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

by Evan Osnos

“In the societies where it has caught fire, there has not been the occasion—for whatever reason—for serious public discussion of big ethical questions,” he said. Young people especially “sense a kind of emptiness in terms of public discourse, and they want something better.”

“We see that the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe have collapsed, and their countries have collapsed with them,” Zhao told me. But in China, the Party survived, he said, “precisely because it continues to change.”

Officially, China recognized five religions—Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—and believers could worship in state-controlled settings.

When the campy Korean music video called “Gangnam Style” became a surprise hit—the most watched clip in the history of the Internet—Chinese artists complained that they could never have created it because the culture officials that preside over their work would never have permitted a silly spoof of Beijing’s high-living elite and would, instead, have insisted that a music video for export be grand and impressive. The artists circulated a bitter comic strip called Shanghai Style, in which the creator of a Gangnam-style dance move is not showered in fortune but is, instead, incarcerated for “running crazily all over the place.”

In April 2013 the filmmaker Feng Xiaogang was giving a mundane acceptance speech for the Director of the Year award when he seized the chance to make a bold statement; he cut short his list of thank-yous and said, “For the last twenty years, every director in China has faced a kind of tremendous torment, and that torment is censorship.” Feng was no dissident; he’d made a bare-handed fortune on romantic comedies and big-budget epics, but the decades of compromises and concessions were rubbing a raw spot on his professional pride. “To get approval, I have to cut my films in ways that actually make them worse,” he told the audience. If his point wasn’t clear enough, the censors unwittingly drove it home to viewers: while he was speaking, someone in the control booth hit a button just in time to censor Feng’s reference to censorship; viewers at home heard him say, “that torment is [beep].”

It was investing more in research and development than any country but the United States, and it had surpassed the United States and Japan to become the largest filer of patents. But many of them had little value; they had been filed to meet political targets or attract funding. China was producing more scientific papers than anywhere but the United States, but on measurements of quality (how often the average paper was cited by others), China was not even in the top ten.

The architecture of the Japanese embassy reflected its grim relationship with the host country. It was an embassy designed to be pelted: a six-story gray fortress set back from the road, with windows shielded by steel grates.

In Beijing, one of Lin Yifu’s former students, a professor named Yao Yang, published a view of China’s political and economic future that was strikingly at odds with his mentor’s. Yao pointed to the rise of crony capitalism and the gap between rich and poor as evidence that China’s economic model had run up against the limit of what was possible without permitting greater political openness “to balance the demands of different social groups.” He cited control of the Internet and labor unions, and unsafe working conditions. “Chinese citizens will not remain silent in the face of these infringements, and their discontent will inevitably lead to periodic resistance,” he warned. “Before long, some form of explicit political transition that allows ordinary citizens to take part in the political process will be necessary.”

In the years after the financial crisis, most economists had come to believe that, as China’s workforce aged, its growth would slow. How soon and how far would depend on how China’s government behaved: whether it could control corruption, maintain public support, curb pollution, narrow the gap between rich and poor, and unleash another surge of its people’s potential.

“When I was little, I liked to ask older people the questions I couldn’t answer,” he said. “If the first person didn’t have an answer, I asked another, and another, and I would collect different explanations. And then I would think about which seemed the closest to correct.”

The occasion was called a “Meet the Press” opportunity, though the press was not permitted to ask questions. First onstage was the man who would become president: general secretary of the Party Xi Jinping. He hailed from a fine revolutionary family—his father had been one of the Party’s hallowed elders, known as the “Eight Immortals”—and in person, he was a striking contrast to his predecessor. Xi was a ruddy-cheeked bear of a figure, with a rich radio voice and a penchant for roomy Western suits. The full picture evoked Jackie Gleason more than Zhou Enlai. “Our people love life,” he said. “They hope for better education, more stable jobs, more satisfactory incomes, more reliable social guarantees, higher-level medical and health services, more comfortable living conditions, a more beautiful environment, and they hope that their children can grow up better, work better, and live better.

By setting China against “universal values,” the Party is ensuring that it will face more snubs, more protests, more reminders of Liu Xiaobo’s empty chair. Yet it is raising its people to believe that humiliation, and those responsible for it, must not be tolerated.

Thirty years after China embarked on its fitful embrace of the free market, it has no single unifying doctrine—no “central melody”—and there is nothing predestined about what kind of country it is becoming.

When a website run by the People’s Daily conducted a “Chinese Dream” survey, asking whether people supported one-party rule and believed in socialism, 80 percent of the three thousand respondents replied “no” to both questions, and the survey was abruptly withdrawn. People used to say that their censored work had been “harmonized.” Now they said it had been “dreamed away.”

He called on his comrades to be “diligent and thrifty,” and when Xi took his first official trip, state television reported that he checked into a “normal suite” and dined not at a banquet, but at a buffet—a revelation so radical in Chinese political culture that the word buffet took on metaphysical significance. The state news service ran a banner headline: XI JINPING VISITS POOR FAMILIES IN HEBEI: DINNER IS JUST FOUR DISHES AND ONE SOUP, NO ALCOHOL.

The “Four Dishes and One Soup” campaign was followed by “Operation Empty Plate,” a campaign to encourage officials to finish what they ordered. It didn’t take long for the abrupt drop-off in gluttony to affect the economy: sales of shark fin (de rigueur for banquets) sank more than 70 percent; casinos in Macau recorded a drop in VIPs, and Swiss watch exports dropped by a quarter from the year before. Luxury goods makers mourned.

By some essential measures—eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and medical neglect—the public was more satisfied than in most countries. When sociologist Martin Whyte of Harvard first asked people, in 2004, if they were receiving coverage under public medical insurance plans, only 15 percent of those in the countryside said yes; when he asked again in 2009, that share had grown to 90 percent. People still faced wide gaps in coverage, and their insurance provided only the most basic care, but the progress was clear.

for decades, Party leaders had said, “Fight corruption too little and you’ll destroy the country. Fight it too much and you’ll destroy the Party.”

My phone buzzed with a notice from the Department: When reporting on officials suspected of graft or bribery, or those who have become degenerate, strictly adhere to information from the authorities. Do not speculate, do not exaggerate, do not investigate, and do not quote from things on the Internet.

The Party’s long-term objective was no mystery: if Xi Jinping fulfilled his duty to lead the Party until 2023, China would surpass the record held by the Soviet Union as history’s most durable one-party state. The Soviets had been in power for seventy-four years, and Chinese leaders openly feared the Soviet fate. Shortly after taking office, Xi Jinping gave a speech to Party members and asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered. Eventually, all it took was a quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party, and the great party was gone. In the end nobody was man enough to come out and resist.”

Chinese leaders were facing a choice: to continue growing, they could adopt a more democratic form of government, as South Korea did in the 1980s, or they could recommit themselves to authoritarianism. Historically, the latter approach was risky. Over the long term, authoritarian states do not grow as reliably as democracies; they are fragile, and they tend to thrive only in the hands of visionary individual leaders. “For every Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko, of the Congo,” according to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people.

For the moment, it was difficult to envision a coherent challenge to the Party: though the Chinese middle class was galvanized by many of the issues that had animated its peers at the advent of democracy in Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea (consumer rights, the environment, labor rights, housing prices, free speech), in China there were very few formal organizations in which people could assemble and produce a coordinated alternative to Party rule.

So far, China’s middle-class activists generally sought to reform the government, not replace it. In many countries, a more educated and entrepreneurial middle class has demanded greater control over its affairs. China had already passed the threshold into what political scientists call the “zone of democratic transition”—when a country’s per capita income exceeds four thousand dollars, and the correlation with regime change rises sharply.

Everything the Chinese had ever gained was by iron and sweat and fire, and they, better than anyone, knew the impermanence of it all—“the unreality of reality,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”

Between 2010 and 2030, China’s labor force would shrink by sixty-seven million people, the equivalent of the population of France. What’s more, China was devoting half its GDP to investment—a higher level than any big country in modern times—but growth was still slowing, which meant that investments in new equipment and other capital weren’t yielding as much growth as before.

The larger danger was that China’s local governments had spent so much on building that their debt had doubled since 2010, to almost 39 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. So, instead of putting money into the hands of consumers, China was spending it on staving off municipal defaults, a scenario that reminded people of Japan-style stagnation.

For those inclined to find reminders of eighties-era Japan—its loose credit and its ice cubes chipped from the Arctic—the moment arrived in July, when developers in the Chinese city of Changsha broke ground for the world’s tallest building, Sky City. Economists point to a historic correlation between “world’s tallest” debuts and economic slowdowns. There is no cause and effect, but such projects are a sign of easy credit, excessive optimism, and inflated land prices—a pattern that dates to the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life Building. Built in New York at the height of the Gilded Age, it was completed in 1873, the start of a five-year slump that became known as the Long Depression, and the pattern repeated in decades to follow. Skyscraper magazine, a Shanghai publication that treated tall buildings like celebrities, reported in 2012 that China would finish a new skyscraper every five days for the next three years; China was home to 40 percent of the skyscrapers under construction in the world.

Anybody who scratched beneath the surface of Chinese life discovered a more complicated conception of the good life that had made room for the pursuit of values and dignity alongside the pursuit of cars and apartments.