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

by Evan Osnos

Public servants—officially earning twenty or thirty thousand dollars a year—became such frequent shoppers at Gucci and Louis Vuitton that high-end boutiques in Beijing ran out of stock whenever the National People’s Congress was in session.

For outsiders, the scale of political corruption in China was often difficult to comprehend, in part because most were insulated from it. Visitors to China, compared to other developing countries, were not hit up for small bribes by customs officers or street cops; unless foreigners used Chinese schools or public hospitals, they didn’t feel the creep of bribery into virtually every corner of Chinese society. On paper, Chinese public education was free and guaranteed, but parents knew to pay “sponsorship fees” to gain entry to top schools; in Beijing, the fees reached sixteen thousand dollars—more than double the average annual salary.

Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word maiguan—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000.

Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West.

By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

Over time, Chinese bloggers learned to zoom in on official photos to find evidence of habits that did not match official salaries. They posted photographs of police departments with Maseratis and Porsches painted blue and white. They pointed out that a local real estate official named Zhou Jiugeng was often photographed smoking cigarettes that cost twenty-four dollars a pack, and after a bribery investigation he was sent to prison for eleven years. Another blogger made a specialty of exposing comrades with suspiciously expensive timepieces, and he became known as the Wristwatch Watchdog.

The last case I saw before I gave up bothering to keep track of such reports was about the police chief in the county of Usu. When he was found to be in a pair of simultaneous love affairs with women whom he had promoted through the ranks of the police force—while keeping them in a luxurious apartment funded by taxpayers—his office released a clarification that must have felt like good news under the circumstances: the police chief’s two mistresses were not twin sisters, they were just sisters. When I read this detail, I stopped chewing my lunch and looked up, blinking, while I absorbed the full scale of it; the “just sisters” defense seemed to set a new watermark for the image of Chinese public servants.

In the more recent upswell, the Party’s virtue problem was reflected most acutely, perhaps, in a video that captivated people in China even more than the tawdriest clips: when local reporters asked a group of six-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up, the kids ran through the usual list—firefighters, pilots, artists—until one small boy said, “I want to be an official.” “What sort of official?” the reporter asked. “A corrupt official,” the boy said, “because they have lots of things.”

In June 2012, Bloomberg News used corporate documents and interviews to calculate that the extended family of China’s incoming president, Xi Jinping, had accumulated assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That wealth was hard for the Party to explain, so it decided not to try: within twenty-four hours, the government blocked the Bloomberg website—it would stay blocked in China for the foreseeable future—and it barred Chinese banks and companies from signing new contracts for use of Bloomberg terminals. It would cost the company millions in lost sales and advertising.

One afternoon my wife, Sarabeth, who worked for a nonprofit education organization, received a call from a woman she knew professionally, the wife of a Chinese professor with close ties to the Party. They were a worldly couple—a child in the Ivy League and deep connections with senior leaders—and she asked Sarabeth for a chat at a nearby mall. At Starbucks, beside the Apple Store, the woman asked about my work as a journalist, and if I was friends with Michael Forsythe, a Bloomberg reporter who had published the details about Xi Jinping’s family fortune. She had a warning for Sarabeth to relay to me, and for me to relay to Mike. “He and his family can’t stay in China. It’s no longer safe,” she said. “Something will happen. It will look like an accident. Nobody will know what happened. He’ll just be found dead.”

before the Communists arrived, they liked to say, China was run by four dominant families, and the Party had handed those fortunes back to the people. Now it was becoming clear that China, on the one hundredth anniversary of the end of the last dynasty, was returning to a form of aristocracy. The scale of privilege and self-dealing struck an especially awkward blow to Wen Jiabao’s reputation, because he had put himself forward as one of the Party’s liberal standard-bearers. Nicknamed Grandpa Wen for his attentions to the poor, he had declared, “I often say that we should not only let people have the freedom of speech, we, more importantly, must create conditions to let them criticize the work of the government.” And yet, by six o’clock on the morning that his family fortune was revealed, his government had blacked out the Times—and it, like Bloomberg, would stay blocked.

A manufacturer of air purifiers unwittingly sparked an uproar when it released promotional materials crowing that China’s officials breathed with the help of two hundred high-grade purifiers installed inside cloistered offices around the capital. “Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people,” the company said. Just as the people were getting their minds around that blessing, they learned of a network of “special farms” dedicated to providing Party leaders with safe ingredients. (An Asian Development Bank report estimated in 2007 that three hundred million people in China suffered from food-borne illnesses every year.)

When Andrew Wedeman, a political scientist at Georgia State University who studies China, examined patterns of bribes and prosecutions, he expected to find that the mechanics of Chinese corruption followed the hierarchical patronage system found in Japan and Korea. Instead, Wedeman concluded, “the evidence suggests that corruption in contemporary China is essentially anarchy.” He wrote that “corruption in China more closely resembled corruption in Zaire than it did corruption in Japan.” But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”

I asked Hu Gang if he thought China would grow past its corruption boom, just as America and Korea did. He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “I see our society as an enormous pond. For years, people have been using it as a restroom, just because we could. And we enjoyed the freedom of that, even as the pond got filthier and filthier. Now we need someone who can stand up and tell everyone that the pond has been fouled and if you continue to pollute it, nobody will survive.”

the years passed, I sensed that other young strivers like Michael were growing frustrated as well. Low-skilled jobs weren’t the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren’t enough white-collar jobs to employ each year’s crop of more than six million new college graduates. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant workers had grown by nearly 80 percent, but for college graduates, starting wages were flat. When you considered inflation, their income had declined. The young Chinese strivers desperate to become “car-and-home-equipped”—to find a mate and elbow their way into the New Middle-Income Stratum—now knew the truth: China’s new fortunes were wildly out of balance. By 2012 a typical apartment in a Chinese city was selling for eight to ten times the average annual income nationwide. (Even at the heights of the American property bubble, the ratio peaked at five to one.)

When the Harvard sociologist Martin Whyte polled the Chinese public in 2009, he discovered that people had a surprisingly high tolerance for the rise of the plutocracy. What they resented were the obstacles that prevented them from joining it: weak courts, abuses of power, a lack of recourse.

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.”

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.”

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.

In China the affairs of state had always been kept out of view of the public, and been unveiled only at the end as a fait accompli. But now the uncooked ingredients—the deals, the feuds, the peccadillos, the betrayals—were tumbling into the open air to be judged and evaluated. People were assessing whether the values of the system now on display lived up to their own moral aspirations.

In China, the double life was eroding. The reality of extreme inequality was now inescapable: one part of China lived in a different material universe from the rest of the country. This was true in many countries, of course, including my own, but in China it was especially deeply felt; the nation was just one generation removed from bitter sacrifices in the name of egalitarianism.

In the summer of 2012, people noticed that another search word had been blocked. The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations had just passed, and people had been discussing it, in code, by calling it “the truth”—zhenxiang. The censors picked up on this, and when people searched Weibo for anything further, they began receiving a warning: “In accordance with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, search results for ‘the truth’ have not been displayed.”

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.

At the very moment that Mao was becoming a god, his believers were dismantling China’s ancient infrastructure of faith. Karl Marx had considered religion an “illusory happiness” incompatible with the struggle for socialism, and the People’s Daily called upon the young to “Smash the Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Red Guards demolished temples and smashed sacred objects in a surge of violence that the scholars Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer describe as the “most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in Chinese and, perhaps, human history.”

The Little Red Book was used as a “demon-exposing mirror” that could unmask “class enemies,” and in two provinces, the fervor descended into cannibalism: class enemies were disemboweled, and their organs were consumed at communal banquets.

There was a hole in Chinese life that people named the jingshen kongxu—“the spiritual void”

The Alley of National Studies—surrounded by noisy boulevards, north of the Forbidden City—was a remnant of old Beijing that had fended off demolition because it was wedged between two treasures: the Lama Temple (Beijing’s largest Tibetan monastery) and the Confucius Temple (a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher). These were surrounded by the city’s largest concentration of fortune-tellers, and together they made the neighborhood the most spiritually alive patch of the capital. It had the feel of a chaotic open-air market stocked with not products but creeds.

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. At one point, Beijing had more temples than any other city in Asia. Daoism and Buddhism flourished alongside a range of indigenous deities: scholars prayed to the God of Literature, the sick appealed to the God of Rheumatism, and artillerymen worshipped the God of Cannons. Beijing attracted pilgrims from thousands of miles away, some of whom made their way by prostrating flat on the ground with every step, like inchworms.

After the Cultural Revolution subsided, Chinese scholars were gradually permitted to reinterpret Marx’s belief that religion was “the opiate of the masses,” and they argued that he was referring to religion in the Germany of his day, not religion itself.

Faced with so many options, some people hedged with a bit of spiritual promiscuity: before the school exams each spring, I watched Chinese parents stream past the gates of the Lama Temple to pray for good scores. Then they crossed the street to pray at the Confucius Temple, and some finished the afternoon at a Catholic Church, just in case.

Beijing had once been close to Tibetan Buddhism; emperors had kept thousands of monks in the capital to pray for protection of the empire. But the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled China in 1959 after rejecting the Communist Party’s claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. In exile, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and helped turn Tibetans, in the words of his friend Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor and former monk, into the “the baby seals of the human-rights movement.” Just as Pope John Paul II had been an icon of opposition to the Soviet empire, the Dalai Lama became the face of resistance to Chinese rule.

For many of them, Tibet was China’s glamorous Wild West, a chic destination associated with spirituality and rugged individualism. “When I’m in Tibet,” a young Chinese rock musician told me, “I can be free.”

“That’s a weasel,” he said. “You should be happy!” A weasel, he said, was a sign of imminent wealth, as were hedgehogs, snakes, foxes, and rats. Since those species hung around tombs, they were believed to bear the souls of ancestors. “Don’t mess with it,” Huang said. I mentioned the animal to our housekeeper, Auntie Ma, and she said sternly, “Don’t hit it. Never a hit a weasel.”

Of all the neighbors, none was closer to us than the Confucius Temple; it shared a wall with our kitchen. The shrine was one of the city’s most tranquil places, a secluded compound built in 1302, with ancient trees and a tall wooden pavilion that loomed above our house like a conscience. In the mornings, I brought a cup of coffee outside and listened to the wake-up sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the hectoring of the magpies overhead. It was a small miracle that the temple had survived at all. Thousands of shrines across the country once existed to venerate Confucius, the philosopher and politician who was born in the sixth century B.C.E. He acquired a place in Chinese history akin to that of Socrates in the West, in part because his ideology encouraged order and loyalty. “There is government,” Confucius said, “when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” Confucius linked morality to the strength of the state: “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the North Star, which holds its place while all other stars turn around it.”

Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the 1980s, Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Ying-shih Yu called it a “wandering soul.”

Beginning in the eighties, when it became clear that something would eventually fill the “spiritual void,” the Party was determined to have a hand in filling it. The old proletarian virtues (revolution, class consciousness) were obsolete. The leaders needed a new moral vocabulary suited to the Party in Power, a way to link themselves to the glories of their ancient civilization. China needed a morality and a politics for the New Middle-Income Stratum. The Party was intrigued by the renaissance of Confucius among Chinese communities in Singapore and Taiwan. He was, after all, an indigenous moral icon, firmly embedded in China’s “national studies.” In Beijing, Confucius was rehabilitated.

Proponents of the Confucian revival argued that it would defend China from Western “egoist philosophy,” and they had taken to comparing the city of Qufu, the philosopher’s hometown, to Jerusalem. Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five-hundred-million-dollar museum-and-park complex began construction; plans called for a statue of Confucius that would be nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qufu called itself “the Holy City of the Orient.” In 2012, it received 4.4 million visitors, surpassing the number of people who visited Israel. The Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius unveiled new traditions, including encouraging couples to renew their wedding vows in front of a statue of the sage. To give him a fresher image, historians unveiled what they called a “standardized” portrait: a kindly old man in a Chinese robe, with his hands crossed at his chest.

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 ...

In January 2011 a giant statue of the wise man appeared beside Tiananmen Square, the first new addition to such a sensitive spot since Mao’s mausoleum was erected a generation ago. Philosophers and political scientists wondered if this meant a change in the Party platform. But then, it was gone. In the middle of the night, three months after it arrived, the statue was moved to a low-profile location in the courtyard of a museum. Why? It remained a mystery: the Central Propaganda Department banned any discussion of it. People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit.

The Chinese pride themselves on “humaneness,” or ren, as it was known, and it was an idea as fundamental to conceptions of morality in China as the principle of “do unto others” was in the West.

Over the years, the risk of being blamed for helping someone was a scenario that appeared over and over in the headlines. In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn’t been motivated by guilt.

The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang examined twenty-six cases of Good Samaritans who had been the victims of extortion in China, and he found that, in every instance, the local police and the courts treated the helpers as guilty until proven innocent. In none of the twenty-six cases was the extortionist ever required to provide a witness to back up the accusation; nor was the extortionist ever punished, even after the helper was found to be falsely accused.

“In the past, if you saw something, you knew it was true because who had the time or the money to make something fake?” he said, adding, “Now even the fin on a fish can be fake … In the past, if you didn’t have enough food, I would give you a bite. That’s how it was. But after Reform and Opening Up, it’s different. If you have one bite of food and I have one bite, I will try to take yours and have two for myself, and leave you with nothing.

Chen had a granddaughter, and I asked, “When she grows up, what kind of person do you want her to be?” “That depends on what’s going on in society,” he said. “If good people run things, she should be a good person. If it’s bad people, well, you have no choice but to be bad.”

Hannah Arendt once identified a “peculiar kind of cynicism” that takes hold in societies prone to the “consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth.” The response, she wrote, was “the absolute refusal to believe the truth of anything.”

Several weeks after Yueyue died, the city of Shenzhen drafted China’s first regulation to protect Good Samaritans from legal liability. It shifted the burden of proof to the accusers, and it laid out punishments for false accusations ranging from a public apology to detention. The law stopped short of requiring passersby to get involved—as they are required to do in Japan, France, and elsewhere—but it was nevertheless China’s greatest step yet to amend the law.

He went on, “As a journalist in China you have to dance in chains. You have to maneuver in whatever space you get. You have to play the game with the government and the propaganda officials, and the subject of your stories … We waste a lot of energy and time trying to bypass all the obstacles of the propaganda machine. By that time, you are exhausted and the deadline is there. So you don’t feel satisfied with the professionalism of your stories, and you envy your Western colleagues who can focus on the writing itself.”

To live in China in the early years of the twenty-first century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.

“Of the various countries I’ve visited,” Sandel told me the next day, “the free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.”

In China, foreign ideas had a history of sparking fevers. After World War I, John Dewey toured the country and inspired legions of followers. Later, it was Freud and Habermas.