millionaires and corruption. The average Chinese income increased by a factor of 30 - from $200 in 1978 to $6,000 in 2014.
The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.
Millions have escaped poverty, but the increase in average income could also be partially attributed to the outsized impact from China's newly-minted billionaires (which is second in the world). The Chinese initially described those individuals' wealth as baishon qijia for "bare-handed fortune." Their riches didn't always come from honest effort, however, but from having a high connection with the Communist Party. By 2012, the corruption was so pervasive that a new word maiguan - "to buy a government promotion" - was added to the Modern Chinese Dictionary in 2012.
Two scholars, Yinqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, tracked the paths of Chinese families from 1989 to 2006 and found a "high degree of inequality of opportunity." ... They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.”
A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found "a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility." Writing in 2010, the authors ranked "urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world."
The Communist Party has been in charge of China since 1949, and they seriously desire to outlast their Soviet counterparts in maintaining an one-party government. At their beginning, the Party promised equality. After Mao's demise, they promised "prosperity, pride, and strength." The Party leaders tried to "evolve" only enough to placate their citizens, especially since the internet arrived in China in 1994 and rising incomes enabled widespread access to it. The Party uses its Central Propaganda Department, which is absolutely Orwellian, and the Great China Firewall in its incessant campaign to control the type of information their people can see.
The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.
Osnos included stories about several dissidents and their personal efforts, despite arrests and imprisonment, to enact policy change. In particular, the author described Liu Xiaobo (who later received the Nobel Peace Prize), the blind and self-taught lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and artist Ai Weiwei. The artist Ai fittingly had the most creative way of giving the proverbial finger to the Party; how he incorporated the Grass Mud Horse in his protest appealed to my inner rebellious teenager.
But to balance his coverage and to reveal the complexity of China, Osnos also wrote about individuals with great national pride. Unique in this group was a Taiwanese soldier, Lin Yifu, who defected to the motherland of China in 1979. By the end of Osnos' time in Beijing, Taiwan remained steadfast with their intention to arrest Lin if he ever steps foot back in Taiwan.
Just like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs predicts, once people obtain their basic necessities, such as for food and shelter, their desires progress in abstraction.
“We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978. We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster,” he said.
The Chinese use the words jingshen kongxu for "spiritual void." Osnos believed that this will be a big challenge for the Communist Party's future. More specifically, Osnos opined that President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign was launched in order to fill that spiritual void by restoring people's faith in the Party. And, of course, it also helped to solidify Xi's power base if he was selective as to whom to expose and prosecute.
China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”
Age of Ambition was published in 2014 and primarily covered 2005 to 2013 when Osnos worked as the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. To try and capture the zeitgeist of nearly 1.4 billion people is an ambitious undertaking. Whether Osnos accurately accomplished that is not for me to judge as I possess neither the experience nor the requisite language. I felt that Osnos wrote with empathy, not condescension, even though his book is filtered through his personal assessment and biases. His linguistic skills conveyed the wry humor of a people under constant surveillance and doing their best to get on with their lives, including a brief description of dating practices and marriages. As Osnos characterized his book, The Age of Ambition is "an account of the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism."
I found it fascinating and read it with the NFBC. If you're curious, here's the discussion thread -
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
August 17, 2021
This is a highly interesting account of China at the beginning of the 21st century. The author probes many different aspects, ways of life, and the inhabitants of this large, complex country. What comes through on every page is the extraordinary changes that have occurred in China. Thirty years before this book was written the main concern for most people was getting food on the table. Now they are buying cars, using high-speed rail, educating their children at university (sometimes outside China), buying larger and larger homes, communicating on cell phones, surfing the net, but most of all becoming urban - moving from the countryside to embracing city life. China has rapidly outpaced many developed countries.
It should be noted that this book was published before the leadership of Xi Jinping – so many more changes have taken place. China has advanced even more in technology and become more belligerent and self-assured on the world stage.
But many topics in this book are still very relevant. The corruption – nothing gets done in China without some sort of money handoff. And all gets done on a remarkably fast and grand scale – from subway routes to bridges. This development has also caused widespread pollution across China.
Censorship is discussed. Freedom of expression is very fluid and monitored by Big Brother. Facts change to enhance the prestige of the all-ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Page 246 (my book)
Liu Zhijun [railroad magnate and entrepreneur] would eventually go on trial… censors had already taken to the Web to begin excising years’ worth of glowing news reports and documentaries that hailed Liu’s accomplishments, leaving behind only squibs about his arrest. Before long Liu had been expunged so thoroughly from the history of China’s achievements that you might never have known that he existed.
The rise of the middle class and the very rich are brought up. Some argue that if the choice were Russia in an unruly and chaotic 1990s versus the control exerted by the Communist Party which achieved growth, stability and economic prosperity – that China has been far more successful. It is difficult to disagree with this.
The author gives a wide view of the nooks and crannies of Chinese society from dissidents like Ai Weiwei to nationalists who want to prevent China from being Westernized and becoming a liberal democracy.
China is a land of many paradoxes. Facebook is banned – so China joins an ignominious list with the likes of North Korea and Iran. China’s reputation continues to suffer due to its constant human rights violations, like jailing and beating Ai Weiwei. But due to its vast economic clout no country can afford to ignore or besmirch it for very long.
One passage in the book quoted a Chinese nationalist saying that “China’s economic miracle and rise as a world power had not been achieved by it’s becoming a colonial imperialist”. This is not true. China’s economic imperialism and its search for resources extends across the globe – to Central America (more so Nicaragua), South America, and especially Africa and Asia. Canada has also become a beholden to China for our raw resources. China’s trade tentacles are spreading everywhere.
This book captures in full measure a dynamic and expanding China. It is written with gusto and humour. As the author points out what took Great Britain decades in the Industrial Revolution and the U.S. in stages during the 19th and 20th centuries – China has accomplished all this and arguably more given its vast use of the internet – and with a population of over one billion!
It should be noted that this book was published before the leadership of Xi Jinping – so many more changes have taken place. China has advanced even more in technology and become more belligerent and self-assured on the world stage.
But many topics in this book are still very relevant. The corruption – nothing gets done in China without some sort of money handoff. And all gets done on a remarkably fast and grand scale – from subway routes to bridges. This development has also caused widespread pollution across China.
Censorship is discussed. Freedom of expression is very fluid and monitored by Big Brother. Facts change to enhance the prestige of the all-ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Page 246 (my book)
Liu Zhijun [railroad magnate and entrepreneur] would eventually go on trial… censors had already taken to the Web to begin excising years’ worth of glowing news reports and documentaries that hailed Liu’s accomplishments, leaving behind only squibs about his arrest. Before long Liu had been expunged so thoroughly from the history of China’s achievements that you might never have known that he existed.
The rise of the middle class and the very rich are brought up. Some argue that if the choice were Russia in an unruly and chaotic 1990s versus the control exerted by the Communist Party which achieved growth, stability and economic prosperity – that China has been far more successful. It is difficult to disagree with this.
The author gives a wide view of the nooks and crannies of Chinese society from dissidents like Ai Weiwei to nationalists who want to prevent China from being Westernized and becoming a liberal democracy.
China is a land of many paradoxes. Facebook is banned – so China joins an ignominious list with the likes of North Korea and Iran. China’s reputation continues to suffer due to its constant human rights violations, like jailing and beating Ai Weiwei. But due to its vast economic clout no country can afford to ignore or besmirch it for very long.
One passage in the book quoted a Chinese nationalist saying that “China’s economic miracle and rise as a world power had not been achieved by it’s becoming a colonial imperialist”. This is not true. China’s economic imperialism and its search for resources extends across the globe – to Central America (more so Nicaragua), South America, and especially Africa and Asia. Canada has also become a beholden to China for our raw resources. China’s trade tentacles are spreading everywhere.
This book captures in full measure a dynamic and expanding China. It is written with gusto and humour. As the author points out what took Great Britain decades in the Industrial Revolution and the U.S. in stages during the 19th and 20th centuries – China has accomplished all this and arguably more given its vast use of the internet – and with a population of over one billion!
March 20, 2021
Shenzhen landslide, December 2015
Tianjin explosion, August 2015
Oriental Star Cruise Ship Disaster, June 2015
There are a lot of China books out there. As China is a constantly changing country, I'm sometimes frustrated by how quickly outdated books become. However, if I had to recommend one book to a person, who is interested to learn about contemporary China, I think Osnos' "Age of Ambition" is the perfect recommendation.
He hits the nail about the Party and the stories he collected from the people he interviewed are a realistic reflection of what is happening in China right now. He did a wonderful job weaving the stories together and I thought it was brilliant how he managed to divide the book into three themes; fortune, truth and faith. I'm not going to write more about the characters he interviewed, do yourself a favor and read about them yourselves!
"The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat - because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe - progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance."
"In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own."
June 4, 2014
我觉得这本书更多是对信息的一种收集和整合，感觉从这里开始作者没有走更远，我不知道是不是他刻意而为，比如他对这本书的期望就是介绍而不是发表自己对这个给国家的观点。还是依然是由于语言和文化的隔阂，他努力却无法发展出更深刻的想法，也许对于中国仍然是一个进行中的问题所以他选择聪明的保持沉默和旁观，而不是展现一种预言家的姿态。
但是其中很多谈论的问题都可以更加深刻，比如腐败，贫富差距，审查制度。
但是其中很多谈论的问题都可以更加深刻，比如腐败，贫富差距，审查制度。
December 26, 2025
90% of this book is very good and 10% of it is very meh. Unfortunately the distribution of the meh parts (5% at the beginning and 5% at the end) makes this book feel like it's worse than it really is.
Age of Ambition opens with the "westerner writing about China" trifecta - Tienanmen, one child policy, Cultural Revolution - and that rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately author does not dive too much into those topics and instead focuses on the realities of living in China in early 2000. After the brief moment of centering the narration around his experience of living in the Middle Kingdom, author takes a step back and allows Chinese voices to take over and that's the moment when Age of Ambition became unputdownable. From the stories of the Bare-Handed Fortune owners, through dissidents to "aspiring middle class" workers you get a beautiful spectrum that showcases Communistic China as a country that is impossible to classify as simply good or bad. Especially large chunk of this book is focusing on different dissidents and their personal experience of struggle against a faceless system or "a building that does not exist" as author elegantly put it.
When I was approaching last pages of this book I was sure it's going to be a 5 star read so you can imagine my disappointment when I encountered the last 5% meh part. After 300+ pages of showing the reader how complex the Chinese situation is we are blessed with typical conclusion - China will soon collapse because of one child policy/ rampant corruption/ destruction of environment / authoritarian government / slowing economy. Interestingly, I hear the same sentiments being repeated right now - 11 years after this book was published.
It's a lot of complaining but this book was definitely worth my time.
Age of Ambition opens with the "westerner writing about China" trifecta - Tienanmen, one child policy, Cultural Revolution - and that rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately author does not dive too much into those topics and instead focuses on the realities of living in China in early 2000. After the brief moment of centering the narration around his experience of living in the Middle Kingdom, author takes a step back and allows Chinese voices to take over and that's the moment when Age of Ambition became unputdownable. From the stories of the Bare-Handed Fortune owners, through dissidents to "aspiring middle class" workers you get a beautiful spectrum that showcases Communistic China as a country that is impossible to classify as simply good or bad. Especially large chunk of this book is focusing on different dissidents and their personal experience of struggle against a faceless system or "a building that does not exist" as author elegantly put it.
When I was approaching last pages of this book I was sure it's going to be a 5 star read so you can imagine my disappointment when I encountered the last 5% meh part. After 300+ pages of showing the reader how complex the Chinese situation is we are blessed with typical conclusion - China will soon collapse because of one child policy/ rampant corruption/ destruction of environment / authoritarian government / slowing economy. Interestingly, I hear the same sentiments being repeated right now - 11 years after this book was published.
It's a lot of complaining but this book was definitely worth my time.
June 28, 2021
Now you have no excuse not to know what is really happening in modern China. Author Osnos unveils an energized, powerful, bursting at the seams China. In the 80’s, Party leader Deng Xiaoping permitted private enterprise creating an economy that changed China society into an urban, “free wheeling” machine, while the Party remained totalitarian. It’s a study in contradictions because along with the prosperity of full bellies, high speed trains, and the hammering force of the internet came corruption, injustices, cover ups, and stifling propaganda. Truly enlightening.
February 6, 2015
I don’t think anyone could argue that Evan Osnos wasn’t ambitious in this, his National Book Award-winning compendium of current Chinese political culture. Subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, this book extends and expands essays he’d already published in The New Yorker magazine and gives outsiders a glimpse into the confusion and mad, exciting reality that is China today.
Osnos covers a lot of ground and at the risk of appearing to be a ping-pong ball in the hands of a giant, he patiently and persistently over a period of years pursues big questions about what China culture is and is becoming. We can extrapolate from his work to consider what change in China means to us around the world. I admit to exhaustion when contemplating China’s development because of its overwhelmingly big, populous, and uncontrollable aspects. But one thing is sure: ordinary Chinese people have a kind of “get ahead” entrepreneurial mentality that swamps the vitality of ordinary American life. The distance from their basic living starting point and ours is so great that their desperate energy is going to be the propulsion for societies around the globe. We can’t keep pace but we can gain in their slipstream.
Osnos makes reporting in China look easy even when it clearly is not, even now. The state has loosened its grip a little but there is still the possibility of community or state backlash on individuals that speak to him openly. Those people are courageous souls. Osnos managed to corral the size and scope of his story to a manageable level and yet was able to give us an idea of the great energy being unleashed among the populace and the Chinese government’s pride and fear. I am currently reading about the North Korean regime in Pyongyang (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power by Paul Fischer) and so the Chinese government looks far less effective and controlling by comparison. But the richness of Osnos’s life in China comes through.
I especially liked the reportage in the Epilogue that shows from several long term studies over two decades
This book won the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Osnos covers a lot of ground and at the risk of appearing to be a ping-pong ball in the hands of a giant, he patiently and persistently over a period of years pursues big questions about what China culture is and is becoming. We can extrapolate from his work to consider what change in China means to us around the world. I admit to exhaustion when contemplating China’s development because of its overwhelmingly big, populous, and uncontrollable aspects. But one thing is sure: ordinary Chinese people have a kind of “get ahead” entrepreneurial mentality that swamps the vitality of ordinary American life. The distance from their basic living starting point and ours is so great that their desperate energy is going to be the propulsion for societies around the globe. We can’t keep pace but we can gain in their slipstream.
Osnos makes reporting in China look easy even when it clearly is not, even now. The state has loosened its grip a little but there is still the possibility of community or state backlash on individuals that speak to him openly. Those people are courageous souls. Osnos managed to corral the size and scope of his story to a manageable level and yet was able to give us an idea of the great energy being unleashed among the populace and the Chinese government’s pride and fear. I am currently reading about the North Korean regime in Pyongyang (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power by Paul Fischer) and so the Chinese government looks far less effective and controlling by comparison. But the richness of Osnos’s life in China comes through.
I especially liked the reportage in the Epilogue that shows from several long term studies over two decades
"no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately." Overall, they found, "economic growth is not enough; job security and a social safety net are also crtitical to people's happiness."Ah. Well, both Chinese and American officials could learn something from this.
This book won the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
November 11, 2018
Without permanent technology leadership, the West will have to leave the top podium
Please note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
Astonishing is the monopoly position of China in the discipline to kick back as a world power for a second time on the international stage within millennials. A hitherto unique event in history from which the Chinese have learned. Thus, it is unlikely that the entire container ship fleet will be sunk, all boatbuilders killed and the building plans burned. Because the wife of a high party official drowned. Not once again.
Especially in cooperation with India, it reveals a coverage of all activities related to both production and service. Thanks to their unbeatable prices, these cannot be provided by any other international union. In addition to the Chinese workbench of the world, on which increasingly entire industries are being piled up, and the entire production process is going through, a knowledge society of unimaginable proportions is growing in India.
Also, genetic engineering, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research, has no chains as in Europe and even fewer barriers than in America are allocated. Thus, the studies can be carried out in dimensions that have no equal from the budget or the research results.
Asia will maintain and expand its supremacy in the artificial modification, development, and optimization of animals, plants, and humans. Whether there is still much-uncontaminated life left between Monsanto in the west, and Chinese genetic engineering companies in the east is questionable. Whether the selective breeding of humans and genetic manipulation outweigh the irreversible change in the entire biosphere is at the discretion and subjective perception of the individual.
In keeping with the polite, Asian mentality, the Chinese not only conceal their economic growth and exchange rates with subtle means. But practice in a permanent appeasement policy, which is to suggest a long-lasting march to catch up with the West.
Nor do they appear with American directness and handshake mentality, but in the role of mediator and covenant smith in the Asian and Eurasian space. The creation of neutral free trade alliances, state communities and interest groups from willing vassal states aims for a slow but long-term shift in the balance of power.
Apparently, states are more easily won over by diplomacy and alliance politics than by military occupation and plundering. From the point of view of the US wanting to repress China's influence, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars can be viewed in entirely new ways. Less war on extremists than much more a desperate attempt to assert itself in as many states as possible under an implausible pretext. And to control them to build a protective barrier. Whereby it is not just about raw materials, but also about the control of transport routes.
Away from the military spectrum, managers focused on short-term profit like to sign any clause that concerns them. And if one agrees on technology transfers, reveals trade secrets, explains key technologies down to the last detail and even brings ones own training staff, it does not bother anyone. If that's the price, there's virtually no Western company that does not agree to take that step. And willingly gives the only competitive advantage to the at some point superior economic power. The still existing, but steadily dwindling technological lead, which will develop into a tie and, ultimately, the secondary rank of the West.
As if brain drain and the shift of science, research and innovation centers to Asia are not already alarming enough for the West. Besides, the outrageous economic policy of the industrialized countries leads straight into a European and American de-industrialization. If the entire production process is outsourced, the domestic economy and the welfare state are destroyed, and only a pile of remaining bureaucrats and employees in the local corporate headquarters will be left, a bitter awakening is likely to follow. And the realization that one has outsourced the entire technology, industry and economic performance. Suitable for short-term profit but a miserable long-term perspective.
Unless unexpected disasters such as wars, pandemics or extreme environmental events put a damper on, or the West gains ground through revolutionary new technologies and reforms, the decline of the former US-European hegemony empire is likely to be sealed.
It is only to be hoped that the US and the EU will not receive the same treatment from the new rulers that they gave to the rest of the world for centuries. At that time, when they ruled unrestrictedly with colonialism, slave trade and opium wars.
Ohne die permanente Technologieführerschaft wird der Westen das oberste Podest verlassen müssen
Erstaunlich ist die Monopolstellung Chinas in der Disziplin, als Weltmacht ein zweites Mal zurück auf die internationale Bühne zu treten. Ein bisher einmaliges Ereignis in der Geschichte, aus der die Chinesen gelernt haben. Somit ist es unwahrscheinlich, dass wieder die gesamte Containerschiffflotte versenkt, alle Bootsbauer getötet und die Baupläne verbrannt werden. Weil die Frau eines hohen Parteifunktionärs ertrunken ist.
Vor allem in Zusammenarbeit mit Indien offenbart sich eine Abdeckung sämtlicher sowohl produktions- als auch dienstleistungsspezifischer Aktivitäten. Diese können in dieser Masse und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit dank unschlagbarer Preise von keinem anderen Staatenbündnis erbracht werden. Neben der chinesischen Werkbank der Welt, auf der zusehends komplette Industrien aus dem Boden gestampft und der gesamte Produktionsprozess durchlaufen wird, wächst in Indien eine Wissensgesellschaft ungeahnten Ausmaßes.
Auch werden Gentechnik, Klonen und embryonaler Stammzellenforschung keine Ketten wie in Europa und noch weniger Hemmnisse als in Amerika umgelegt. Somit kann in Dimensionen geforscht werden kann, die weder vom Etat noch von den Forschungsergebnissen her ihresgleichen haben.
Asien wird die Vormachtstellung in der künstlichen Modifikation, Entwicklung und Optimierung von Tieren, Pflanzen und auch Menschen halten und weiter ausbauen. Ob zwischen Monsanto im Westen und den chinesischen Gentechnikkonzernen im Osten noch viel unkontaminiertes Leben wird übrigbleiben können, ist fraglich. Etwa angesichts der bisherigen Entwicklungen in den USA wie beim Genraps.
Ob die selektive Züchtung von Menschen und Manipulation am Erbgut schlimmer wiegt als die irreversible Veränderung der gesamten Biosphäre, liegt im Ermessen und der subjektiven Wahrnehmung des Einzelnen.
Ganz der höflichen, asiatischen Mentalität entsprechend kaschieren die Chinesen nicht nur ihr Wirtschaftswachstum und Währungskurse mit subtilen Mitteln. Sondern üben sich in einer permanenten Beschwichtigungspolitik, die einen noch lange andauernden Marsch bis zum Aufholen auf den Westen suggerieren soll.
Auch treten sie nicht mit amerikanischer Direktheit und Handschlagmentalität, sondern in der Rolle des Mediators und Bündnisschmieds im asiatischen und eurasischen Raum auf. Eine Schaffung von neutralen Freihandelsbündnissen, Staatsgemeinschaften und Interessensvertretungen aus williger Vasallenstaaten zielt auf eine langsame, aber langfristige Verschiebung der Machtverhältnisse hin.
Scheinbar lassen sich Staaten leichter durch Diplomatie und Bündnispolitik für sich gewinnen als durch militärische Okkupation und Ausplünderung. Unter dem Gesichtspunkt, dass die USA den chinesischen Einfluss speziell in Zentralasien und im Nahen Osten zurückdrängen wollen, lassen sich Afghanistan- und Irakkrieg unter gänzlich neuen Aspekten betrachten. Weniger Krieg gegen Extremisten als viel mehr ein verzweifelter Versuch, sich unter einem unglaubwürdigen Vorwand in möglichst vielen Staaten festzusetzen. Und sie zu kontrollieren, um einen Schutzwall errichten zu können. Wobei es nicht nur um Rohstoffe, sondern auch um die Kontrolle der Transportwege geht.
Abseits des militärischen Spektrums unterschreiben auf kurzfristigen Gewinn fokussierte Manager gern jede noch so bedenkliche Klausel. Und wenn man auch Technologietransfers zustimmen, Betriebsgeheimnisse preisgeben, Schlüsseltechnologien bis ins Detail erklären und zu allem auch noch eigenes Schulungspersonal stellen muss, stört es trotzdem nicht. Wenn das der Preis ist, gibt es quasi kein westliches Unternehmen, das sich nicht zu diesem Schritt bereit erklärt. Und damit einer irgendwann überlegenen Wirtschaftsmacht den einzigen Wettbewerbsvorteil bereitwillig schenkt. Den noch vorhandenen, aber stetig schwindenden technologischen Vorsprung, der sich zu einem Gleichstand und schließlich Zweitrangstellung des Westens entwickeln wird.
Als ob Braindrain und die Verschiebung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Innovationszentren nach Asien nicht schon bedenklich genug für den Westen wären. Zusätzlich führt die hanebüchene Wirtschaftspolitik der Industriestaaten geradewegs in eine europäische und amerikanische Deindustrialisierung. Wenn der gesamte Produktionsprozess ausgelagert, die heimische Wirtschaft und der Sozialstaat zugrunde gerichtet und nur mehr ein Häufchen an verbliebenen Bürokraten und Angestellten in den einheimischen Konzernzentralen übrig sein werden, dürfte ein bitteres Erwachen folgen. Und die Erkenntnis, dass man seine gesamte Technologie, Industrie und Wirtschaftsleistung ausgelagert hat. Gut für kurzfristigen Gewinn aber mit einer miserablen Langzeitperspektive behaftet.
Sofern nicht unerwartete Katastrophen wie Kriege, Pandemien oder extreme Umweltereignisse einen Dämpfer erteilen oder der Westen durch revolutionäre neue Technologien und Reformen mehr an Boden gewinnt, dürfte der Niedergang des einstigen amerikanisch-europäischen Hegemonialreichs besiegelt sein.
Es steht nur zu hoffen, dass die USA und die EU von den neuen Herrschern nicht dieselbe Behandlung erfahren, die sie dem Rest der Welt Jahrhunderte lang angedeihen ließen. Damals, als sie uneingeschränkt herrschten.
Please note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.
Astonishing is the monopoly position of China in the discipline to kick back as a world power for a second time on the international stage within millennials. A hitherto unique event in history from which the Chinese have learned. Thus, it is unlikely that the entire container ship fleet will be sunk, all boatbuilders killed and the building plans burned. Because the wife of a high party official drowned. Not once again.
Especially in cooperation with India, it reveals a coverage of all activities related to both production and service. Thanks to their unbeatable prices, these cannot be provided by any other international union. In addition to the Chinese workbench of the world, on which increasingly entire industries are being piled up, and the entire production process is going through, a knowledge society of unimaginable proportions is growing in India.
Also, genetic engineering, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research, has no chains as in Europe and even fewer barriers than in America are allocated. Thus, the studies can be carried out in dimensions that have no equal from the budget or the research results.
Asia will maintain and expand its supremacy in the artificial modification, development, and optimization of animals, plants, and humans. Whether there is still much-uncontaminated life left between Monsanto in the west, and Chinese genetic engineering companies in the east is questionable. Whether the selective breeding of humans and genetic manipulation outweigh the irreversible change in the entire biosphere is at the discretion and subjective perception of the individual.
In keeping with the polite, Asian mentality, the Chinese not only conceal their economic growth and exchange rates with subtle means. But practice in a permanent appeasement policy, which is to suggest a long-lasting march to catch up with the West.
Nor do they appear with American directness and handshake mentality, but in the role of mediator and covenant smith in the Asian and Eurasian space. The creation of neutral free trade alliances, state communities and interest groups from willing vassal states aims for a slow but long-term shift in the balance of power.
Apparently, states are more easily won over by diplomacy and alliance politics than by military occupation and plundering. From the point of view of the US wanting to repress China's influence, especially in Central Asia and the Middle East, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars can be viewed in entirely new ways. Less war on extremists than much more a desperate attempt to assert itself in as many states as possible under an implausible pretext. And to control them to build a protective barrier. Whereby it is not just about raw materials, but also about the control of transport routes.
Away from the military spectrum, managers focused on short-term profit like to sign any clause that concerns them. And if one agrees on technology transfers, reveals trade secrets, explains key technologies down to the last detail and even brings ones own training staff, it does not bother anyone. If that's the price, there's virtually no Western company that does not agree to take that step. And willingly gives the only competitive advantage to the at some point superior economic power. The still existing, but steadily dwindling technological lead, which will develop into a tie and, ultimately, the secondary rank of the West.
As if brain drain and the shift of science, research and innovation centers to Asia are not already alarming enough for the West. Besides, the outrageous economic policy of the industrialized countries leads straight into a European and American de-industrialization. If the entire production process is outsourced, the domestic economy and the welfare state are destroyed, and only a pile of remaining bureaucrats and employees in the local corporate headquarters will be left, a bitter awakening is likely to follow. And the realization that one has outsourced the entire technology, industry and economic performance. Suitable for short-term profit but a miserable long-term perspective.
Unless unexpected disasters such as wars, pandemics or extreme environmental events put a damper on, or the West gains ground through revolutionary new technologies and reforms, the decline of the former US-European hegemony empire is likely to be sealed.
It is only to be hoped that the US and the EU will not receive the same treatment from the new rulers that they gave to the rest of the world for centuries. At that time, when they ruled unrestrictedly with colonialism, slave trade and opium wars.
Ohne die permanente Technologieführerschaft wird der Westen das oberste Podest verlassen müssen
Erstaunlich ist die Monopolstellung Chinas in der Disziplin, als Weltmacht ein zweites Mal zurück auf die internationale Bühne zu treten. Ein bisher einmaliges Ereignis in der Geschichte, aus der die Chinesen gelernt haben. Somit ist es unwahrscheinlich, dass wieder die gesamte Containerschiffflotte versenkt, alle Bootsbauer getötet und die Baupläne verbrannt werden. Weil die Frau eines hohen Parteifunktionärs ertrunken ist.
Vor allem in Zusammenarbeit mit Indien offenbart sich eine Abdeckung sämtlicher sowohl produktions- als auch dienstleistungsspezifischer Aktivitäten. Diese können in dieser Masse und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit dank unschlagbarer Preise von keinem anderen Staatenbündnis erbracht werden. Neben der chinesischen Werkbank der Welt, auf der zusehends komplette Industrien aus dem Boden gestampft und der gesamte Produktionsprozess durchlaufen wird, wächst in Indien eine Wissensgesellschaft ungeahnten Ausmaßes.
Auch werden Gentechnik, Klonen und embryonaler Stammzellenforschung keine Ketten wie in Europa und noch weniger Hemmnisse als in Amerika umgelegt. Somit kann in Dimensionen geforscht werden kann, die weder vom Etat noch von den Forschungsergebnissen her ihresgleichen haben.
Asien wird die Vormachtstellung in der künstlichen Modifikation, Entwicklung und Optimierung von Tieren, Pflanzen und auch Menschen halten und weiter ausbauen. Ob zwischen Monsanto im Westen und den chinesischen Gentechnikkonzernen im Osten noch viel unkontaminiertes Leben wird übrigbleiben können, ist fraglich. Etwa angesichts der bisherigen Entwicklungen in den USA wie beim Genraps.
Ob die selektive Züchtung von Menschen und Manipulation am Erbgut schlimmer wiegt als die irreversible Veränderung der gesamten Biosphäre, liegt im Ermessen und der subjektiven Wahrnehmung des Einzelnen.
Ganz der höflichen, asiatischen Mentalität entsprechend kaschieren die Chinesen nicht nur ihr Wirtschaftswachstum und Währungskurse mit subtilen Mitteln. Sondern üben sich in einer permanenten Beschwichtigungspolitik, die einen noch lange andauernden Marsch bis zum Aufholen auf den Westen suggerieren soll.
Auch treten sie nicht mit amerikanischer Direktheit und Handschlagmentalität, sondern in der Rolle des Mediators und Bündnisschmieds im asiatischen und eurasischen Raum auf. Eine Schaffung von neutralen Freihandelsbündnissen, Staatsgemeinschaften und Interessensvertretungen aus williger Vasallenstaaten zielt auf eine langsame, aber langfristige Verschiebung der Machtverhältnisse hin.
Scheinbar lassen sich Staaten leichter durch Diplomatie und Bündnispolitik für sich gewinnen als durch militärische Okkupation und Ausplünderung. Unter dem Gesichtspunkt, dass die USA den chinesischen Einfluss speziell in Zentralasien und im Nahen Osten zurückdrängen wollen, lassen sich Afghanistan- und Irakkrieg unter gänzlich neuen Aspekten betrachten. Weniger Krieg gegen Extremisten als viel mehr ein verzweifelter Versuch, sich unter einem unglaubwürdigen Vorwand in möglichst vielen Staaten festzusetzen. Und sie zu kontrollieren, um einen Schutzwall errichten zu können. Wobei es nicht nur um Rohstoffe, sondern auch um die Kontrolle der Transportwege geht.
Abseits des militärischen Spektrums unterschreiben auf kurzfristigen Gewinn fokussierte Manager gern jede noch so bedenkliche Klausel. Und wenn man auch Technologietransfers zustimmen, Betriebsgeheimnisse preisgeben, Schlüsseltechnologien bis ins Detail erklären und zu allem auch noch eigenes Schulungspersonal stellen muss, stört es trotzdem nicht. Wenn das der Preis ist, gibt es quasi kein westliches Unternehmen, das sich nicht zu diesem Schritt bereit erklärt. Und damit einer irgendwann überlegenen Wirtschaftsmacht den einzigen Wettbewerbsvorteil bereitwillig schenkt. Den noch vorhandenen, aber stetig schwindenden technologischen Vorsprung, der sich zu einem Gleichstand und schließlich Zweitrangstellung des Westens entwickeln wird.
Als ob Braindrain und die Verschiebung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Innovationszentren nach Asien nicht schon bedenklich genug für den Westen wären. Zusätzlich führt die hanebüchene Wirtschaftspolitik der Industriestaaten geradewegs in eine europäische und amerikanische Deindustrialisierung. Wenn der gesamte Produktionsprozess ausgelagert, die heimische Wirtschaft und der Sozialstaat zugrunde gerichtet und nur mehr ein Häufchen an verbliebenen Bürokraten und Angestellten in den einheimischen Konzernzentralen übrig sein werden, dürfte ein bitteres Erwachen folgen. Und die Erkenntnis, dass man seine gesamte Technologie, Industrie und Wirtschaftsleistung ausgelagert hat. Gut für kurzfristigen Gewinn aber mit einer miserablen Langzeitperspektive behaftet.
Sofern nicht unerwartete Katastrophen wie Kriege, Pandemien oder extreme Umweltereignisse einen Dämpfer erteilen oder der Westen durch revolutionäre neue Technologien und Reformen mehr an Boden gewinnt, dürfte der Niedergang des einstigen amerikanisch-europäischen Hegemonialreichs besiegelt sein.
Es steht nur zu hoffen, dass die USA und die EU von den neuen Herrschern nicht dieselbe Behandlung erfahren, die sie dem Rest der Welt Jahrhunderte lang angedeihen ließen. Damals, als sie uneingeschränkt herrschten.
October 20, 2014
An interesting look at contemporary China by a journalist who has spent over a decade living there. Documents the cultural changes of a country in great flux, and tells the story of national changes through individual narratives. I was especially taken with the stories of educated young Chinese nationalists, reviving traditional Eastern thought and insisting on a unique place for China in the world aloof from blind Westernization. This was interesting in the suggestion that "Third Worldism" is still an animating force for many Chinese behind the market-driven consumerism projected to the outside world.
One of my favourite subjects is the upheaval of China's Cultural Revolution during Mao's time, and while this is very much a book about the present moment those events still reverberate. Chinese history and culture was mostly wiped clean, and people are only beginning to try and rediscover it. Moreover they are being forced to develop a new morality to cope with their present moment, and to fill the "spiritual void" created by the national ideology of production and consumption mixed with (obviously discredited) paeans to socialism.
Well-written, even humorous at times, offers a good window into the hopes and aspirations of contemporary Chinese people - especially young strivers who are wholly a product of this age.
One of my favourite subjects is the upheaval of China's Cultural Revolution during Mao's time, and while this is very much a book about the present moment those events still reverberate. Chinese history and culture was mostly wiped clean, and people are only beginning to try and rediscover it. Moreover they are being forced to develop a new morality to cope with their present moment, and to fill the "spiritual void" created by the national ideology of production and consumption mixed with (obviously discredited) paeans to socialism.
Well-written, even humorous at times, offers a good window into the hopes and aspirations of contemporary Chinese people - especially young strivers who are wholly a product of this age.
August 31, 2014
Disappointed. Except the chapter of the writer's riding along with a group of Chinese for a guided tour in Europe (which is fresh and insightful), the rest stories are either unoriginal or plainly wrong (like the story about Han Han). In comparison, Peter Hessler's River Town and Oracle Bones are much more fun to read and amazingly insightful about China and Chinese, even for native Chinese like me.
March 15, 2020
Let's write a summary of the book's main points: China is growing fast, but many people are discontent with the the lack of freedom. One single party system is inherently problematic much worse than democracy, so is facing crises. The country is overwhelmed with terrible terrible corruptions, and there is great inequality.
OK that's it, perfect fit for Western audience, a confirmation of their long suspected idea from an award winning author spending 8 years in China and does speak Chinese decently (my guess). There is nothing new here, you could have read much shorter articles/essays on many Western media.
Now, flip to acknowledgement section, you will see an overwhelmingly number of Western names, expatriats in China, people for counsel and expertise.
Fine, let's look into the actual people that Osnos portrays. No doubt they are high profile individuals, already famous in the West and elsewhere.
And so it was a disappointment. I had two different expections that weren't satisfied. One, that Osnos could provide new perspectives on China, or perhaps more nuanced discussion of all the successes and issues the country has been facing. Each country is unique with its history, and the number of challenges China has to consider is enormous. It is unfair to reduce everything to measure on Western standards, of democracy and liberty, of liberal market and individual freedom. Obviously from the brief summary I provided above, you see that this expectation was absolutely failed.
Second, I wish perhaps the author could really tell of stories of common people. Fine, not dirt poor, not migrants with regional slangs, but perhaps common middle class individuals, some who are older and still remember the 70s and 80s, some who are young enough to enjoy and prosper with he country in the 90s and 00s, and some who are very very young and will be the lead of the future, those born in the 90s and 00s. But common people, you know. I wish to see the ambition, the chase for fortune, for truth, for faith from the very root of it. I want multiple real accounts. Because as Osnos mentioned it himself in the book, how much we can trust polls in this country? The account on the Europe tour under Chinese agency is perhaps the only redemption. And of course, Michael.
For the most part I feel like Osnos was just guessing about the overall atmosphere. He went for crazy famous dissidents (the fascination with Ai Wei Wei is huge), briefly mentioned their achievements yet hardly any quote. It was a sort of retellings, and I was left dumbfounded. What can I learn from these people without actually reading, watching, analyzing some main pieces of their works, with expert's opinions from all sides? Any discussion remains limited. There are investigative cases that Osnos wasn't directly involved and could not provide first hand reliable statistics either. Of course he could not, not even Chinese journalists could do well, but then why writing about something you do not truly truly know? Why not, like, talking to people, just common people, and let us know? I feel like the author is in China but he is not in China. Just geographically but not emotionally and intellectually, and culturally. My Chinese friend talked to me about how Chinese students study abroad in America, for knowledge but not ideology. I feel the same thing in the author. He was there for some acknowledgement of some big events.
But I did learn something from the book. I think carefully about the Western and Eastern world, about the inherent arrogance of the West, about my craving for understanding the East more on its own terms. I am tired, whenever I read news criticizing China it implicitly complains on the grounds of Western ideas of freedom of liberty - yeah, so noble so beautiful. Yet whenever news covering critics of the West, the West isn't compared to any other place at all, well because implicitly we agree the West is the best, isn't it?
And I deeply doubt that. Fine, I will find out on my own.
OK that's it, perfect fit for Western audience, a confirmation of their long suspected idea from an award winning author spending 8 years in China and does speak Chinese decently (my guess). There is nothing new here, you could have read much shorter articles/essays on many Western media.
Now, flip to acknowledgement section, you will see an overwhelmingly number of Western names, expatriats in China, people for counsel and expertise.
Fine, let's look into the actual people that Osnos portrays. No doubt they are high profile individuals, already famous in the West and elsewhere.
And so it was a disappointment. I had two different expections that weren't satisfied. One, that Osnos could provide new perspectives on China, or perhaps more nuanced discussion of all the successes and issues the country has been facing. Each country is unique with its history, and the number of challenges China has to consider is enormous. It is unfair to reduce everything to measure on Western standards, of democracy and liberty, of liberal market and individual freedom. Obviously from the brief summary I provided above, you see that this expectation was absolutely failed.
Second, I wish perhaps the author could really tell of stories of common people. Fine, not dirt poor, not migrants with regional slangs, but perhaps common middle class individuals, some who are older and still remember the 70s and 80s, some who are young enough to enjoy and prosper with he country in the 90s and 00s, and some who are very very young and will be the lead of the future, those born in the 90s and 00s. But common people, you know. I wish to see the ambition, the chase for fortune, for truth, for faith from the very root of it. I want multiple real accounts. Because as Osnos mentioned it himself in the book, how much we can trust polls in this country? The account on the Europe tour under Chinese agency is perhaps the only redemption. And of course, Michael.
For the most part I feel like Osnos was just guessing about the overall atmosphere. He went for crazy famous dissidents (the fascination with Ai Wei Wei is huge), briefly mentioned their achievements yet hardly any quote. It was a sort of retellings, and I was left dumbfounded. What can I learn from these people without actually reading, watching, analyzing some main pieces of their works, with expert's opinions from all sides? Any discussion remains limited. There are investigative cases that Osnos wasn't directly involved and could not provide first hand reliable statistics either. Of course he could not, not even Chinese journalists could do well, but then why writing about something you do not truly truly know? Why not, like, talking to people, just common people, and let us know? I feel like the author is in China but he is not in China. Just geographically but not emotionally and intellectually, and culturally. My Chinese friend talked to me about how Chinese students study abroad in America, for knowledge but not ideology. I feel the same thing in the author. He was there for some acknowledgement of some big events.
But I did learn something from the book. I think carefully about the Western and Eastern world, about the inherent arrogance of the West, about my craving for understanding the East more on its own terms. I am tired, whenever I read news criticizing China it implicitly complains on the grounds of Western ideas of freedom of liberty - yeah, so noble so beautiful. Yet whenever news covering critics of the West, the West isn't compared to any other place at all, well because implicitly we agree the West is the best, isn't it?
And I deeply doubt that. Fine, I will find out on my own.
March 20, 2021
This is a non-fic about what is happening in modern China based on the author’s extensive coverage of the country. I read is as a part of monthly reading for March 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.
I think it is extremely hard to make a snapshoot of a country, after all we people usually see ourselves as unique, and here is the state with 1.1 bn individuals! As Evan Osnos wrote (rephrasing) “How much did individual stories really tell us about China? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark?”
He starts with Capt. Lin Zhengyi who defected from Taiwan to China in 1979. While it Taiwan, he was a model soldier, shifted from university degree to military service in the early 70s, enough to get a photo with Taiwan president, a poster boy. He will return to Lin’s career later in the book and it is as surprising as his initial move. Then he shifts to his own impressions, that unlike China of the 60-70s, Mao’s blue ants, homogeneity to absurdity (like officers getting fully similar uniforms, etc, so soldiers had to way to find who can give orders… solved by having to more pockets on officer uniform), what surprised his when he first visited China is the diversity. Later in the book he describes his tour through Europe with Chinese tourists and the way they see Europe as a single entity, just like we see China.
He depicts how Chinese censorship works and how internet allowed for mass evasion of the last century system, with rise of not only pro-Western political reforms proponents, but nationalists more similar to Western alt-right, about 50-cent army of trolls and how they operate described by one of them.
He writes about several self-made (wo)men, like an English teacher Li Yang Crazy English, who gathers stadiums and teaches to cry out as loud as they can. Gong Hainan, a woman who created the largest dating site after she was scammed on another dating service (he also gives a lot of info on present marriage habits). Chen Guangcheng a blind man, who taught himself and promoted legal awareness at his village, so that he was de facto under house arrest. A writer and critic Liu Xiaobo, who is a cyber-utopian and a writer
(and blogger and racer) Han Han, who as many critics point writes extremely poorly, but whose books are bestsellers…
A worthy read if one wishes to get a clearer picture what China is today.
I think it is extremely hard to make a snapshoot of a country, after all we people usually see ourselves as unique, and here is the state with 1.1 bn individuals! As Evan Osnos wrote (rephrasing) “How much did individual stories really tell us about China? The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark?”
He starts with Capt. Lin Zhengyi who defected from Taiwan to China in 1979. While it Taiwan, he was a model soldier, shifted from university degree to military service in the early 70s, enough to get a photo with Taiwan president, a poster boy. He will return to Lin’s career later in the book and it is as surprising as his initial move. Then he shifts to his own impressions, that unlike China of the 60-70s, Mao’s blue ants, homogeneity to absurdity (like officers getting fully similar uniforms, etc, so soldiers had to way to find who can give orders… solved by having to more pockets on officer uniform), what surprised his when he first visited China is the diversity. Later in the book he describes his tour through Europe with Chinese tourists and the way they see Europe as a single entity, just like we see China.
He depicts how Chinese censorship works and how internet allowed for mass evasion of the last century system, with rise of not only pro-Western political reforms proponents, but nationalists more similar to Western alt-right, about 50-cent army of trolls and how they operate described by one of them.
He writes about several self-made (wo)men, like an English teacher Li Yang Crazy English, who gathers stadiums and teaches to cry out as loud as they can. Gong Hainan, a woman who created the largest dating site after she was scammed on another dating service (he also gives a lot of info on present marriage habits). Chen Guangcheng a blind man, who taught himself and promoted legal awareness at his village, so that he was de facto under house arrest. A writer and critic Liu Xiaobo, who is a cyber-utopian and a writer
(and blogger and racer) Han Han, who as many critics point writes extremely poorly, but whose books are bestsellers…
A worthy read if one wishes to get a clearer picture what China is today.
April 6, 2017
Age of Ambition won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2014, and no wonder. Nothing I’ve read about the rise of China for many years has immersed me so deeply into the texture of life in that country or more memorably portrayed its yawning contradictions.
Twenty years ago, the extraordinary husband-and-wife reporting team of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. Based on five years of work in China — they won the Pulitzer for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square massacre — China Wakes introduced American readers to the dynamism and the clashing contradictions unleashed a decade and a half earlier by the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Now, two decades further on, Evan Osnos ably updates the story with Age of Ambition.
Osnos brings to bear the insight that comes only with extended experience and facility with the language in an alien culture, the sort of understanding that no reader can glean from the daily news, no matter how deeply reported. “The Party had always prided itself on articulating the ‘central melody’ of Chinese life,” Osnos writes, in a perfect example of this insight, “but as the years passed, the Party’s rendition of that melody seemed increasingly out of tune with the cacophony and improvisation striking up all around it. It was impossible to know what ‘most Chinese’ believed because the state media and the political system were designed not to amplify public opinion but to impose a shape on it. Nationalism, like any other note in the melody, might surge to the surface at one moment and fade into the background at another, but was it the mainstream view? The nationalists didn’t think so.”
Osnos focuses his penetrating repertorial eye on ten or a dozen central figures whose stories resume from time to time through the pages of this brilliant survey of contemporary China. A heroic young captain in the Taiwanese Army who defects to the Mainland and later — much later — becomes one of the country’s most celebrated economists, garnering the job of chief economist at the World Bank. A self-promoting English teacher who builds a nationwide adult education empire based on urging his students to shout English at the top of their lungs. A Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at a leading university who spearheads an ultranationalist campaign online. The sad story of the driven railroad man who rises to preside over one of the most corrupt ministries in a country of legendary corruption, building China’s network of high-speed trains along the way — and is nearly executed for his achievements. These and so many other fascinating characters bring the reality of present-day China to life in ways that episodic journalistic reports so rarely can. Evan Osnos knows his subjects, and he follows them for years. Read Age of Ambition, and you’ll get to know them, too.
Still shy of 40, Evan Osnos reported from China for The New Yorker from 2008 to 2013. Earlier, as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Age of Ambition is his first book.
Twenty years ago, the extraordinary husband-and-wife reporting team of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. Based on five years of work in China — they won the Pulitzer for their reporting on the Tiananmen Square massacre — China Wakes introduced American readers to the dynamism and the clashing contradictions unleashed a decade and a half earlier by the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Now, two decades further on, Evan Osnos ably updates the story with Age of Ambition.
Osnos brings to bear the insight that comes only with extended experience and facility with the language in an alien culture, the sort of understanding that no reader can glean from the daily news, no matter how deeply reported. “The Party had always prided itself on articulating the ‘central melody’ of Chinese life,” Osnos writes, in a perfect example of this insight, “but as the years passed, the Party’s rendition of that melody seemed increasingly out of tune with the cacophony and improvisation striking up all around it. It was impossible to know what ‘most Chinese’ believed because the state media and the political system were designed not to amplify public opinion but to impose a shape on it. Nationalism, like any other note in the melody, might surge to the surface at one moment and fade into the background at another, but was it the mainstream view? The nationalists didn’t think so.”
Osnos focuses his penetrating repertorial eye on ten or a dozen central figures whose stories resume from time to time through the pages of this brilliant survey of contemporary China. A heroic young captain in the Taiwanese Army who defects to the Mainland and later — much later — becomes one of the country’s most celebrated economists, garnering the job of chief economist at the World Bank. A self-promoting English teacher who builds a nationwide adult education empire based on urging his students to shout English at the top of their lungs. A Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at a leading university who spearheads an ultranationalist campaign online. The sad story of the driven railroad man who rises to preside over one of the most corrupt ministries in a country of legendary corruption, building China’s network of high-speed trains along the way — and is nearly executed for his achievements. These and so many other fascinating characters bring the reality of present-day China to life in ways that episodic journalistic reports so rarely can. Evan Osnos knows his subjects, and he follows them for years. Read Age of Ambition, and you’ll get to know them, too.
Still shy of 40, Evan Osnos reported from China for The New Yorker from 2008 to 2013. Earlier, as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, he was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Age of Ambition is his first book.
December 15, 2017
This book was so well written and very interesting. I did not all that much about modern China--Osnos has a gift for exploring some of the tensions in the culture. His access to some of the people he profiles is remarkable. This is well worth the read.
May 19, 2025
An informative, detailed and in-depth account of the state of China in the late 2000s and early 2010s, from an American journalist who lived and worked in the country for eight years. Having seen comparisons, I came to this book expecting something like Peter Hessler’s work, but Osnos’s is very different, if equally thorough and well-informed. While Hessler opts for much more personal, narrative nonfiction focused on the lives of ordinary people, Osnos is drawn to the bigger-picture, more usual journalistic topics: influential people, government corruption and malfeasance and the dissidents who oppose it. While a handful of interviewees do show up repeatedly, the chapters are relatively self-contained: there’s one on the quick fortunes and dangers of the gambling town of Macau; another in which he accompanies a Chinese tour group to Europe (this was fun to see); another about manifestations of patriotism and nationalism around the 2008 Olympics; another about a horrific train crash caused by shoddy infrastructure rushed into place. I wasn’t always sure why the chapters were ordered as they were, but they were consistently interesting.
The three parts of the book are named for the three words in the subtitle (fortune, truth, and faith) but they’re not quite treated equally, as the truth and faith sections pretty much run together with questions of to what extent Chinese citizens can or do have faith in their government, rather than spending much time on religion. It makes for heavy reading at times with the focus on various people being abused by the authoritarian regime, and even at the best of times, reads much more slowly than I expected. Perhaps it’s the formatting, with packed pages, that makes Osnos’s writing feel a bit dense. But it’s certainly readable. And it’s clearly the product of an enormous amount of time, work, experience, and knowledge. While a little bit dated today, I would nonetheless recommend to those interested in learning more about China. Given how much the government is called out here, I wonder if Osnos would be welcome to return to the country if he tried!
The three parts of the book are named for the three words in the subtitle (fortune, truth, and faith) but they’re not quite treated equally, as the truth and faith sections pretty much run together with questions of to what extent Chinese citizens can or do have faith in their government, rather than spending much time on religion. It makes for heavy reading at times with the focus on various people being abused by the authoritarian regime, and even at the best of times, reads much more slowly than I expected. Perhaps it’s the formatting, with packed pages, that makes Osnos’s writing feel a bit dense. But it’s certainly readable. And it’s clearly the product of an enormous amount of time, work, experience, and knowledge. While a little bit dated today, I would nonetheless recommend to those interested in learning more about China. Given how much the government is called out here, I wonder if Osnos would be welcome to return to the country if he tried!
February 15, 2023
Having recently read a book about Mao Zedong's reign, and a few books previously about him and that time period, I wondered if reading a book about China in more contemporary times would provide a different view of the country and how it treated its citizens. After reading Evan Osnos' work, not quite a decade old, I did get a different view on China, but much of what Osnos showed me seemed like it could have been written of Mao's era as well. Osnos is an American journalist who spent eight years living in China, mostly in Beijing, and the book covers his experiences and analysis of the country during that time.
Osnos follows several different people that he encounters during his lengthy stay in China. Most of them are not involved with any of the others, which lends a broad approach to the experiences that Osnos is trying to convey. He starts by talking about Lin Yifu, who defected from Taiwan. leaving behind his pregnant wife and young child. Lin defected because he believed in the power and potential of Communist China. As with most of the characters here, he pops up again several times throughout the book. Osnos charts his rise to becoming a leading economic voice in China, and an appointment at the World Bank.
Contrasted with Lin is Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer turned activist who was imprisoned by the Communist Party for attempting to help women who were forced to undergo abortions as part of China's seriously misguided and horrible "one-child policy". Chen was placed under house arrest, then sent to prison for over four years. He served his full term, only to be put back under house arrest immediately upon his release. Chen, with the help of his wife, eventually planned and successfully carried out an escape from his house, taking advantage of the Republican Party of the United States in the process (they placed pressure on Barack Obama's State Department to help arrange travel to the U.S. for Chen when he managed to make it to the U.S. embassy in Beijing). Chen is thus, in that sense, the opposite of Lin in that Lin made a daring nighttime escape from Taiwan by swimming across the Taiwan Strait while Chen made an equally daring escape by fleeing his house, and then China itself.
That is one of the reasons that this book works so well: a variety of perspectives are given space. Osnos also writes about the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, and his many run-ins with the Communist Party, resulting in house arrest. Ai could have left but he did not. He seemed to relish finding ways to give the Party the middle finger, such as by setting up cameras all over his own house and broadcasting their footage so that anyone could see what he was doing at any given time. Even though the government had placed guards, floodlights, and cameras all around his house, they would not let him film himself inside his own house. Prior to that, Osnos described some of the conditions that Ai faced when he was arrested. Page 226: "In the days that followed, Ai was never alone. He was transferred to a military compound and placed in a narrow windowless room with padded walls, like a mental hospital. Two young guards in olive-green uniforms were never more than three feet from him; at times they say four inches from his face. They accompanied him to the toilet and the shower. When he paced in his cell, they paced with him. They ordered him to sleep with his hands in full view and to ask permission to touch his own face." So, while he was not beaten, was this type of treatment any better? For sure it is mental and psychological abuse. What was his crime, so to speak? The police arrested him for "economic crimes" but never provided any details beyond that.
Osnos writes of several other people as well, not all of whom went to prison or were arrested. Many of them simply struggled from day to day trying to make a living for themselves. He met people who were wealthy and many who were not. China during this period was struggling with how to control and censor the internet while at the same time expanding its infrastructure and economy. The internet and use of it took up a lot of this book. Keep in mind that most of the period covered by Osnos here was pre-smart phone and apps, especially over there. Therefore much of what writes about refers to websites, and the state controlling what can be searched for on it. The censors were all over people, discouraging the researching or reading about anything that reflected negatively on the Party. Words or phrases would be removed if they were found to be used to get around an initial firewall. Awful things, such as contaminated milk that killed some children, were quickly hushed up and basically erased out of existence.
Along those lines, Osnos did pay particular attention to a couple of disasters which were a combination of man-made and natural. First, there was a significant earthquake in Sichuan in 2008. Who mostly died? Schoolchildren. The quake occurred during the school day, and the schools had been cheaply made due to the rampant corruption and greed that permeates politics and contracts in China. The schools collapsed, killing the children in the process. The Party's response? Cover it up, immediately. Three years later, there was a lightning strike on a power box used by the high-speed railroads. Combined with human error, it caused a massive train crash. Many people died. The result? Cover up. Press were not allowed to visit the site. The train was buried. Crash survivors were warned to keep their mouths shut.
There is a lot more in this book. On almost every page I came across something that just made me shake my head. Osnos focuses much of his time on analyzing the conflict between what the Communist Party wants economically and what it is willing to tolerate to get that, all the while analyzing what he is seeing and hearing without placing himself at the center of the narrative. On page 213 he writes: "The Party was in a conundrum of its own making. Over the years, it had squeezed off so many avenues of expression that people had little choice but to engage in the kind of unrest that was the Party's greatest fear." And on page 260: "As a reflection of decision-making, blocking some of the world's most influential news sources was a vivid measure of how much the Party was willing to isolate its people in order to protect itself: it was now barring them from viewing Facebook... and many other sites. Online, the censors raced to protect the image of Premier Wen by screening out new combinations of words, including prime minister + family and Wen + hundreds of millions."
Osnos writes of a two-year-old girl who was struck by a van in an alleyway where several shops were located. The driver kept going (this was caught on camera), later saying he thought he had just bumped into some debris. Osnos watched the footage and counted seventeen different people walk by the stricken girl and do nothing. Some pretended not to notice her. Some saw her and quickly kept walking. Some looked at her and then looked the other way. Finally, the eighteenth person, an old woman collecting scrap, tried to help her and found the girl's mother. She ended up dying from internal injuries a few days later. Osnos then notes that China had several cases of Good Samaritans actually being successfully sued by people who they tried to help, with the reasoning being that nobody would stop to help someone unless they themselves were guilty of doing something to that person. I had to stop and ask myself: What kind of a country is this where people are punished for doing good? What kind of a people is this where this type of behavior is normalized? How did this happen? Can this be traced back to Mao?
Considering all of the things that have happened with China since this book was published in 2014, I can only imagine how many more books Osnos could fill if he had been living there as Xi Jinping consolidated power; then Covid hit and the subsequent cover-up that the government attempted; the rising tensions with the U.S.; and the support of Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. Given the growing importance of China in today's world, books such as this one by Osnos serve a purpose by providing a few brief windows of insight into an authoritarian country.
Grade: A
Osnos follows several different people that he encounters during his lengthy stay in China. Most of them are not involved with any of the others, which lends a broad approach to the experiences that Osnos is trying to convey. He starts by talking about Lin Yifu, who defected from Taiwan. leaving behind his pregnant wife and young child. Lin defected because he believed in the power and potential of Communist China. As with most of the characters here, he pops up again several times throughout the book. Osnos charts his rise to becoming a leading economic voice in China, and an appointment at the World Bank.
Contrasted with Lin is Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer turned activist who was imprisoned by the Communist Party for attempting to help women who were forced to undergo abortions as part of China's seriously misguided and horrible "one-child policy". Chen was placed under house arrest, then sent to prison for over four years. He served his full term, only to be put back under house arrest immediately upon his release. Chen, with the help of his wife, eventually planned and successfully carried out an escape from his house, taking advantage of the Republican Party of the United States in the process (they placed pressure on Barack Obama's State Department to help arrange travel to the U.S. for Chen when he managed to make it to the U.S. embassy in Beijing). Chen is thus, in that sense, the opposite of Lin in that Lin made a daring nighttime escape from Taiwan by swimming across the Taiwan Strait while Chen made an equally daring escape by fleeing his house, and then China itself.
That is one of the reasons that this book works so well: a variety of perspectives are given space. Osnos also writes about the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, and his many run-ins with the Communist Party, resulting in house arrest. Ai could have left but he did not. He seemed to relish finding ways to give the Party the middle finger, such as by setting up cameras all over his own house and broadcasting their footage so that anyone could see what he was doing at any given time. Even though the government had placed guards, floodlights, and cameras all around his house, they would not let him film himself inside his own house. Prior to that, Osnos described some of the conditions that Ai faced when he was arrested. Page 226: "In the days that followed, Ai was never alone. He was transferred to a military compound and placed in a narrow windowless room with padded walls, like a mental hospital. Two young guards in olive-green uniforms were never more than three feet from him; at times they say four inches from his face. They accompanied him to the toilet and the shower. When he paced in his cell, they paced with him. They ordered him to sleep with his hands in full view and to ask permission to touch his own face." So, while he was not beaten, was this type of treatment any better? For sure it is mental and psychological abuse. What was his crime, so to speak? The police arrested him for "economic crimes" but never provided any details beyond that.
Osnos writes of several other people as well, not all of whom went to prison or were arrested. Many of them simply struggled from day to day trying to make a living for themselves. He met people who were wealthy and many who were not. China during this period was struggling with how to control and censor the internet while at the same time expanding its infrastructure and economy. The internet and use of it took up a lot of this book. Keep in mind that most of the period covered by Osnos here was pre-smart phone and apps, especially over there. Therefore much of what writes about refers to websites, and the state controlling what can be searched for on it. The censors were all over people, discouraging the researching or reading about anything that reflected negatively on the Party. Words or phrases would be removed if they were found to be used to get around an initial firewall. Awful things, such as contaminated milk that killed some children, were quickly hushed up and basically erased out of existence.
Along those lines, Osnos did pay particular attention to a couple of disasters which were a combination of man-made and natural. First, there was a significant earthquake in Sichuan in 2008. Who mostly died? Schoolchildren. The quake occurred during the school day, and the schools had been cheaply made due to the rampant corruption and greed that permeates politics and contracts in China. The schools collapsed, killing the children in the process. The Party's response? Cover it up, immediately. Three years later, there was a lightning strike on a power box used by the high-speed railroads. Combined with human error, it caused a massive train crash. Many people died. The result? Cover up. Press were not allowed to visit the site. The train was buried. Crash survivors were warned to keep their mouths shut.
There is a lot more in this book. On almost every page I came across something that just made me shake my head. Osnos focuses much of his time on analyzing the conflict between what the Communist Party wants economically and what it is willing to tolerate to get that, all the while analyzing what he is seeing and hearing without placing himself at the center of the narrative. On page 213 he writes: "The Party was in a conundrum of its own making. Over the years, it had squeezed off so many avenues of expression that people had little choice but to engage in the kind of unrest that was the Party's greatest fear." And on page 260: "As a reflection of decision-making, blocking some of the world's most influential news sources was a vivid measure of how much the Party was willing to isolate its people in order to protect itself: it was now barring them from viewing Facebook... and many other sites. Online, the censors raced to protect the image of Premier Wen by screening out new combinations of words, including prime minister + family and Wen + hundreds of millions."
Osnos writes of a two-year-old girl who was struck by a van in an alleyway where several shops were located. The driver kept going (this was caught on camera), later saying he thought he had just bumped into some debris. Osnos watched the footage and counted seventeen different people walk by the stricken girl and do nothing. Some pretended not to notice her. Some saw her and quickly kept walking. Some looked at her and then looked the other way. Finally, the eighteenth person, an old woman collecting scrap, tried to help her and found the girl's mother. She ended up dying from internal injuries a few days later. Osnos then notes that China had several cases of Good Samaritans actually being successfully sued by people who they tried to help, with the reasoning being that nobody would stop to help someone unless they themselves were guilty of doing something to that person. I had to stop and ask myself: What kind of a country is this where people are punished for doing good? What kind of a people is this where this type of behavior is normalized? How did this happen? Can this be traced back to Mao?
Considering all of the things that have happened with China since this book was published in 2014, I can only imagine how many more books Osnos could fill if he had been living there as Xi Jinping consolidated power; then Covid hit and the subsequent cover-up that the government attempted; the rising tensions with the U.S.; and the support of Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine. Given the growing importance of China in today's world, books such as this one by Osnos serve a purpose by providing a few brief windows of insight into an authoritarian country.
Grade: A
May 11, 2019
I look at China’s meteoric rise in the past four decades with contradictory emotions. I admire the way they execute massive infrastructural projects like highways, bridges and high-speed rail at a rapid pace. I admire the way they have risen to the No.2 position in the world in just four decades. I have always wondered how they produce goods at such low prices that even poorer Asian countries cannot compete with them. On the other hand, I fear their military build-up and attempts to hegemonize in the Indo-Pacific region. I feel skepticism at their GDP growth numbers and antagonism at the denial of democracy to their citizens. I am intrigued and skeptical about how advanced China is in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, and self-driving cars. I am doubtful whether they have overcome the pitfalls inherent in the long-term continuity of authoritarian regimes.
Over the years, I have read several books by Western academics, other China-watchers and journalists to get a grasp of what the composite picture concerning China is. I have had satisfying answers to questions like the ‘low price’ at which China manufactures goods. This book by Evan Osnos is an essential contribution in advancing our knowledge of contemporary China. Osnos lived for eight years between 2005 and 2013 in China as a journalist and China-watcher. He contributed many essays during that time to ‘the New Yorker’ on China. He speaks Mandarin and is a dispassionate observer of China, being neither starry-eyed about it nor a trenchantly hostile critic. I found some more answers to many of my questions in this book.
Western academics talk much about the wisdom of the Chinese leadership in history. They point out how it has taken a long-range view of various questions regarding its security, development, and relationships with its neighborhood and the world. The approach is said to be one of Confucian sagacity and working on a timeline that is proportionate to China’s long history. In other words, the Chinese are unhurried and always bide their time and strike when the time is ripe. Other writers project a picture of an integrated China, where the Party and the people are moving together towards the country’s vision of becoming the pre-eminent power that China once was in history. The BRI (Belt and Road initiative) and the Maritime Silk Road are notable examples of this vision. Unlike the USSR, the Communist Party of China is believed to have successfully diluted the demand for freedom from its citizens and established total control over them through the fruits of material advancement. Authors like Niall Ferguson and Kishore Mehbubani believe that China is ‘the future.’
Osnos’ book stands in contrast to the views mentioned above. He presents his analysis in three sections, titled Fortune, Truth, and Faith. In ‘Fortune,’ we get to learn about the ambitions and anxieties that drive the Chinese in the era of economic transformation. In ‘Truth,’ we learn in an Orwellian fashion, how lies about the objective Chinese reality and constraints on freedom proliferate in every walk of life and how the Chinese navigate them in the era of the internet. Finally, in ‘Faith,’ we learn about how the Chinese people are skeptical and dismissive of the Party’s propaganda. They are on a quest to believe in something other than what the Party dishes out to them as reality. The book explores all these aspects through a collection of anecdotal accounts of various people whom Osnos meets and keeps in touch over the eight years he lived in China. We meet a broad cross-section of people. There is Lin YiFu, who was a Taiwanese military officer in 1979. He chose to swim the Taiwan straits to defect to China because that is where he saw the future to be. He becomes the chief economist in the World Bank and remains a firm believer in the Chinese model of capitalism under the leadership of the Party. Then we have the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and the Nobel Laureate / dissident literary critic Liu Xiaobo. The politically influential journalist cum publisher Hu Shuli and the blogger Han Han are others who make their presence. We meet Tang Jie, a Chinese nationalist, who argues that the Chinese have a good life without freedom. So, why should they fight the state for democracy and spoil it?
I wouldn’t go into the details of these interactions and experiences. Instead, I would like to paraphrase the conclusions Osnos arrives at as a result of these exchanges.
In the section on ‘Fortune,’ Osnos says that there is a desperate rush among the Chinese to get wealthy. The average Chinese feel that one has to elbow one’s way on to everything; otherwise one will miss out. Since people do not have enough information on the strengths and weaknesses of the politics and the economy, there is the anxiety to capitalize on the good times before the bad times make their entry. The author feels that China today is comparable to the US during the Gilded Age. Just like it was in the US in the late 19th century, corruption, lack of the rule of law and weakness in the face of corporate monopolies are pervasive. Strikes and Demonstrations raged across the US in the 1870s and 80s, and the state met them with force. The same is true in China today concerning any form of protest. However, Osnos makes a qualification regarding corruption. He says that the corruption in China in this era is monumental. According to him, the high-speed rail project was the single biggest financial scandal not just in China but in the whole world. Between 1990 and 2011, eighteen thousand corrupt officials have fled the country with at least $120 billion, according to the Central bank of China. Even the military is riddled with patronage. Commanders receive strings of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers below them. The ex-Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family is said to have amassed assets worth $2.7 billion during the time he was in office. Public officials routinely take bribes to dole out jobs that they control.
The section on ‘Truth’ throws much light on the Chinese view of the world outside and their aspirations and the quest for freedom. The Chinese attitude to the West is complicated. There is a fierce curiosity about the world, but it is tempered by a defensive pride of their place in it. They look at the West with a mixture of pity, envy, victimhood, and resentment. Pity for the barbarians, envy for their strength and resentment and the sense of victimhood for their incursions into China. They feel some sense of superiority due to the belief that they are lot more hard-working and goal-oriented than Westerners. At the same time, they are also filled with doubts and misgivings. Just as American mothers wonder whether they should be tiger-mothers and push their children harder, the Chinese are wondering if they should learn about being creative in their education system like the Americans.
Unlike what is written in much of the Western media, China has a creative class of artists, bloggers, journalists and students who resist the conformity that is imposed on them by the Party and the State. The intersection of wealth and authoritarianism poses a problem for the new Chinese creative class. The struggles and resistance of the artist Ai Wei-Wei and the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo are well known in the West. They spoke in a vernacular that mixed irony, imagination, and rage. They tried to see how far an individual’s power can sustain in China. As we know, the state came down firmly on them and incarcerated them. They put Liu on trial where he aesthetically declared, ‘I hope I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes.’
In any case, there is no doubt that the internet has stirred a hunger for a new kind of critical voice - a rebirth of irony, a search for community and the courage to complain. For example, the computer science professor, Fang Binxing is known as the architect of the Great Firewall which tramples the access of the Chinese people to the open internet. When he lectured at Wuhan University in 2011, angry students threw shoes at him in protest. When the teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, fellow students defied them and protected the shoe-thrower. The students argued that there is no way for them to debate Fang Binxing because of the mismatch in their powers. Hence, throwing shoes was the only way out. The author says that divining how far an individual can go in Chinese creative life is akin to carving a line in the sand at low tide in the dark. The political terrain keeps shifting all the time.
In the section on ‘Faith,’ Osnos makes keen observations on how the Communist Party has learned to deal with control and manipulation in the internet era. The Chinese leadership observed how the Arab Springs and the Soviet collapse originated and evolved. They drew the lesson that ‘protests which go unchecked, lead to open revolt.’ The Politburo consequently decided on the approach of Five ‘No’s - no opposition parties, no alternative principles, no separation of powers, no federal system and no full-scale privatization. Curiously, they also adopted an American model of doing propaganda. Learning from Walter Lippmann, they ‘magnify emotion while undermining critical thought.’ The idea is that good PR can create a ‘group mind’ and ‘manufacture consent’ for the ruling elite. The father of American PR, Harold Lasswell said in 1927, ”if the masses will be free of chains of iron, they must accept its chains of silver.” Unlike the USSR, communist China's propaganda gospel follows such American innovations.
On the internet, the Party controls online dissent and criticism by the use of what it calls ‘ushers of public opinion.’ The Party has many ‘ushers of public opinion’ deployed on the net, masquerading as ordinary users. They do not try to extinguish debate but endeavor to steer it away harmlessly. Their task is to influence public opinion and stabilize netizens’ emotions. As an example, if people criticize the Party on rising gas prices, the ushers will lob a grenade of a post, like ‘if you are too poor to drive, then it serves you right.’ This makes the public turn the debate towards attacking the usher. The topic gradually moves from gas prices to the usher’s comments. Netizens’ emotions are diverted and stabilized. Mission accomplished. This approach must ring a bell in most of us. I have seen similar methods by the current right-wing government in India as well. One could see that even the Trump campaign used such approaches in diverting attention away from Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. However, in spite of all these seeming successes on establishing control over public opinion, the Communist Party of China is nervous and unsure deep down. For the first time in history, Osnos says, China is spending more on domestic security than on foreign defense. They invest more money on surveilling and policing its citizens than on external threats.
When I finished the book, the impression I had was that Communist China is on shaky legs at its core. The Party elite is juggling many balls up in the air, and one of them is sure to drop eventually. When that happens, the authoritarian state as no other plan but to put down the resulting protests violently. Even in the unlikely event that no ball drops ever, improving living standards will demand more freedom and individual expression. This will challenge the Party to loosen its control. In such an event as well, the Party has no plan other than to put down the demands. Many scholars have said this over the past couple of decades. The Chinese nationalists have responded that these predictions have not come true and that China is going from strength to strength. However, I would read Evan Osnos’ book as saying that it is an illusion and that Communist China also will meet the same fate that has befallen all authoritarian regimes in history.
Over the years, I have read several books by Western academics, other China-watchers and journalists to get a grasp of what the composite picture concerning China is. I have had satisfying answers to questions like the ‘low price’ at which China manufactures goods. This book by Evan Osnos is an essential contribution in advancing our knowledge of contemporary China. Osnos lived for eight years between 2005 and 2013 in China as a journalist and China-watcher. He contributed many essays during that time to ‘the New Yorker’ on China. He speaks Mandarin and is a dispassionate observer of China, being neither starry-eyed about it nor a trenchantly hostile critic. I found some more answers to many of my questions in this book.
Western academics talk much about the wisdom of the Chinese leadership in history. They point out how it has taken a long-range view of various questions regarding its security, development, and relationships with its neighborhood and the world. The approach is said to be one of Confucian sagacity and working on a timeline that is proportionate to China’s long history. In other words, the Chinese are unhurried and always bide their time and strike when the time is ripe. Other writers project a picture of an integrated China, where the Party and the people are moving together towards the country’s vision of becoming the pre-eminent power that China once was in history. The BRI (Belt and Road initiative) and the Maritime Silk Road are notable examples of this vision. Unlike the USSR, the Communist Party of China is believed to have successfully diluted the demand for freedom from its citizens and established total control over them through the fruits of material advancement. Authors like Niall Ferguson and Kishore Mehbubani believe that China is ‘the future.’
Osnos’ book stands in contrast to the views mentioned above. He presents his analysis in three sections, titled Fortune, Truth, and Faith. In ‘Fortune,’ we get to learn about the ambitions and anxieties that drive the Chinese in the era of economic transformation. In ‘Truth,’ we learn in an Orwellian fashion, how lies about the objective Chinese reality and constraints on freedom proliferate in every walk of life and how the Chinese navigate them in the era of the internet. Finally, in ‘Faith,’ we learn about how the Chinese people are skeptical and dismissive of the Party’s propaganda. They are on a quest to believe in something other than what the Party dishes out to them as reality. The book explores all these aspects through a collection of anecdotal accounts of various people whom Osnos meets and keeps in touch over the eight years he lived in China. We meet a broad cross-section of people. There is Lin YiFu, who was a Taiwanese military officer in 1979. He chose to swim the Taiwan straits to defect to China because that is where he saw the future to be. He becomes the chief economist in the World Bank and remains a firm believer in the Chinese model of capitalism under the leadership of the Party. Then we have the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, the human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and the Nobel Laureate / dissident literary critic Liu Xiaobo. The politically influential journalist cum publisher Hu Shuli and the blogger Han Han are others who make their presence. We meet Tang Jie, a Chinese nationalist, who argues that the Chinese have a good life without freedom. So, why should they fight the state for democracy and spoil it?
I wouldn’t go into the details of these interactions and experiences. Instead, I would like to paraphrase the conclusions Osnos arrives at as a result of these exchanges.
In the section on ‘Fortune,’ Osnos says that there is a desperate rush among the Chinese to get wealthy. The average Chinese feel that one has to elbow one’s way on to everything; otherwise one will miss out. Since people do not have enough information on the strengths and weaknesses of the politics and the economy, there is the anxiety to capitalize on the good times before the bad times make their entry. The author feels that China today is comparable to the US during the Gilded Age. Just like it was in the US in the late 19th century, corruption, lack of the rule of law and weakness in the face of corporate monopolies are pervasive. Strikes and Demonstrations raged across the US in the 1870s and 80s, and the state met them with force. The same is true in China today concerning any form of protest. However, Osnos makes a qualification regarding corruption. He says that the corruption in China in this era is monumental. According to him, the high-speed rail project was the single biggest financial scandal not just in China but in the whole world. Between 1990 and 2011, eighteen thousand corrupt officials have fled the country with at least $120 billion, according to the Central bank of China. Even the military is riddled with patronage. Commanders receive strings of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers below them. The ex-Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family is said to have amassed assets worth $2.7 billion during the time he was in office. Public officials routinely take bribes to dole out jobs that they control.
The section on ‘Truth’ throws much light on the Chinese view of the world outside and their aspirations and the quest for freedom. The Chinese attitude to the West is complicated. There is a fierce curiosity about the world, but it is tempered by a defensive pride of their place in it. They look at the West with a mixture of pity, envy, victimhood, and resentment. Pity for the barbarians, envy for their strength and resentment and the sense of victimhood for their incursions into China. They feel some sense of superiority due to the belief that they are lot more hard-working and goal-oriented than Westerners. At the same time, they are also filled with doubts and misgivings. Just as American mothers wonder whether they should be tiger-mothers and push their children harder, the Chinese are wondering if they should learn about being creative in their education system like the Americans.
Unlike what is written in much of the Western media, China has a creative class of artists, bloggers, journalists and students who resist the conformity that is imposed on them by the Party and the State. The intersection of wealth and authoritarianism poses a problem for the new Chinese creative class. The struggles and resistance of the artist Ai Wei-Wei and the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo are well known in the West. They spoke in a vernacular that mixed irony, imagination, and rage. They tried to see how far an individual’s power can sustain in China. As we know, the state came down firmly on them and incarcerated them. They put Liu on trial where he aesthetically declared, ‘I hope I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes.’
In any case, there is no doubt that the internet has stirred a hunger for a new kind of critical voice - a rebirth of irony, a search for community and the courage to complain. For example, the computer science professor, Fang Binxing is known as the architect of the Great Firewall which tramples the access of the Chinese people to the open internet. When he lectured at Wuhan University in 2011, angry students threw shoes at him in protest. When the teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, fellow students defied them and protected the shoe-thrower. The students argued that there is no way for them to debate Fang Binxing because of the mismatch in their powers. Hence, throwing shoes was the only way out. The author says that divining how far an individual can go in Chinese creative life is akin to carving a line in the sand at low tide in the dark. The political terrain keeps shifting all the time.
In the section on ‘Faith,’ Osnos makes keen observations on how the Communist Party has learned to deal with control and manipulation in the internet era. The Chinese leadership observed how the Arab Springs and the Soviet collapse originated and evolved. They drew the lesson that ‘protests which go unchecked, lead to open revolt.’ The Politburo consequently decided on the approach of Five ‘No’s - no opposition parties, no alternative principles, no separation of powers, no federal system and no full-scale privatization. Curiously, they also adopted an American model of doing propaganda. Learning from Walter Lippmann, they ‘magnify emotion while undermining critical thought.’ The idea is that good PR can create a ‘group mind’ and ‘manufacture consent’ for the ruling elite. The father of American PR, Harold Lasswell said in 1927, ”if the masses will be free of chains of iron, they must accept its chains of silver.” Unlike the USSR, communist China's propaganda gospel follows such American innovations.
On the internet, the Party controls online dissent and criticism by the use of what it calls ‘ushers of public opinion.’ The Party has many ‘ushers of public opinion’ deployed on the net, masquerading as ordinary users. They do not try to extinguish debate but endeavor to steer it away harmlessly. Their task is to influence public opinion and stabilize netizens’ emotions. As an example, if people criticize the Party on rising gas prices, the ushers will lob a grenade of a post, like ‘if you are too poor to drive, then it serves you right.’ This makes the public turn the debate towards attacking the usher. The topic gradually moves from gas prices to the usher’s comments. Netizens’ emotions are diverted and stabilized. Mission accomplished. This approach must ring a bell in most of us. I have seen similar methods by the current right-wing government in India as well. One could see that even the Trump campaign used such approaches in diverting attention away from Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. However, in spite of all these seeming successes on establishing control over public opinion, the Communist Party of China is nervous and unsure deep down. For the first time in history, Osnos says, China is spending more on domestic security than on foreign defense. They invest more money on surveilling and policing its citizens than on external threats.
When I finished the book, the impression I had was that Communist China is on shaky legs at its core. The Party elite is juggling many balls up in the air, and one of them is sure to drop eventually. When that happens, the authoritarian state as no other plan but to put down the resulting protests violently. Even in the unlikely event that no ball drops ever, improving living standards will demand more freedom and individual expression. This will challenge the Party to loosen its control. In such an event as well, the Party has no plan other than to put down the demands. Many scholars have said this over the past couple of decades. The Chinese nationalists have responded that these predictions have not come true and that China is going from strength to strength. However, I would read Evan Osnos’ book as saying that it is an illusion and that Communist China also will meet the same fate that has befallen all authoritarian regimes in history.
December 3, 2016
Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition is packed with detailed observations and curious facts that will edify anyone looking to learn about modern China’s domestic structure and growing role on the international stage. Osnos is a talented writer whose style can be described as “humanist nonfiction”––a series of interview-based narratives organized by theme and supported by ancillary research. It reminds of me George Packer’s exceptional book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which is having a new moment in post-election America. As with all good nonfiction, Age of Ambition complicates the world and asks more questions than it answers. The following passages give a good sense of Osnos’s general approach:
"The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions. How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking." (227)
"Anybody who scratched beneath the surface of Chinese life discovered a more complicated conception of the good life that had made room for the pursuit of values and dignity alongside the pursuit of cars and apartments." (371)
Age of Ambition is broken into three parts: Fortune, Truth, and Faith. Osnos provides solid commentary on each theme, weaving the stories of his interviewees into each section with impressive fluidity. Osnos’s cast of characters is broad and diverse; it includes a Taiwanese military man who defected to China, a female media mogul, Ai Weiwei (the internationally-acclaimed artist), a young conservative nationalist with training in Western philosophy, a young man obsessed with mastering the English language, a blind lawyer put under house arrest for questioning the government, and more.
Each tale adds its own spice to Age of Ambition, but as an American, I became enthralled by the myriad ways contemporary China has imitated the United States while also working very hard to set itself apart from all of Western culture. For example, when fledgling Party propagandists wanted to learn the tricks of the trade, they looked to America, “the holy land of public relations” (118). China rapidly adapted a distinctly American tool to bolster a distinctly anti-American (or at least anti-democratic) government. This dynamic comes up again and again in Age of Ambition, with Chinese individuals constantly negotiating with a cultural attitude toward America that appears admiring, supercilious, aspirational, jealous, and spiteful all at once.
Osnos dives deeply into the question of how China’s modernization has affected Chinese identity. He identifies a “paradox of ambition” stemming from the fundamental contraction of an authoritarian state overseeing a booming private sector: “The Party was sparking individual ambition and self-creation in one half of life and suppressing those tendencies in the other” (150). Referring to the lasting impact of China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, one of Osnos’s subjects asserts: “We cast aside our three core ideas––Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism––and that was a mistake” (107-8). A toxic form of Marxism quickly filled the void, and then was injected with rampant capitalism as China “opened up” to a larger role in international trade. But, as Osnos points out, capitalism is an economic system, and not a particularly effective means of generating or maintaining cultural identity:
"In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own." (306)
The icons that have come to dominate this rootless landscape are familiar to anyone with a passing interest in world affairs: opulent displays of wealth, crony capitalism, vulgar and insipid media, blind consumerism, and growing socioeconomic inequality. As in America, “China’s new fortunes were wildly out of balance” (267). The nature and scope of Chinese corruption seems to have a flavor all its own, but its underpinnings are present throughout the globalized world. Osnos reflects on this situation with an image that applies as easily to any struggling Western democracy as it does to modern China:
"The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat––because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe––progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance." (271)
So what to make of all this? For me, Age of Ambition inspired fear and admiration in about equal measure. I read the book because a dear friend of mine recently lived in China for a time, and came away from the experience distressed by what he saw as a deeply repressive and increasingly aggressive nation with a huge and needy population. Without the chance to make that judgment for myself, I must admit that I’m far more fearful of the new government in my homeland than one far across the Pacific, at least for the moment. And then the sadness really sinks in, because fear is perhaps the only emotion currently shared by everyone alive on Earth––the commonplace tragedy that unites and divides us.
As the reasons for informed cynicism continue to mount, I take solace in the knowledge that thinkers like Osnos will continue to provide us with exemplary texts to improve our minds and defend civilization from its worst self.
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
"The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions. How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking." (227)
"Anybody who scratched beneath the surface of Chinese life discovered a more complicated conception of the good life that had made room for the pursuit of values and dignity alongside the pursuit of cars and apartments." (371)
Age of Ambition is broken into three parts: Fortune, Truth, and Faith. Osnos provides solid commentary on each theme, weaving the stories of his interviewees into each section with impressive fluidity. Osnos’s cast of characters is broad and diverse; it includes a Taiwanese military man who defected to China, a female media mogul, Ai Weiwei (the internationally-acclaimed artist), a young conservative nationalist with training in Western philosophy, a young man obsessed with mastering the English language, a blind lawyer put under house arrest for questioning the government, and more.
Each tale adds its own spice to Age of Ambition, but as an American, I became enthralled by the myriad ways contemporary China has imitated the United States while also working very hard to set itself apart from all of Western culture. For example, when fledgling Party propagandists wanted to learn the tricks of the trade, they looked to America, “the holy land of public relations” (118). China rapidly adapted a distinctly American tool to bolster a distinctly anti-American (or at least anti-democratic) government. This dynamic comes up again and again in Age of Ambition, with Chinese individuals constantly negotiating with a cultural attitude toward America that appears admiring, supercilious, aspirational, jealous, and spiteful all at once.
Osnos dives deeply into the question of how China’s modernization has affected Chinese identity. He identifies a “paradox of ambition” stemming from the fundamental contraction of an authoritarian state overseeing a booming private sector: “The Party was sparking individual ambition and self-creation in one half of life and suppressing those tendencies in the other” (150). Referring to the lasting impact of China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution, one of Osnos’s subjects asserts: “We cast aside our three core ideas––Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism––and that was a mistake” (107-8). A toxic form of Marxism quickly filled the void, and then was injected with rampant capitalism as China “opened up” to a larger role in international trade. But, as Osnos points out, capitalism is an economic system, and not a particularly effective means of generating or maintaining cultural identity:
"In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own." (306)
The icons that have come to dominate this rootless landscape are familiar to anyone with a passing interest in world affairs: opulent displays of wealth, crony capitalism, vulgar and insipid media, blind consumerism, and growing socioeconomic inequality. As in America, “China’s new fortunes were wildly out of balance” (267). The nature and scope of Chinese corruption seems to have a flavor all its own, but its underpinnings are present throughout the globalized world. Osnos reflects on this situation with an image that applies as easily to any struggling Western democracy as it does to modern China:
"The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat––because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe––progress was beyond their imagination. Everyone else could run as far and fast as their legs would carry them, but they would only be able to watch the caboose shrink into the distance." (271)
So what to make of all this? For me, Age of Ambition inspired fear and admiration in about equal measure. I read the book because a dear friend of mine recently lived in China for a time, and came away from the experience distressed by what he saw as a deeply repressive and increasingly aggressive nation with a huge and needy population. Without the chance to make that judgment for myself, I must admit that I’m far more fearful of the new government in my homeland than one far across the Pacific, at least for the moment. And then the sadness really sinks in, because fear is perhaps the only emotion currently shared by everyone alive on Earth––the commonplace tragedy that unites and divides us.
As the reasons for informed cynicism continue to mount, I take solace in the knowledge that thinkers like Osnos will continue to provide us with exemplary texts to improve our minds and defend civilization from its worst self.
This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.
December 5, 2023
Insightful book on inner working mechanisms of the Chinese government and the society. Was appalled to know the extent of wealth inequality in China which might one day lead to the possible collapse of the CCP.
October 12, 2014
This is the best book I've read so far on China. It helps you understand the odd dichotomy of big government and free market capitalism that exists there. Something that the vast majority of westerns including myself fail to really understand. That is not a simple topic to summarize but the author presented it - not as a rigid historical background - but as a mix of stories, biographies, of real fascinating people in China. Combining many of the articles the author has written for the New Yorker on China.
It explains not only how the government got to it's current state but also why it's not going away anytime soon. The book demonstrated that a surprising amount of people in China are still embracing it; seeing it as necessary and helpful to their advancement in the world. And are critical and resistant to the flawed western democracies they see on TV.
The author expertly avoided bias from his presentation of the situation and I should note it is hardly a defense or criticism of the Party or its supporters.
One unexpected result of reading this book was how it gave me a greater critical eye just not at China - but of our western countries due to the outside perspective provided by the young and old Chinese people he interviewed. Through the book you discover how common a perspective it is among the Chinese that even though Americans are highly critical of China's government, anyone with a critical eye can see that the American government is extremely similar to China's over-bearing state in many ways. One example is how the US gov touches every market and industry, not just at home but globally and loves over-policing and militarization.
So ultimately you must credit China for having at least one thing going for it: their government is honest about their oppression. They just may not be as good at obscuring it as other countries.
I can't stop talking about this book among my friends. Highly recommended.
It explains not only how the government got to it's current state but also why it's not going away anytime soon. The book demonstrated that a surprising amount of people in China are still embracing it; seeing it as necessary and helpful to their advancement in the world. And are critical and resistant to the flawed western democracies they see on TV.
The author expertly avoided bias from his presentation of the situation and I should note it is hardly a defense or criticism of the Party or its supporters.
One unexpected result of reading this book was how it gave me a greater critical eye just not at China - but of our western countries due to the outside perspective provided by the young and old Chinese people he interviewed. Through the book you discover how common a perspective it is among the Chinese that even though Americans are highly critical of China's government, anyone with a critical eye can see that the American government is extremely similar to China's over-bearing state in many ways. One example is how the US gov touches every market and industry, not just at home but globally and loves over-policing and militarization.
So ultimately you must credit China for having at least one thing going for it: their government is honest about their oppression. They just may not be as good at obscuring it as other countries.
I can't stop talking about this book among my friends. Highly recommended.
December 10, 2014
Evan Osnos lived in China, specifically Beijing, from 2008 to 2013, covering the enormous changes in that nation as it embraces it own brand of capitalism (and the enormous implications, local and global, of those changes) for the New Yorker. I hadn't read any of Osnos's pieces for the magazine before picking up Age of Ambition, which just won this year's National Book Award, but I imagine much of this lengthy, impressively-reported portrait falls within the previously published category. Or, at least, it feels that way, like a bunch of strung-together long-forms, each meandering in standard New Yorker fashion, but to me never quite cohering into a book. Not that there aren't plenty of interesting and engaging moments here, as well as keen insights sharpened still further from his years spent on the ground, talking to an astonishing array of people who embody the "new China" where, as you can tell from the book's title, ambition reigns supreme, with all of the good (hundred of millions of people actually have plenty to eat these days) and the bad (government repression of speech, vast income gap, spiritual and ethical bankruptcy, country- (and planet-) wide environmental nightmare) that comes with that dubious distinction. For example, the many riffs on censorship were fascinating, I thought, how the Party has had to become so open and unashamed in the internet-age about what you can and cannot ask, write about, search for, photograph. Foreign journos like Osnos receive daily texts on what's newly off-limits, and the Propaganda Bureau constantly updates its list of blocked search terms, driven by the events of the day and the code phrases used by crafty bloggers to get around the restrictions. Also notable is how rapidly rampant capitalism, China-style, has destroyed whatever soul the country may have had, as people are willing to accept almost anything, including corruption on a mind-boggling scale, as long as they feel like they are "getting theirs". But while the big-picture stuff was all pretty great, many of the stories Osnos tells to get us there feel a little stale, like years-old news but told with a weekly-magazine immediacy. The best (worst) example of this are the long Ai Weiwei chapters, which feel lifted straight from the pages of 2011 or whatever, adding no perspective to the often-told (for example, in the great documentary Never Sorry, or even at the recent Brooklyn Museum exhibition) tale. And there are other things like that, about much less famous people, lengthy profiles that no longer feel particularly relevant to "Beijing today", nor important enough to warrant inclusion in history. If you want an overview of China of the last decade, Age of Ambition is a solid choice. Beijing Welcomes You, by Tom Socca, on the city's transformation for the recent Olympics (often with devastating results) is also good.
November 25, 2015
China is far too large and complex for a single book to take the full measure of the country. Instead, Age of Ambition explores three themes: economic changes; censorship; and personal values and ethics. Drawing on Osnos' eight years as a reporter based in China, the book follows a loosely chronological path, and the author does an amazing job weaving his themes around a score of characters - real people he got to know from different walks of life. Although I've read other books about China, almost eveything here was somewhat new, or took events I'd heard about in the news and fit them into a much more comprehensible context.
At one point, Osnos wrestles with his choice to give so much space to a relatively small number of dissidents in the middle section of the book. On the other hand, as he points out, the question of how the Party will adapt to increasing public pressure to allow freer expression - and how it will get a handle on rampant corruption - is of vital importance to the nation's future. The most disturbing part of Osnos' story is the degree to which the Party really is committed to tight control of ideas, news coverage, and public debate. This book is particularly good at conveying what it feels like for a variety of critics to operate under that scrutiny, and the personal and professional prices they are forced to pay. Topics that receive mention but relatively little discussion include China's environment; status of minority peoples; the colonization of western China and Tibet; China's foreign policy. But there are other good books on each of these issues, and Age of Ambition offers superb insight into the themes it focuses on.
At one point, Osnos wrestles with his choice to give so much space to a relatively small number of dissidents in the middle section of the book. On the other hand, as he points out, the question of how the Party will adapt to increasing public pressure to allow freer expression - and how it will get a handle on rampant corruption - is of vital importance to the nation's future. The most disturbing part of Osnos' story is the degree to which the Party really is committed to tight control of ideas, news coverage, and public debate. This book is particularly good at conveying what it feels like for a variety of critics to operate under that scrutiny, and the personal and professional prices they are forced to pay. Topics that receive mention but relatively little discussion include China's environment; status of minority peoples; the colonization of western China and Tibet; China's foreign policy. But there are other good books on each of these issues, and Age of Ambition offers superb insight into the themes it focuses on.
November 5, 2025
4.5/5 this was everything i was hoping it would be! Osnos tells the stories of chinese dissidents, influencers, writers and economists in a way that makes me think.. only in such a big and unusual country could there be people living such crazy/exciting/unimaginable lives. he puts each of these individual stories in a broader context to provide a big picture view of the changes in china between 2005 and 2013. I was especially struck by tang jie and the impassioned nationalism of some of the chinese youth in that period. From the west, its easy to view the chinese approach to govt as backwards and wrong, but i think it must be true that there is more than one way to be a prosperous and happy nation. for china, why does it have to be the western way? Of course, the book also covers many problems with the ccp including corruption and restrictions on free speech.
May 18, 2019
I planned to read this book three years ago, the last time when I visited China. I did not finish, maybe because it is really not a captivating book in any sense.
This book is quite disappointing to me. It caters to western readers, especially the intellectual or social elites. It reads like a McKinsey report written on the topics of some anti-China websites . Even though Osnos had lived in China for quite some time, it seems to me he never really understood China. He portrayed China from a cliched political perspective, and fail to see it from a humane and deeper one. It is not unexpected all of his interviewees are at the extreme of human existence - social elites, or political activists, or high-rank officials, or extremely pitiful young man who I can tell not representative at all. Who can you interview if you want to portray Chinese society as a political drama, right? But even in those interview, I think he constantly failed to understand or analyze deeper motivations. He was only able to comment well when the viewpoints align with his.
I know the journalists, the ones I like the most, like Peter Hessler or Svetlana Alexievich, would present the interviewee's dialog as it is. Theirs read warm and truthful, but Osnos' reads like lame translation from Chinese to English.
I think it is fair to say that those cliche political dramas are indeed part of what is China, and those people are indeed representative to a small percentage of Chinese.. China is a huge country. There are many Chinese people. One can see or understand it from different perspectives. Osnos chose the most banal one.
This book is quite disappointing to me. It caters to western readers, especially the intellectual or social elites. It reads like a McKinsey report written on the topics of some anti-China websites . Even though Osnos had lived in China for quite some time, it seems to me he never really understood China. He portrayed China from a cliched political perspective, and fail to see it from a humane and deeper one. It is not unexpected all of his interviewees are at the extreme of human existence - social elites, or political activists, or high-rank officials, or extremely pitiful young man who I can tell not representative at all. Who can you interview if you want to portray Chinese society as a political drama, right? But even in those interview, I think he constantly failed to understand or analyze deeper motivations. He was only able to comment well when the viewpoints align with his.
I know the journalists, the ones I like the most, like Peter Hessler or Svetlana Alexievich, would present the interviewee's dialog as it is. Theirs read warm and truthful, but Osnos' reads like lame translation from Chinese to English.
I think it is fair to say that those cliche political dramas are indeed part of what is China, and those people are indeed representative to a small percentage of Chinese.. China is a huge country. There are many Chinese people. One can see or understand it from different perspectives. Osnos chose the most banal one.
July 18, 2016
Nothing groundbreaking.
But for Americans who are trying to understand China today, this book provides quite a few fair reflections: Foxconn suicides aren't all about "sweatshop" labor, in studies of Chinese people and anecdotes of Macao casinos Chinese people seem to gamble and take risks a lot more than Americans, public censors/50 cent party/propoganda is even worse than most Americans might realize (but it doesn't quite fool a public probably best described as apathetic), and the Internet is ubiquitous. I also liked the three narratives of fortune, truth, and faith that the book follows.
Ive heard challenges against specific judgements by Osnos, such as Han Han. He also admits to the difficulty of choosing between producing content on people in the spotlight: rowdy dissidents, rich business owners, Bo Xilai and the everyday lives of the Chinese. Mostly he focuses on the former in this book, and as evident by the proportions of his stories, public dissidents much more willingly divulge their lives and thoughts than government censors (or even everyday Chinese people), so it might leave out other understandings such as family structures and support, differences in the regions of China, the plight of hukou.
Still for anyone trying to develop an intuition of China, this is a great book to read!
But for Americans who are trying to understand China today, this book provides quite a few fair reflections: Foxconn suicides aren't all about "sweatshop" labor, in studies of Chinese people and anecdotes of Macao casinos Chinese people seem to gamble and take risks a lot more than Americans, public censors/50 cent party/propoganda is even worse than most Americans might realize (but it doesn't quite fool a public probably best described as apathetic), and the Internet is ubiquitous. I also liked the three narratives of fortune, truth, and faith that the book follows.
Ive heard challenges against specific judgements by Osnos, such as Han Han. He also admits to the difficulty of choosing between producing content on people in the spotlight: rowdy dissidents, rich business owners, Bo Xilai and the everyday lives of the Chinese. Mostly he focuses on the former in this book, and as evident by the proportions of his stories, public dissidents much more willingly divulge their lives and thoughts than government censors (or even everyday Chinese people), so it might leave out other understandings such as family structures and support, differences in the regions of China, the plight of hukou.
Still for anyone trying to develop an intuition of China, this is a great book to read!
April 20, 2017
Growing up in a Western liberal democracy, I held my Chinese heritage in contempt. I didn't understand my parents' generation, who lived through the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and eventually left China in the late 1990s to pursue better lives. I saw in them the remnants of attitudes birthed in the era of Communist rule: a scarcity mindset, collectivist attitudes.
Thankfully, with time, I lost my disdain for my parents' culture. I didn't come much closer to understanding it until I read Age of Ambition.
This book was remarkable because it was both historically enlightening and personally meaningful. It shed light on corruption in politics, crackdowns on dissidents, the rise of cities and railways, and large-scale migrations towards the cities. It also takes deeply personal routes at times, introducing the reader to people who built media empires that later fell out of favour with the government and aspiring English masters alike. Most of all, it piqued in me an interest about China - and brought me closer to comprehending its intersection with my past.
Thankfully, with time, I lost my disdain for my parents' culture. I didn't come much closer to understanding it until I read Age of Ambition.
This book was remarkable because it was both historically enlightening and personally meaningful. It shed light on corruption in politics, crackdowns on dissidents, the rise of cities and railways, and large-scale migrations towards the cities. It also takes deeply personal routes at times, introducing the reader to people who built media empires that later fell out of favour with the government and aspiring English masters alike. Most of all, it piqued in me an interest about China - and brought me closer to comprehending its intersection with my past.
December 6, 2019
I heard about this book on Fareed Zakaria and I was intrigued! I know little about Chinese history, modern or ancient, and had wanted to gain more knowledge. This book is broad sweeping in scope but also very personal in depth. The journalist who wrote it deals with Chinese modern history by explaining how the systemic changes the nation underwent as they touched the lives of every day people. I listened to this on audible and it was read very well.
August 19, 2021
This book did and did not align with my experiences in China. More of the later, which puzzled me until I was able to sort it out.
Evan follows the lives of six Chinese citizens: a sculptor, an artist, an economist, two English teachers, and a journalist/publicist. Once introduced the book circles back to their experiences. Interwoven are the events in China during the eras from Deng Xiaopeng to Hu Jintao. We read about the opening of China’s economy and the opportunities created leading to both a growing middle class and new rich.
Evan uses the lives of these six to highlight public reactions to tragic events in China: the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and the collapsing of a school, the 2011 high-speed train collision in Wenzhou, or the 2011 hit-and-run of a two-year-old who was ignored by at least eighteen people before she was brought to a hospital. These are specific events allowing exploration of public reactions and/or ambivalence. All led to public outcries with the former focused on the role of graft and corruption. The later, implied guilt of bystanders.
The hypothesis of the book is that China’s citizens are awakening to individuality, transparency, and religion. We read about China’s propaganda machine and censorship, the artists arrests, and the journalists challenges in publishing truth and how much “truth” can pass the censors.
I’ve seen some of what Evan describes but because the book was published in 2014 it doesn’t cover the changes in China since Xi Jinping took over. Much of the opening of personal liberties that Deng Xiaopeng allowed are not now allowed. What I see in China is a population happy for the income middle class jobs allow but not prepared to take public positions of discontent. Nationalism is stronger than discord.
It was interesting reading Evan’s perspective. He lived in China between 2005 and 2013, speaks Chinese, and had direct access to the subjects he wrote about. That said, I think the changes since 2013 don’t support Evan’s hypothesis. The book is a good snapshot for the two decades from Deng Xiaopeng to Hu Jintao but an updated version is needed. We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State is a better read.
Evan follows the lives of six Chinese citizens: a sculptor, an artist, an economist, two English teachers, and a journalist/publicist. Once introduced the book circles back to their experiences. Interwoven are the events in China during the eras from Deng Xiaopeng to Hu Jintao. We read about the opening of China’s economy and the opportunities created leading to both a growing middle class and new rich.
Evan uses the lives of these six to highlight public reactions to tragic events in China: the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan and the collapsing of a school, the 2011 high-speed train collision in Wenzhou, or the 2011 hit-and-run of a two-year-old who was ignored by at least eighteen people before she was brought to a hospital. These are specific events allowing exploration of public reactions and/or ambivalence. All led to public outcries with the former focused on the role of graft and corruption. The later, implied guilt of bystanders.
The hypothesis of the book is that China’s citizens are awakening to individuality, transparency, and religion. We read about China’s propaganda machine and censorship, the artists arrests, and the journalists challenges in publishing truth and how much “truth” can pass the censors.
I’ve seen some of what Evan describes but because the book was published in 2014 it doesn’t cover the changes in China since Xi Jinping took over. Much of the opening of personal liberties that Deng Xiaopeng allowed are not now allowed. What I see in China is a population happy for the income middle class jobs allow but not prepared to take public positions of discontent. Nationalism is stronger than discord.
It was interesting reading Evan’s perspective. He lived in China between 2005 and 2013, speaks Chinese, and had direct access to the subjects he wrote about. That said, I think the changes since 2013 don’t support Evan’s hypothesis. The book is a good snapshot for the two decades from Deng Xiaopeng to Hu Jintao but an updated version is needed. We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State is a better read.
January 26, 2019
One of the most memorable books I’ve come across in a long time!
‘But in the China that I encountered, the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories—stories of flesh and blood, of idiosyncrasies and solitary struggles. It is a time when the ties between the world’s two most powerful countries, China and the United States, can be tested by the aspirations of a lone peasant lawyer who chose the day and the hour in which to alter his fate. It is the age of the changeling, when the daughter of a farmer can propel herself from the assembly line to the boardroom so fast that she never has time to shed the manners and anxieties of the village. It is a moment when the individual became a gale force in political, economic, and private life, so central to the self-image of a rising generation that a coal miner’s son can grow up to believe that nothing matters more to him than seeing his name on the cover of a book.’
‘China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison.’
‘Two scholars, Yinqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, tracked the paths of Chinese families from 1989 to 2006 and found a “high degree of inequality of opportunity.” They wrote, “The basic idea behind the market reforms was that by enabling some citizens to become rich this would in turn help the rest to become rich as well. Our analysis shows that at least so far there are few traces of the reforms leveling the playing field.” They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.” A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found “a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility.” Writing in 2010, the authors ranked “urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world.”
Even before they had statistics to prove it, people described new divisions emerging in their society; they no longer simply parsed the distinctions between Bobos and DINKs (double income, no kids) and the New Middle-Income Stratum. There was now a line between the white-collar class and what people called the “black-collar class.” An anonymous author circulated an essay that defined it: “Their clothes are black. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden—like a man wearing black, standing in the dark.”
“At its extremes, the frustration was explosive. By 2010 the number of strikes, riots, and other “mass incidents” had doubled in five years to 180,000 a year—almost 500 incidents a day, according to the government’s statistics. On July 24, 2009, steelworkers in Jilin Province, fearing layoffs, attacked the general manager, a young graduate named Chen Guojun, beating him to death with bricks and clubs, and blocking police and ambulances. When the Party broke up disturbances like this, it often said the problem was members of the “masses who didn’t know the truth.”
‘In January 2010 a nineteen-year-old named Ma Xiangqian jumped from the roof of his factory dormitory at Foxconn Technology, the maker of iPhones and other electronics. He had worked on the assembly line seven nights a week, eleven hours at a stretch, before being demoted to cleaning toilets. In the months after Ma’s death, thirteen other Foxconn workers committed suicide. People wondered if it was spreading like a fever, and they pointed out that the cluster of suicides was still under the rate expected for a factory as large as a city.
Foxconn installed nets around the roofs of its buildings and boosted wages, and the suicides diminished as abruptly as they had begun. Outsiders were quick to imagine a sweatshop, but this explanation was not quite right. When therapists were brought in to Foxconn to meet workers, they found what sociologists had begun to detect in surveys of the new middle class: the first generation of assembly-line workers had been grateful just to be off the farm, but this generation compared themselves to wealthier peers. “What is the most common feeling in China today?” the Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua wrote in 2012. “I think many people would say disappointment. This feeling comes from the insufficient improvement in lives amid rapid economic growth. It also comes from the contrast between the degree to which
individual social status is rising and the idea of the ‘rise of a great and powerful nation.’”
I noticed that people were still invoking The Great Gatsby as an analogy for their moment in China’s rise, but now the reference carried a sinister new connotation. They pointed to a study known as the Great Gatsby curve, conducted by labor economist Miles Corak, which produced further evidence that China had one of the world’s lowest levels of social mobility. A Chinese blogger read it and wrote, “The sons of rats will only dig holes … Birth determines class.”
“Mao’s touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango’? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.”
“Outsiders often saw the Chinese as pragmatists with little time for faith, but for thousands of years the country had been knitted together by beliefs and rituals. ....
... But the longer I stayed in China, the more I sought to understand the changes that were harder to glimpse—the quests for meaning. Nothing had caused more upheaval in the last hundred years of Chinese history than the battle over what to believe. I wanted to know what life was like for men and women trying to decide what mattered most, and I didn’t have to look far. In the bookstores of my neighborhood, the Chinese titles included A Guidebook for the Soul and What Do We Live For? From my front door, I could walk to every point on the compass and find a different answer.”
“Little Yueyue was struck twice, first by the front wheel, then by the rear, her upper body, then her lower. She came to rest beside a bale of merchandise, and she lay motionless except for the faint movement of her left arm.
Twenty seconds after she was struck, a man on foot, wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, approached. He looked in her direction and slowed. Then he walked on. Five seconds later, a motorbike passed; the driver peered over his shoulder, toward the child, but did not slow down. Ten seconds after that, another man passed, looked in her direction, and kept walking. Nine seconds later, a small truck approached and it, too, hit Little Yueyue, rolling over her legs and continuing on.
More people passed—a figure in a blue raincoat, a rider in a black T-shirt, a worker loading goods at the intersection. A man on a motorbike stared at her and talked to a shop owner, before they hurried away. Four minutes after the initial collision, the eleventh person to approach was a woman holding the hand of a little girl. She ran a store nearby, and she, too, had picked up her daughter from school. She stopped, asked a shopkeeper about the child in the road, and then darted off, hurrying her daughter away from the scene. On they came: a rider on a motorbike, a man on foot, a worker from the shop on the corner.
At 5:31, six minutes after the girl was hit, a small woman carrying bags of salvaged cans and bottles approached. She was the eighteenth passerby. But she did not pass. She dropped her bags and tried to lift Little Yueyue in her arms. She heard the child groan, and her small body crumpled like dead weight. The woman was an illiterate grandmother named Chen Xianmei, who recycled trash and scrap metal for a living. She pulled the child’s body closer to the curb, and then she peered around for help. She approached nearby shopkeepers, but one was busy with a customer; another told her, “That child is not mine.” Chen tried the next block, shouting for help, and there she encountered the mother, Qu Feifei, who was searching desperately for her daughter. Chen led her to the roadside. The mother crouched on the asphalt, wrapped Little Yueyue in her arms, and began to run.
Ambulances are rare in China, so mother and father loaded their daughter into the small family Buick. When they reached Huangqi Hospital, fifteen minutes away, nurses in pink uniforms were attending to a stream of arrivals. The waiting room was clean and well built, but the signs on the walls warned people of the perils that cling to China’s health care system. One sign advised them against trying to bribe a doctor for better care; another warned against “Appointment Scalpers.” It said, IF A STRANGER CLAIMS TO HAVE A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH A SPECIALIST, AND TRIES TO LEAD YOU OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, DON’T BE FOOLED.
Doctors discovered that Little Yueyue had a skull fracture and serious damage to the brain. At first, local reporters figured it was a typical hit-and-run. Then they saw the surveillance video. Instantly, the story of the seventeen passersby began to spread across China, and it provoked a surge of self-recrimination. The writer Zhang Lijia asked, “How can we possibly win respect and play the role of a world leader if this is a nation with 1.4 billion cold hearts?”
‘But in the China that I encountered, the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories—stories of flesh and blood, of idiosyncrasies and solitary struggles. It is a time when the ties between the world’s two most powerful countries, China and the United States, can be tested by the aspirations of a lone peasant lawyer who chose the day and the hour in which to alter his fate. It is the age of the changeling, when the daughter of a farmer can propel herself from the assembly line to the boardroom so fast that she never has time to shed the manners and anxieties of the village. It is a moment when the individual became a gale force in political, economic, and private life, so central to the self-image of a rising generation that a coal miner’s son can grow up to believe that nothing matters more to him than seeing his name on the cover of a book.’
‘China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison.’
‘Two scholars, Yinqiang Zhang and Tor Eriksson, tracked the paths of Chinese families from 1989 to 2006 and found a “high degree of inequality of opportunity.” They wrote, “The basic idea behind the market reforms was that by enabling some citizens to become rich this would in turn help the rest to become rich as well. Our analysis shows that at least so far there are few traces of the reforms leveling the playing field.” They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.” A separate study of parents and children in Chinese cities found “a strikingly low level of intergenerational mobility.” Writing in 2010, the authors ranked “urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world.”
Even before they had statistics to prove it, people described new divisions emerging in their society; they no longer simply parsed the distinctions between Bobos and DINKs (double income, no kids) and the New Middle-Income Stratum. There was now a line between the white-collar class and what people called the “black-collar class.” An anonymous author circulated an essay that defined it: “Their clothes are black. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden—like a man wearing black, standing in the dark.”
“At its extremes, the frustration was explosive. By 2010 the number of strikes, riots, and other “mass incidents” had doubled in five years to 180,000 a year—almost 500 incidents a day, according to the government’s statistics. On July 24, 2009, steelworkers in Jilin Province, fearing layoffs, attacked the general manager, a young graduate named Chen Guojun, beating him to death with bricks and clubs, and blocking police and ambulances. When the Party broke up disturbances like this, it often said the problem was members of the “masses who didn’t know the truth.”
‘In January 2010 a nineteen-year-old named Ma Xiangqian jumped from the roof of his factory dormitory at Foxconn Technology, the maker of iPhones and other electronics. He had worked on the assembly line seven nights a week, eleven hours at a stretch, before being demoted to cleaning toilets. In the months after Ma’s death, thirteen other Foxconn workers committed suicide. People wondered if it was spreading like a fever, and they pointed out that the cluster of suicides was still under the rate expected for a factory as large as a city.
Foxconn installed nets around the roofs of its buildings and boosted wages, and the suicides diminished as abruptly as they had begun. Outsiders were quick to imagine a sweatshop, but this explanation was not quite right. When therapists were brought in to Foxconn to meet workers, they found what sociologists had begun to detect in surveys of the new middle class: the first generation of assembly-line workers had been grateful just to be off the farm, but this generation compared themselves to wealthier peers. “What is the most common feeling in China today?” the Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua wrote in 2012. “I think many people would say disappointment. This feeling comes from the insufficient improvement in lives amid rapid economic growth. It also comes from the contrast between the degree to which
individual social status is rising and the idea of the ‘rise of a great and powerful nation.’”
I noticed that people were still invoking The Great Gatsby as an analogy for their moment in China’s rise, but now the reference carried a sinister new connotation. They pointed to a study known as the Great Gatsby curve, conducted by labor economist Miles Corak, which produced further evidence that China had one of the world’s lowest levels of social mobility. A Chinese blogger read it and wrote, “The sons of rats will only dig holes … Birth determines class.”
“Mao’s touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango’? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.”
“Outsiders often saw the Chinese as pragmatists with little time for faith, but for thousands of years the country had been knitted together by beliefs and rituals. ....
... But the longer I stayed in China, the more I sought to understand the changes that were harder to glimpse—the quests for meaning. Nothing had caused more upheaval in the last hundred years of Chinese history than the battle over what to believe. I wanted to know what life was like for men and women trying to decide what mattered most, and I didn’t have to look far. In the bookstores of my neighborhood, the Chinese titles included A Guidebook for the Soul and What Do We Live For? From my front door, I could walk to every point on the compass and find a different answer.”
“Little Yueyue was struck twice, first by the front wheel, then by the rear, her upper body, then her lower. She came to rest beside a bale of merchandise, and she lay motionless except for the faint movement of her left arm.
Twenty seconds after she was struck, a man on foot, wearing a white shirt and dark trousers, approached. He looked in her direction and slowed. Then he walked on. Five seconds later, a motorbike passed; the driver peered over his shoulder, toward the child, but did not slow down. Ten seconds after that, another man passed, looked in her direction, and kept walking. Nine seconds later, a small truck approached and it, too, hit Little Yueyue, rolling over her legs and continuing on.
More people passed—a figure in a blue raincoat, a rider in a black T-shirt, a worker loading goods at the intersection. A man on a motorbike stared at her and talked to a shop owner, before they hurried away. Four minutes after the initial collision, the eleventh person to approach was a woman holding the hand of a little girl. She ran a store nearby, and she, too, had picked up her daughter from school. She stopped, asked a shopkeeper about the child in the road, and then darted off, hurrying her daughter away from the scene. On they came: a rider on a motorbike, a man on foot, a worker from the shop on the corner.
At 5:31, six minutes after the girl was hit, a small woman carrying bags of salvaged cans and bottles approached. She was the eighteenth passerby. But she did not pass. She dropped her bags and tried to lift Little Yueyue in her arms. She heard the child groan, and her small body crumpled like dead weight. The woman was an illiterate grandmother named Chen Xianmei, who recycled trash and scrap metal for a living. She pulled the child’s body closer to the curb, and then she peered around for help. She approached nearby shopkeepers, but one was busy with a customer; another told her, “That child is not mine.” Chen tried the next block, shouting for help, and there she encountered the mother, Qu Feifei, who was searching desperately for her daughter. Chen led her to the roadside. The mother crouched on the asphalt, wrapped Little Yueyue in her arms, and began to run.
Ambulances are rare in China, so mother and father loaded their daughter into the small family Buick. When they reached Huangqi Hospital, fifteen minutes away, nurses in pink uniforms were attending to a stream of arrivals. The waiting room was clean and well built, but the signs on the walls warned people of the perils that cling to China’s health care system. One sign advised them against trying to bribe a doctor for better care; another warned against “Appointment Scalpers.” It said, IF A STRANGER CLAIMS TO HAVE A CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH A SPECIALIST, AND TRIES TO LEAD YOU OUTSIDE THE HOSPITAL, DON’T BE FOOLED.
Doctors discovered that Little Yueyue had a skull fracture and serious damage to the brain. At first, local reporters figured it was a typical hit-and-run. Then they saw the surveillance video. Instantly, the story of the seventeen passersby began to spread across China, and it provoked a surge of self-recrimination. The writer Zhang Lijia asked, “How can we possibly win respect and play the role of a world leader if this is a nation with 1.4 billion cold hearts?”
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