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

by Evan Osnos

Mao outlawed arranged marriages and concubines, and established a woman’s right to divorce, but the system left little room for desire. Dating that did not lead to the altar was “hooliganism,” and sex was so stigmatized in the Maoist period that doctors met couples who struggled to conceive because they lacked a firm grasp of the mechanics. When the magazine Popular Films ran a photo of Cinderella kissing a prince, readers wrote in to denounce it.

In the heyday of socialism, every man in Yan’s village wanted to be seen as laoshi, “frank and simple”; the worst thing a bachelor could be was fengliu, “rebellious and romantic.” But all of a sudden, the laoshi men were known as dowdy and gullible, and everyone wanted to be as fengliu as Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the Titanic, in the most popular pirated movie of the day.

In much of the world, marriage is in decline; the proportion of married American adults has dropped to 51 percent, the lowest ever recorded. But in China, even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries—one of the highest levels in the world. (China has neither civil unions nor laws against discrimination, and it remains a very hard place to be gay.)

China’s one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on an unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: When sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has twenty-four million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse—“bare branches” on the family tree, as they’re known in Chinese. Women were barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that if they were still single at thirty, they would be considered “leftover women.”

After so many years without much say in one of life’s great decisions, people seemed to be making up for lost time. I read an online personal ad by a graduate student named Lin Yu in which she itemized her expectations for her future husband: Never married; master’s degree or more; not from Wuhan; no rural registration; no only children; no smokers; no alcoholics; no gamblers; taller than one hundred and seventy-two centimeters; ready for at least a year of dating before marriage; sporty; parents who are still together; annual salary over fifty thousand yuan; age between twenty-six and thirty-two; willing to guarantee eating four dinners at home each week; track record of at least two ex-girlfriends, but no more than four; no Virgos. No Capricorns.

in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes.

Traditionally, young Chinese couples moved in with the groom’s parents, but by the twenty-first century less than half of them stayed very long, and the economists Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang discovered that parents with sons were building ever larger and more expensive houses for their offspring, to attract better matches—a real estate phenomenon that became known as the “mother-in-law syndrome.”

Between 2003 and 2011, home prices in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities rose by up to 800 percent.

“If you’re a man who rents or shares a place with roommates, you’re almost out of the game from the beginning,” Gong told me. Men who had a good answer did not bother with subtlety: in their singles ads, they adopted a new phrase: chefang yibei, which meant “car-and-home-equipped.”

Mao dismantled four million private businesses, nationalized assets, and flattened society so thoroughly that China’s income inequality fell to the lowest level in the socialist world. Students were taught that the bourgeoisie and other “class enemies” were “blood suckers” and “vermin.” The zeal reached its greatest intensity during the Cultural Revolution, when the military went so far as to eliminate rank, until this created chaos on the battlefield and soldiers had to identify one another by the number of pockets on their uniforms. (Officers had two more than enlisted men.) Any effort to improve one’s lot was not only pointless but dangerous. The Party banned competitive sports, and athletes who had won medals in the past found themselves accused, retroactively, of “trophy mania”—the crime of pursuing victory instead of mass fitness.

the Chinese Communist Party’s essential paradox: How could the heirs of Marx and Lenin, the rulers of the People’s Republic, who had risen to power denouncing bourgeois values and inequality, baldly embrace the new moneyed class? How could it retain its ideological claim to rule?

The task fell to the president and general secretary of the Party, Jiang Zemin. At the Party’s most important meeting, in 2002, he executed a major rhetorical contortion: he couldn’t bring himself to use the term middle class, but he declared that, from then on, the Party would dedicate itself to the success of the “New Middle-Income Stratum.” The New Middle-Income Stratum was everywhere, hailed by apparatchiks and enshrined in new slogans.

In nineteenth-century China, English was held in contempt as the language of the middlemen who dealt with foreign traders. “These men are generally frivolous rascals and loafers in the cities and are despised in their villages and communities,” the reformist scholar Feng Guifen wrote in 1861.

Mao favored Russian for the country, and he expelled so many English teachers that, by the sixties, China had fewer than a thousand high school English teachers nationwide.

After Deng opened China’s doors to the world, English fever took hold.

When Michael was a child, the family lived in a coal mining town called Mine Number Five. His parents, who had survived the harshest years of poverty and political turmoil, had only “one goal in life,” Michael said: “to pass the days normally.” But Michael was desperate to get out of Mine Number Five. In a passage he used for language practice, he wrote: I couldn’t stand eating steamed bread, leftover greens, and sweet potatoes every day.

Chairman Mao banned gambling in China long ago, but it endures in Macau because of a historical wrinkle: for nearly five hundred years, the city was a Portuguese colony, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions that led W. H. Auden to christen it “a weed from Catholic Europe.”

With a population of just half a million, Macau feels like China amplified and miniaturized. It is animated by the same combination of ambition, risk, and self-creation, but the sheer volume of money and people passing through distilled the mixture into an extract so potent that it can seem to be either the city’s greatest strength or its greatest liability. Macau used to manufacture fireworks, toys, and plastic flowers, but once the casinos arrived, the factories vanished. The average citizen now earns more than the average European.

Intrigue, of one kind or another, had clung to Macau since the city’s founding myths, which described an act of elegant deception: In 1564, or so the story went, local Chinese fishermen sought the help of a visiting Portuguese fleet for a battle against pirates; the Portuguese disguised their cannon inside Chinese boats and waylaid the bandits at sea. In gratitude, the Chinese granted permission to the Portuguese to stay on the peninsula. Macau became a vital stop between India and Japan, but eventually nearby Hong Kong built a better port, and Macau had to find alternative specialties: opium, prostitution, and gambling. When the Dutch-born writer Hendrik de Leeuw visited in the 1930s for his book Cities of Sin, he included Macau as home to “all the riffraff of the world, the drunken shipmasters; the flotsam of the sea, the derelicts, and more shameless, beautiful, savage women than any port in the world. It is a hell.”

For most of its history, Macau looked as much Mediterranean as Chinese, with baroque Catholic churches and rows of cafés shaded by drooping palms, where old émigrés sipped cafe da manhã over the Jornal Tribuna. But by the time I arrived, it had a touch of the Persian Gulf: air-conditioned luxury hotels and high-rises, with sports cars idling in the sunshine. Government tax revenue in Macau was often more than double the budget, and like Kuwait, Macau distributed checks to its residents under a program named the Wealth Partaking Scheme. Unemployment was below 3 percent. “What Las Vegas did in seventy-five years, we are doing in fifteen,” Paulo Azevedo, the publisher of Macau Business and other local magazines, told me when we met for a drink.

The behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee have compared Chinese and American approaches to financial risk. In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.

I had come to expect that Chinese friends would make financial decisions that I found uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call “the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed.

Unlike Las Vegas, where most of the profits came from coins fed into slot machines, three-quarters of the revenue in Macau was derived from enormous bets made in VIP rooms, where high rollers played around the clock.

In May 1942, Chairman Mao, in his talks on the future of art and literature, said, “There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.” For Mao, culture was a “weapon for uniting and educating the people and for crushing and destroying the enemy.” The Party would make sure that art, literature, and other expressions of taste adhered to what it later called the zhuxuanlu—“the central melody”—of Chinese society, the Party’s distilled understanding of values, priorities, and desires.

After Mao died in 1976, the first group of avant-garde artists to step forward named themselves the “Stars,” as a rebuttal to what the member Ma Desheng called the “drab uniformity” of what had come before, as a way “to emphasize our individuality.” When their first exhibition was excluded from the national museum in 1979, they hung their work on the fence outside and staged a march beneath the slogan “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom.” For much of the nineties, authorities arrested performance artists for appearing in the nude, shut down experimental shows, and bulldozed underground artists’ villages.

The Party discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy was to embrace it: in 2006, after years of threatening to demolish Factory 798, a former military electronics plant in Beijing that had been turned into a cluster of galleries and studios, the municipal government designated it as a “creative industry area,” and tour buses filled the streets around it.

the project carried a special resonance in China, where validation from the West, including visas, once carried near-mythic value. “For the past hundred years, we were always the ones waiting for the Americans or the Europeans or whomever to call our names. You. Come.”

Chinese attitudes toward Western culture were a mix of pity, envy, and resentment: pity for the barbarians outside the Middle Kingdom, envy for their strength, and resentment for their incursions into China. “Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings,” Lu Xun wrote. “We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”

Until the final years of Mao’s reign, when he established ties with the United States, admiring the West was a punishable offense. But by the eighties, the West was increasingly seen as a place of possibility and self-creation.

When three researchers asked Chinese high school students, in 2007, for the first five words that came to mind when they thought of America, their answers suggested a kaleidoscopic portrait: Bill Gates, Microsoft, the N.B.A., Hollywood, George W. Bush, Presidential Elections, Democracy, War in Iraq, War in Afghanistan, 9/11, Bin Laden, Harvard, Yale, McDonald’s, Hawaii, Police Officer to the World, Oil, Overbearing-ness, Hegemony, Taiwan

In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role: interpreter, raconteur, and field marshal, with a duty to relay more than facts; as a Chinese guidebook put it, the guide should “express approval or disapproval, praise or opposition, pleasure or contempt.”

Until recently, Chinese people had abundant reasons not to see the world as a place for pleasure. Traveling in ancient China was arduous. As a proverb put it, “You can be comfortable at home for a thousand days, or step out the door and run right into trouble.” Confucius threw guilt into the mix: “While your parents are alive, it is better not to travel far away.”

Mao considered tourism antisocialist. It wasn’t until 1978, after his death, that most Chinese gained approval to go abroad for anything other than work or study.

When government departments began sending people abroad, they sought to prepare the pioneers for every eventuality. A 2002 guidebook called The Latest Must-Read for Personnel Going Abroad warned that, beyond Chinese borders, “foreign intelligence agencies and other enemy forces” wage a “battle for hearts and minds” using “reactionary propaganda to topple the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.” If a traveler on official business encountered a journalist, the authors offered a strategy: “Answer in a simple way; avoid the truth and emphasize the empty.”

Eighty percent of first-time Chinese travelers were traveling in groups, and they earned a reputation as passionate, if occasionally overwhelming, guests. At a Malaysian casino hotel in 2005, some three hundred Chinese visitors were issued meal coupons bearing cartoon pig faces. The hotel said that the illustrations were simply to differentiate Chinese guests from Muslims, who don’t eat pork, but the Chinese tourists took offense and staged a sit-in, singing the national anthem.

In some cases, first-time travelers left mixed impressions on their hosts, and after a few incidents the Beijing government published a handbook, The Chinese Citizens’ Guide to Civilized Behavior Abroad, which had a list of rules, including: 3. Protect the natural environment. Do not trample on green areas; do not pick the flowers and fruit; do not chase, grab, feed or throw things at animals. 6. Respect people’s rights. Do not force foreigners to take pictures with you; do not sneeze in the direction of others. Nobody in our group was inclined to throw things at animals. Th...

By 2009 a British travel industry report had concluded that “Europe” was such a successful “single, unified” brand in China that individual countries would be wise to put aside pride and delay promoting “sub-brands” such as France or Italy. Europe was less a region on the map than a state of mind, and bundling as many countries as possible into a single week appealed to workers with precious few opportunities to travel.

“We have to get used to the fact that Europeans sometimes move slowly,” he said. When shopping in China, he went on, “we’re accustomed to three of us putting our items on the counter at the same time, and then the old lady gives change to three people without making a mistake. Europeans don’t do that.” He continued, “I’m not saying that they’re stupid. If they were, they wouldn’t have developed all this technology, which requires very subtle calculations. They just deal with math in a different way.” He ended with some advice: “Let them do things their way, because if we’re rushing, then they’ll feel rushed, and that will put them in a bad mood, and then we’ll think that they’re discriminating against us, which is not necessarily the case.”

At times, Guide Li marveled at Europe’s high standard of living—bombarding us with statistics on the price of Bordeaux wines or the average height of a Dutchman—but if there was ever a time when Chinese visitors marveled at Europe’s economy, this was not that time. Li made a great show of acting out a Mediterranean lifestyle: “Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It’s impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation’s economy grow.”

Zhu said that Chinese interest in Europe was motivated in part by a need to understand their own history: “When Europe was ruling the world, China was strong as well. So why did we fall behind? We’ve been thinking about that ever since,” he said. Indeed, the question of why a mighty civilization slumped in the fifteenth century runs like a central nerve through China’s analysis of its past and its prospects for the future. Zhu offered an explanation: “Once we were invaded, we didn’t respond quickly enough.” It was a narrative of victimhood and decline that I’d often heard in China. (Historians also tend to blame the stifling effects of bureaucracy and authoritarianism, among other factors.) But Zhu did not trace all China’s troubles to foreign invaders. “We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake.

While we waited for tables, at a Chinese restaurant, Zhu brought up the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 B.C.E.), the era that produced Confucius, Lao-tzu, and other pillars of Chinese thought. “Back then, we were damn good!” Zhu told a group of us. His wife, Wang Jianxin, rolled her eyes. “Here we go again,” she said.

I asked Promise if he used Facebook, which was officially blocked in China but reachable with some tinkering. “It’s too much of a hassle to get to it,” he said. Instead, he used Renren, a Chinese version, which, like other domestic sites, censored any sensitive political discussion. I asked what he knew about Facebook’s being blocked. “It has something to do with politics,” he said, and paused. “But the truth is I don’t really know.” This kind of remove among urbane Chinese students was familiar. They lived with unprecedented access to technology and information, but also with the Great Firewall, the vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors that blocked politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Many young Chinese regarded the notion of the firewall as insulting, but the barriers were just large enough to keep many people from bothering to get around them.

Our guide had mocked Europe’s stately pace, but Zheng said her countrymen had come to believe that “if you don’t elbow your way on to everything you’ll be last.” A car paused for us at a crosswalk, and Zheng drew a contrast: “Drivers at home think, ‘I can’t pause. Otherwise, I’ll never get anywhere,’” she said.

The drive across Italy that day had put him in a reflective mood about life at home. “You might wonder now and then whether it would be good to promote democracy,” he said. “Of course, there are benefits: people enjoy freedom of speech and the freedom to elect politicians. But doesn’t the one-party system have its benefits, too?” He pointed out the window to the highway and said that it had taken decades for Italy to build it, because of local opposition. “If this were China, it would be done in six months! And that’s the only way to keep the economy growing.”

Li’s portrait of the West contained at least one feature of unalloyed admiration. He mentioned a Western friend who had quit his job to go backpacking and find his calling in life. “Would our parents accept that? Of course not! They’d point a finger and say, ‘You’re a waste!’” he said. But in Europe, “young people are allowed to pursue what they want to pursue.”

The most intriguing building in Beijing was not celebrated for its architecture. Facing the Avenue of Eternal Peace, next door to China’s equivalent of the White House, was a modern, three-story green office block with a pagoda roof that perched on top like a toupee. What impressed me was that the building did not, on paper at least, exist. It had no address, no sign, and it appeared on no public charts of the Party structure. The first time I asked what it was, the guard said, “I can’t tell you that. It’s a government organ.” Over time, I came to think of it as, simply, the Department. Every capital has its secret departments, but the odd thing about this one and its aversion to publicity was that it was the Central Publicity Department. The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies. By the time I settled in China, the Department, and its offices across the country, had control over two thousand newspapers and eight thousand magazines; every film and television program, every textbook, amusement park, video game, bowling club, and beauty pageant was subject to its scrutiny.

Orwell wrote that political prose, in any country, is intended to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

But no country has devoted more time and care to the art of propaganda than China, where the emperor Qin Shi Huang governed, in the third century B.C.E., with a policy he called “Keep the Masses Ignorant and They Will Follow.” Mao sanctified propaganda and censorship as essential parts of Thought Work, and he relied on them to reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat. Five years after Mao died, his heirs’ final act of devotion was to issue an official declaration on Mao’s tumultuous reign. They said it was 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong—an imponderable calculation that would be studied by schoolchildren for decades to come.

In 1989 the uprising at Tiananmen Square convinced some Party leaders that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision—the Party’s future survival, he declared, would rest, more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and propaganda. Of China’s young people who took to the square, he said, “It will take years, not just a couple of months, of education to change their thinking.” But the Soviet approach to propaganda had failed them. Deng and his men urgently needed a new approach, and they found it in the holy land of public relations, America, and in a new, if unlikely, role model: Walter Lippmann, a leading American columnist for much of the twentieth century. They overlooked his early anticommunism and hailed his efforts to prevent mass rule and to sway U.S. public opinion to enter World War I. They studied and cited Lippmann’s belief in the power of pictures to, in his words, “magnify emotion while undermining critical thought,” and they adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.

When Reporters Without Borders ranked countries by press freedom in 2008, the year of the earthquake, China ranked 167th out of 173 countries—behind Iran and ahead of Vietnam. Article 35 of the Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, but regulations gave the government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses. There were twenty-eight reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country.