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

by Evan Osnos

Lu Xun, China’s most celebrated modern author, once wrote, “Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.”

The Chinese people no longer want for food—the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976

The rewards created by China’s rise have been wildly inconsistent but fundamentally profound: it is one of the broadest gains in human well-being in the modern age. In 1978, the average Chinese income was $200; by 2014, it was $6,000. By almost every measure, the Chinese people have achieved longer, healthier, more educated lives.

two generations ago, visitors to China marveled most at the sameness of it all. To outsiders, Chairman Mao was the “Emperor of the Blue Ants,” as one memorable book title had it—a secular god in a land of matching cotton suits and “production teams.” Stereotypes about the Chinese as collectivist, inscrutable drones endured in part because China’s politics helped sustain them; official China reminded its guests that it was a nation of work units and communes and uncountable sacrifice.

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.

Viewed one way, the greatest beneficiary of the age of ambition is the Chinese Communist Party. In 2011 the Party celebrated its ninetieth birthday—a milestone unimaginable at the end of the Cold War. In the years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Chinese leaders studied that history and vowed never to suffer the same fate.

To survive, the Chinese Communist Party shed its scripture but held fast to its saints; it abandoned Marx’s theories but retained Mao’s portrait on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, peering down on Tiananmen Square.

The Party no longer promises equality or an end to toil. It promises only prosper...

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.

Sometimes China is compared to the Japan of the 1980s, when a hundred square feet in downtown Tokyo sold for a million dollars, and tycoons were sipping cocktails over ice cubes shipped from Antarctica. By 1991, Japan was in the largest deflation of assets in the modern history of capitalism. But the similarities run thin; when Japan’s bubble burst, it was a mature, developed economy; but China, even overheated, remains a poor country in which the average person earns as much as a Japanese citizen in 1970. At other moments, China’s goose-stepping soldiers, its defectors and its dissidents, recall the Soviet Union or even Nazi Germany. But those comparisons are unsatisfying. Chinese leaders do not threaten to “bury” America, the way Khrushchev did, and even China’s fiercest nationalists do not seek imperial conquest or ethnic cleansing.

China reminds me most of America at its own moment of transformation—the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age, when “every man has his dream, his pet scheme.” The United States emerged from the Civil War on its way to making more steel than Britain, Germany, and France combined. In 1850, America had fewer than twenty millionaires; by 1900 it had forty thousand, some as bumptious and proud as James Gordon Bennett, who bought a restaurant in Monte Carlo after he was refused a seat by the window.

In the eighteenth century, imperial China controlled one-third of the world’s wealth; its most advanced cities were as prosperous and commercialized as Great Britain and the Netherlands. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was crippled by invasion, civil war, and political upheaval.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward resulted in the world’s worst famine, which killed between thirty and forty-five million people, more than World War I. By the time Captain Lin defected from Taiwan, the People’s Republic was poorer than North Korea; its per capita income was one-third that of sub-Saharan Africa.

Deng Xiaoping had been China’s paramount leader for less than six months. At seventy-five, he was a persuasive but plainspoken statesman, and a survivor—repeatedly purged from the leadership by Chairman Mao, twice rehabilitated. In the years since, he has often been described as the sole architect of the boom that followed, but that view is the handiwork of Party historians.

The model they created endured for decades: a “birdcage economy,” as Chen Yun called it, airy enough to let the market thrive but not so free as to let it escape.

As young revolutionaries, the elders had overseen the execution of landlords, the seizure of factories, and the creation of people’s communes. But now they preserved their power by turning the revolution upside down: permitting private enterprise and opening a window to the outside world even if it allowed, as Deng put it, “a few flies” to get in. China’s reforms had no blueprint. The strategy, as Chen Yun put it, was to move without losing control—to “cross the river by feeling for the stones.” (Deng, inevitably, received credit for the expression.)

In 1979 the Party announced that it would no longer tag people as “landlords” and “rich peasants,” and later Deng Xiaoping removed the final stigma: “Let some people get rich first,” he said, “an...

Marx had believed that firms with more than eight workers were exploitative

Lin grew up in the lush river delta town of Yilan, in a remote corner of Taiwan’s main island. His family was descended from earlier migrants from the mainland. The arriving Nationalist forces viewed the earlier migrants as low-class and politically unreliable, and they were subject to widespread discrimination in jobs and education.

But as Lin arrived on campus, Taiwan’s status was eroding. In July 1971, U.S. president Richard Nixon announced his visit to Beijing. The mainland was gaining influence. In October the United Nations voted to take away Taiwan’s seat at the UN General Assembly and give it to the People’s Republic, acknowledging that government as the lawful representative of the Chinese people.

MBA and then he was assigned to lead a company on the island of Quemoy, known during the Cold War as the “lighthouse of the free world,” because it was the final spit of land before the Communist shoreline.

They floated softball-sized glass containers to the opposing shores packed with bundles of goods intended to lure defectors with glimpses of prosperity. Taiwan sent pinups and miniature newspapers describing the outside world, clean underwear, pop music cassettes, instructions on how to build a simple radio, and promises of gold coins and glory for anyone willing to defect. The mainland replied with liquor, tea, sweet melons, and pamphlets with photos of smiling Taiwanese diplomats and scientists who had defected to the mainland—or, as the Party put it, “traded darkness for light.”

In December 1978, Jimmy Carter announced that the United States was officially recognizing the Communist government in Beijing, and severing formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

Although Taiwan and the Communists were enemies, ordinary people considered them two halves of the same clan, with a shared history and destiny. As in the American Civil War, some families were physically divided. In one case, a man sent by his mother to go shopping on the mainland just before the Communists cut off boat traffic did not get home for forty years.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me. Cameras had failed to convey how much closer it was, in spirit and geography, to the windswept plains of Mongolia than to the neon lights of Hong Kong. Beijing smelled of coal and garlic and work-stained wool and cheap tobacco. In a claptrap taxi, with the windows sealed and the heat cranked up, the smell stuck to the roof of your mouth. Beijing was cradled by mountains, high on the North China plain, and in the winter the wind that rose in the land of Genghis Khan whistled down and lashed your face.

The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Chairman Mao had railed against bourgeois indulgences, but now Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life.

People were still adjusting to the idea of a life outside of labor. Only two years had passed since China reduced the workweek from six days to five. Then it had redrawn the old socialist calendar to create something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called “leisure studies,” dedicated to this “important stage in the social evolution of mankind.” One weekend, I joined Chinese classmates on a trip to Inner Mongolia. The train was overcrowded, and the ventilation system inhaled diesel exhaust and exhaled it into the cabins. But nobody complained, because it was a small pleasure simply to be on the move.

In the hope of finding the China that I recognized, I clung at first to the countryside. It was the China of literature and ink paintings. One month, I did nothing but walk and hitch rides beside the rivers of Sichuan Province. I slept in small towns that felt half-abandoned, because the call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull. The village ancients liked to joke that, when they died, there would be nobody strong enough to carry their casket.

(In 2012 the country became, for the first time, more urban than rural.)

At the lowest levels, the Party felt like a professional network. A talented young journalist I knew in Beijing told me that she became a Party member in college because it doubled the number of jobs available, and because one of her favorite professors had pleaded with her to help fill a quota for female recruits.

In the seven years I had been gone, the language had changed. The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other.

The word for waitresses and shopgirls, xiaojie, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes. And the new kind of xiaojie were suddenly everywhere in a country overrun with cash-rich new entrepreneurs on business trips.

Initially, the Chinese government had regarded the Internet as an opportunity: the country had arrived late to the Industrial Revolution, and Chinese leaders hoped that the information revolution could help the country close the gap with the West. But the enthusiasm cooled. In 2001, President Jiang Zemin identified the Internet as a “political, ideological, and cultural battlefield.”

The previous year, 2004, a journalist named Shi Tao, who worked at Contemporary Business News in Hunan Province, attended a staff meeting in which an editor relayed the latest instructions about what subjects could not be published around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. That night, Shi logged on to his e-mail account (huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn) and sent a summary of the Party document to an editor of Democracy Forum, a pro-democracy website based in New York. Two days later, the Beijing State Security Bureau contacted Yahoo! China and asked for the name behind the account, the contents of the e-mail, and the locations from which the e-mail was accessed. Yahoo! complied, and on November 23, 2004, Shi Tao was arrested and later charged with “leaking state secrets.” His trial lasted two hours; he was found guilty and sentenced to ten years.

When human rights groups criticized Yahoo! for handing over the information, the company’s cofounder Jerry Yang replied, “If you want to do business there you have to comply.” Members of the U.S. Congress took note. At a subcommittee hearing on the Internet in China, Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, wondered, “If the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?” Yahoo! held firm, and when Shi Tao’s mother sued the company for exposing her son to harm, Yahoo! filed a motion to dismiss.

The few surviving sections of old Beijing consisted mostly of tiny alleyways lined by single-story homes of gray brick, wood, and tile. The arrangement had remained more or less the same for seven centuries, when sections of the city were laid out under the Yuan dynasty, which gave these streets the name hutong, a Mongolian term that came to mean “alley” in Chinese. The Mongols had designed the hutong to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. In 1980 the city had six thousand hutong; over the years, all but a few hundred were leveled to make way for office buildings and apartment complexes. Only one of the city’s forty-four princely palaces had survived intact.

The window above my desk was filled with a view of Beijing’s ancient Drum Tower, a soaring wooden pavilion built in 1272. For hundreds of years the Drum Tower, and its neighbor the Bell Tower, kept time for the people of the city, telling them when to sleep and when to rise. They were the tallest buildings for miles around. The Drum Tower contained twenty-four giant leather-covered drums, large enough that their thundering could be heard in the farthest reaches of the capital.

Chinese emperors were obsessed with controlling the passing of the seasons and the hours of the day. In the spring, the emperor decreed the precise moment when members of the court could change out of their furs and into their silk; in the fall, the emperor decreed the right moment for the raking of leaves.

One of China’s most famous classical paintings, an eleventh-century scroll by Fan Kuan entitled Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, is often called China’s Mona Lisa. But compared to Leonardo’s full-frame portrait, Fan Kuan’s work depicts a tiny figure of a horseman enveloped by vast, misty mountains.

In imperial Chinese law, the courts considered not only motive but also the damage to the social order, so a defendant received a harsher sentence if he murdered someone of a higher social rank than someone of a lower rank. Punishment was collective: judges sentenced not just the guilty individual but also family members, neighbors, and community leaders.

Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who became president after the fall of the empire in 1911, concluded that China was weak because its people were a “sheet of loose sand.” His prescription? “The individual should not have too much liberty,” he said, “but the nation should have complete liberty.” He encouraged people to think of the government as a “great automobile” and its leaders as essential “chauffeurs and mechanics” who require a free hand to operate.

China had always had poets, writers, and revolutionaries—whom the authors Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin have called the “unbound feet” of Chinese history—but Chairman Mao was determined to enshrine the idea that “the individual is subordinate to the organization.” The Party, he declared, must “eradicate all tendencies towards disunity.” It organized people into work units and collective farms. Without a letter from your danwei (“work unit”), you couldn’t get married or divorced, you couldn’t buy a plane ticket or stay in a hotel, or, for that matter, visit another danwei. Most days, you lived, worked, shopped, and studied within its confines. To identify and correct individualistic thinking, Mao relied on propaganda and education—“Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.” (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.)

The pressure to conform was profound. A doctor who was terrorized during the Cultural Revolution—exiled to the western desert, where his wife committed suicide—later said, “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.”

Beginning in 1980, China designated special economic zones, which used tax advantages to attract foreign investment, technology, and links to customers abroad. The zones needed workers. Since the fifties, the Party had controlled where people lived by dividing households into two types: rural and urban. The distinction ordained where you were born, schooled, employed, and, most likely, buried. With few exceptions, only the Public Security Bureau could change your household registration, or hukou.

Between 1993 and 2005, state-owned enterprises cut more than seventy-three million jobs, sending another flood of workers off to find a new source of income.

Chinese leaders kept their currency undervalued, which made exports cheap, and these soared. In 1999, China’s exports had been less than a third of America’s. A decade later, China was the world’s largest exporter.

There was something different about her generation, the young men and women born in the seventies. You could hear it in their speech, their comfort with saying “I” and “me,” where their parents would have used the plural: “our work unit” and “our family.” (Older Chinese took to calling her cohort the wo yi dai—the “Me Generation.”)

In 1978, nearly 80 percent of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50 percent.

Chairman Mao, who arrived as a twenty-four-year-old in the capital, once said, “Beijing is like a crucible in which one cannot but be transformed.”

Confucius has exhaustive advice about justice and duty, but he mentions emotion, qing, only once in the Analects, a record of his teachings. Love stories didn’t become popular in China until the twentieth century.