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

by Evan Osnos

the night of August 23, 1966. It was the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution, and the order to “Smash the Four Olds” had devolved into a violent assault on authority of all kinds. That night, a group of Red Guards summoned one of China’s most famous writers, Lao She, to the front gate of the Confucius Temple. He was sixty-seven years old and one of China’s best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had grown up not far from there, in poverty, the son of an imperial guard who died in battle against foreign armies. In 1924 he went to London and stayed for five years, living near Bloomsbury and reading Conrad and Joyce. He wore khakis because he couldn’t afford tweeds. In 1939 he published Rickshaw Boy, about an honest, independent-minded young rickshaw puller whose encounters with injustice turn him into, in Lao She’s words, a “degenerate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society.” Lao She became to Beijing what Victor Hugo was to Paris: the city’s quintessential writer. The Party named him a “People’s Artist.” He resented being asked to produce propaganda, but, like many, he was a loyal servant who poured criticism on his fellow writers when they fell out with the Party. Now he was the target. A group of Red Guards—mostly schoolgirls between thirteen and sixteen years old—pushed him through the gates of the temple and forced him to kneel on the flagstones beside a bonfire, surrounded by other writers and artists under attack. His accusers denounced him for his ...