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

by Evan Osnos

I lived in China for eight years, and I watched this age of ambition take shape. Above all, it is a time of plenty—the crest of a transformation one hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created modern Britain.

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.

The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.

The stout fellow was no longer smiling. He wanted to know where I had heard about the blind man in Dongshigu village. “From the Internet,” I said. He blinked back at me, and from his expression, I sensed that the Internet meant as much to him as if I’d said I had been led there by fairies. He opened the door of the taxi and pressed me toward it.

“Macau has attracted more than twenty billion dollars in foreign investment in the casino industry alone,” he went on. “In short, the public interest has been well served.” It was a point of view consistent with the way the Party talked about its success in China: “Development is the only hard truth,” Deng had said, and for many people, that view was correct.

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

When Promise finally put down his wilted copy of The Wall Street Journal, there were no trumpets. He said simply, “When I read a foreign newspaper, I see lots of things I don’t know about.” On this first trip, there was much they would never see, but mile by mile, they were discovering how to see it at all.

The end of the Cold War, and the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, shook the Chinese establishment politically and economically. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist member of Deng Xiaoping’s original economic brain trust, was blamed for not suppressing the demonstrations earlier; think tanks that he had created were dissolved, and several economists went to jail for supporting the protests.

When he visited developing countries, he made a point to say they reminded him of China three decades ago. “Can other developing countries achieve a performance similar to that achieved by China over the past three decades?” he asked in a speech he called “The China Miracle Demystified.” “The answer is clearly yes.”

“Western countries are asking the Chinese government to fulfill its promises to improve the human rights situation, but if there’s no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ‘It’s only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn’t demand it,’” he told me.

I find it hard to understand the situation within China. This book suggest that people who are dissidents can continue to live and work in China and even to publish outside of China but not within China. This seems to be a very confusing way of life and hard to understand how it can be manageable. I follow the experiences of the Uyghers in western China who seem to experience severe discrimination. Reading this book benefits me by giving even different points of view from people within China.

And so he did, growing more ambitious as the months passed. As fall gave way to winter, he and a small group of collaborators were nearing the end of their secret project—a detailed declaration calling for human rights and political reform. “The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law;

If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.” He enjoyed the spontaneity, but he also saw a deeper significance in it for Chinese people; it was, he concluded, their “first chance in a thousand years to exercise their personal freedom of expression” without the state standing between their words and the public.

We got a drink and I asked him why he had returned to China in the way he had. “This place, in fact, still has a lot of problems, like the disparity between rich and poor, and migrant labor issues, and on and on. But it really has solved many problems. China’s economy is developing so quickly. I’m interested in why that has happened.

This is exactly what I would like to understand as well! If a Chinese person is wondering this, what hope is there for a helpless American person?

Ai Weiwei had come to abhor the mode of oblique dissent in China. Traditionally, intellectuals were expected to couch their criticisms of the government in a way that preserved the appearance of unity. As one saying had it, they should “point at the mulberry bush to disparage the ash tree.” Ai Weiwei had lost patience with this.

Indeed, the inherent drama of an individual standing up to the state was obviously seductive, and it helped explain why the most famous image from China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square.

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.

Over the years that I’d known him, Ai Weiwei had become as much a symbol as a man; he was the most famous dissident China had ever known. There were books and movies and articles about him. But once the artist became a celebrity, the art world lost patience and seemed eager to find the next voice.

Fang was a biochemist with a degree from Michigan State who had leaped to prominence by exposing quack science and academic corruption. In China, this was risky work: Fang was attacked by thugs carrying a hammer and pepper spray, and it turned out that they had been hired by a doctor whom he had accused of fabricating data.

The collision of Han Han and Fang Zhouzi, two of China’s most influential commentators, caused a sensation; it generated fifteen million Weibo posts in two weeks. Some of Han Han’s critics went so far as to ask the Taxation Bureau to investigate him; they questioned whether his car races had been fixed; they even accused him of overstating his height.

In the spring of 2013, Sarabeth and I began preparing to leave Beijing. After eight years, we wanted the chance to think about China with the help of some distance. We would miss it immensely, and we would be back, but it was time.

“For several hundred years we’ve been a prisoner of this Western-centric view, which divided the world into two camps: West and East, democracy and authoritarianism, light and dark. Everything light belonged to the West, and everything dark belonged to the East. This worldview should be overturned.”

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 the president unveiled the Chinese Dream, he intended it to be unifying, but instead, his people interpreted it as Chinese “Dreams”—plural.

The Party was rightly convinced that China’s future depended on innovating ideas that would be felt around the globe, and yet it feared the reverse: absorbing “global values” was a threat to its survival.

So much of it would have been impossible just a few years ago: the journey to the city, the online identity, the interior life so at odds with the image he projected to 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.