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Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos

4.25 · Rating details · 6,261 ratings · 667 reviews

From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: 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 ...more

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Hardcover, 403 pages

Published May 13th 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Jun 28, 2014 Mark Hiew rated it it was amazing

Shelves: china

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 ...more

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Oct 03, 2015 Missy J rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2015-books, china-related, non-fiction, asia-related

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 As China is a constantly changing country, I'm sometimes frustrated by how quickly outdated books become.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 ...more

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Aug 30, 2014 Wei Liu rated it it was ok

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.

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Jul 06, 2014 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, audio, asia, foreign-affairs, social-science, journalism

I dont think anyone could argue that Evan Osnos wasnt 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 hed 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 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

"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.
...more

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Dec 29, 2014 Mal Warwick rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

Age of Ambition won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2014, and no wonder. Nothing Ive 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 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. ...more

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Apr 11, 2018 Sci-(Fi) Nerd Mario rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2-humanities

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 ...more

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Oct 12, 2014 Dan McGrady rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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May 10, 2019 Raghu rated it it was amazing

I look at Chinas 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 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.

...more

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Nov 23, 2016 Miles rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Evan Osnoss Age of Ambition is packed with detailed observations and curious facts that will edify anyone looking to learn about modern Chinas domestic structure and growing role on the international stage. Osnos is a talented writer whose style can be described as humanist nonfictiona series of interview-based narratives organized by theme and supported by ancillary research. It reminds of me George Packers exceptional book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which is having a ...more

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Jul 05, 2016 Willy Xiao rated it it was ok

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 ...more

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Sep 03, 2014 Murtaza rated it really liked it

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 ...more

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Feb 28, 2017 Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

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.

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Dec 05, 2019 Jacob rated it it was amazing

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.

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Dec 10, 2014 Scott rated it liked it

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 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. ...more

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Jan 25, 2019 Anima rated it really liked it

One of the most memorable books Ive 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 storiesstories of flesh and blood, of idiosyncrasies and solitary struggles. It is a time when the ties between the worlds 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 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?” ...more

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Dec 31, 2014 Gary Beauregard Bottomley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The last ten years of China is told by mostly telling the stories through second person accounts of people the author has interviewed. He tells the story with three different perspectives at play, China's phenomena growth, the corruption and intimidation the government uses, and the third perspective of what the author refers to as faith, by that he means a belief in tradition and a distrust in the system working fairly for the individual.

At first, I thought the author was giving too many second ...more

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May 17, 2019 Xinyu rated it did not like it

Shelves: society-culture, 2008-2018, on-china

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 ...more

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Oct 25, 2015 Grady rated it it was amazing

Shelves: china

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, ...more

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Apr 19, 2017 Shirley rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Aug 31, 2019 Nick rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Evan Osnos was based in China from 2005 to 2013, working for the New Yorker magazine and the Chicago Tribune. This book especially resonated with me, having lived there myself from 2005 to 2009, living through some of the events he covers such as the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics and milk formula poisonings. As well as being a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, I found many of his observations about life in China and the Chinese people really hit the mark.

Age of Ambition is subtitled Chasing Evan Osnos was based in China from 2005 to 2013, working for the New Yorker magazine and the Chicago Tribune. This book especially resonated with me, having lived there myself from 2005 to 2009, living through some of the events he covers such as the Sichuan earthquake, the Olympics and milk formula poisonings. As well as being a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, I found many of his observations about life in China and the Chinese people really hit the mark.

Age of Ambition is subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, and this provides the structure for the book which is divided into three parts: Fortune, Truth and Faith. Part 1: Fortune is for me the best section. Osnos writes with wry, gentle humour, introducing us to some memorable individuals and their foibles. (My favourites were Michael the obsessive English learner and Guide Li, an ultra-wary European tour guide.)

Then the book's tone shifts in Part 2: Truth, the longest section of the book. Here Osnos examines China's dissidents and internal critics, as well as the Chinese government's efforts to silence dissenting voices through intimidation, arrests and censorship. Osnos can still make the wry observation: he gains access to a text message service from the Central Propaganda Department that sends out pithy instructions to the Chinese media on how to cover sensitive topics. Osnos occasionally inserts these messages into the narrative, a kind of Orwellian running gag:

"All websites are required to remove immediately the article entitled, 'In China, 94% Unhappy with Wealth Disproportionately Concentrated at the Top'".

Despite the muted humour, a reader's reaction while reading Part 2 is more likely to be one of anger and condemnation over the government's treatment of those who dare to criticise it. There's a particularly grim chapter centred on a high-speed rail crash that left 40 dead (which the Chinese government initially tried to cover up). The treatment of crusading blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei are also quite harrowing.

By focusing so much on the negatives of modern China, Osnos runs the risk of seeming biased, his journalism unbalanced. He relates a personal story where at a Beijing dinner party one of his expat acquaintances rebuked him for a negative article he had written: "Stop embarrassing China!" he is told. And I must admit, having lived in China myself, enjoying it immensely and meeting so many wonderful people there, I could sympathise with the angry expat. Osnos to his credit recognises that his stories could be seen as disproportionately negative and spends a couple of pages arguing his case for choosing to write on the subjects he does.

The final part of the book is entitled Faith, and there is some coverage of the resurgence of interest in religion, including Christianity, as well as in traditional Chinese belief systems like Confucianism and the quasi-religion that is nationalism. Some chapters in Part 3 felt shoehorned into the section. There's a chilling account of a toddler victim of a hit-and-run, the most disturbing part of which was that seventeen passers-by ignored the dying 2 year-old girl as they stepped around her. Osnos presented this as evidence that spiritually, ethically, morally, Chinese society as a whole may have lost its way. In Part 3: Faith the book also returns to some of the individuals introduced earlier. Michael the English student seemed to have lost all faith in his own ability to achieve success.

As well as being an insightful examination of Chinese society, politics and economics, one of the real strengths of the book is Osnos' intrepid and tenacious journalism. He meets with many of his subjects on multiple occasions, often travelling across the country to interview them in different locations, such as travelling to novelist-turned-blogger Han Han's rural home town. And Osnos has a novelist's flair for observation, honing in on a mannerism, a gesture, a turn of speech, to illuminate another side of his subject or make his subject a more rounded, fully-developed personality.

I was so impressed by this book that I immediately searched for other books by the author. Sadly this appears to be Evan Osnos' only full-length book. ...more

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Mar 31, 2019 Rachel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: hd

Really great book showcasing life in China for many different types of people in the past few decades. Osnos does a great job balancing Chinese vs Western values and perspectives, which is valuable. This book gave a lot of insight into the experiences of Chinese people as they work to follow their dreams, I really enjoyed seeing how the thought process of Chinese people in these situations differs from my own and thinking about what that says about the country. Each of these chapters reads like ...more

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Apr 19, 2018 Menno Vis rated it really liked it

Great insight in the recent hiatory of China. Nice to read and very interesting to read about this amazing and fast developing country.

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Nov 01, 2014 Marks54 rated it really liked it

This is a book by a journalist with the New Yorker who has spent a lot of time in the new China. It appears to be a collection of stories that originally appeared elsewhere. The general themes consider the promise and reality of China in the new millenium and more broadly since the institution of market reforms in 1978. The result is a well written and fascinating view of China that should be required reading for those seeking to visit China and work there. The picture that emerges in these ...more

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Oct 20, 2017 Margarita rated it really liked it

Shelves: china

My first book on modern China, and interesting indeed. Living in China and being Russian gives a different perspective on the current situation in the Middle Kingdom: as if you were looking at Russia in 90s, just after the collapse of the USSR. The personality cult of Stalin definitely was Mao's inspiration. Great Purge - Cultural Revolution.
Evan says in his book: "When it became clear that Xi Jinping was placing his bet on fortifying the status quo, another Party aristocrat, Hu Dehua, the ...more

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Jan 18, 2015 Jim rated it it was amazing

Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos is one of the most recommended nonfiction books of 2014, and now I understand why. The book chronicles the lives of many people Osnos met while living in China from 2005-2013, from the famous to the not-so-famous, from the very rich to the very poor. What fascinated me most was how the one-party system worked in China, which tried to control everything, yet encouraged its people to prosper and even get rich. I think my favorite person Osnos profiled was Gong Hainan, ...more

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Oct 23, 2014 Ross rated it liked it

This book about modern China is both informative and entertaining. Mostly through the stories of many Chinese citizens he documents the tensions that exist is what is now a fascist totalitarian police state. The levels and extent of corruption is staggering. One example was wonderfully creative. The bureaucrats of the agency to enforce the one child policy law who seized the extra babies sold them abroad to adoption agencies. Their bosses had them prosecuted when they found the proceeds had not ...more

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Apr 03, 2015 Lee Granas rated it really liked it

This gave me a pretty solid understanding of the last 30 years in China and I learned a TON. It's impressive how he crossed paths with such influential characters in modern China. I wish it hadn't only focused on the famous and successful though, I am curious to know more about less well-known daily influences in China. Definitely worth reading though. Having just spent 3 weeks in China, I wish he had also talked more about superstition and ritual that grips China so deeply, compared to other ...more

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Dec 09, 2014 Daniel Simmons rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The single best book I have read about modern China. Its widely ranging synthesis of stories big and small (from the voices of top Party officials to online dissidents to poetry-loving street sweepers) often reminded me of David Remnick's journalistic surveys of the Soviet Union and Russia. Incredible tales, credibly told.

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Feb 24, 2016 Scott Worden rated it it was amazing

Shelves: books-on-china

This is a really informative and useful book that explains China's current state. Osnos interviews various people while living in China to get honest opinions of people who want to challenge the Communist system. You can get a sense that the power of the people will eventually take over the Communist corruption and the government's attempts to keep the people's freedoms limited.

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Apr 29, 2018 Abi rated it liked it

Covers similar ground to other China books in recent times, the ones that end up on The Economist best-of lists. The author dedicates too many pages to the inner workings of journalistic society in China, which I didn't particularly care for.

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Dubuque Virtual B...: June 2016 Discussion: Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos	2	16	Jun 02, 2016 09:45AM
The History Book ...: ARCHIVE - JANUARY - AGE OF AMBITION: CHASING FORTUNE, TRUTH, AND FAITH IN THE NEW CHINA - (January 4th - start date)	30	90	Mar 28, 2016 08:45AM
The History Book ...: ARCHIVE - SPOILER THREAD - JANUARY - GLOSSARY - AGE OF AMBITION: CHASING FORTUNE, TRUTH, AND FAITH IN THE NEW CHINA - (January 4th 2016 - January 31st 2016)	2	22	Jan 17, 2016 12:45PM
China's slow turn to smart growth strategies.	1	9	May 16, 2014 07:31AM

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About Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos

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Evan 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 ...more

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“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.” — 8 likes

“Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.” — 8 likes

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