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

by Evan Osnos

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.

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.

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. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison.

The last time I had been in China, per capita income was three thousand dollars a year—equivalent to the United States in 1872. The United States took fifty-five years to get to seven thousand dollars. China did it in ten.

In 1999, China’s exports had been less than a third of America’s. A decade later, China was the world’s largest exporter.

He Zhaofa, a sociologist at Sun Yat-sen University, published a manifesto in favor of speed, reporting that, in Japan, pedestrians were walking at an average speed of 1.6 meters per second. He criticized his fellow Chinese. “Even American women in high heels walk faster than young Chinese men.” He called on his countrymen to adopt an urgent appreciation of every second. “The nation that wastes time,” he wrote, “will be abandoned by time itself.”

Macau always reminded me of the American Gilded Age. Matthew Josephson, author of The Robber Barons, describes how Americans acclimated to sudden fortune in the 1870s. One man, he writes, “had little holes bored into his teeth, into which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight.” The American political system at the time was subject to criticisms similar to those facing China’s political system today: corruption, lack of rule of law, weakness in the face of corporate monopolies. When strikes and demonstrations raged across the United States in the 1870s and ’80s, they were met with force.

Europeans liked to say that America had gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.

“Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external,” Lam, the professor, said. “To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck.”

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.

For those who have come from poverty to the middle class, he added, “the thinking may be, If I lose half my money, well, I’ve lived through that. I won’t be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I’m a millionaire!”

“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.”

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 the Chinese travel industry surveyed the public on its dream destinations, no place scored higher than Europe. Asked what they liked about it, the Chinese put “culture” at the top of the list. (On the negative side, respondents complained of “arrogance” and “poor-quality Chinese food.”)

If it was naïve to imagine that China’s opening would simply draw it closer to the West, it was also naïve, perhaps, to dismiss the power of more subtle changes. Modern Chinese travel, like the modern Chinese state, was predicated on the fragile promise that it would impose order on a chaotic world, by shepherding its citizens and keeping them safe from threats that could include Western thieves, Western cuisine, and Western culture.

For many in her generation, the rustication campaign was a revelation. Another young believer sent to the countryside, Wu Si, recalled to me his first day at an iron foundry. “We’d always been taught to believe that ‘the proletariat is a selfless class,’ and we believed in it completely,” he told me. A few hours after his arrival, a fellow worker approached him and said, “That’s enough. You can stop [working] now.” Wu was puzzled. “I don’t have anything else to do, so I might as well keep working.” The comrade whispered some advice. “People won’t be too happy about that.” If Wu worked a full day, quotas would go up for everyone. He put down his tools. Soon he learned other secrets of survival in the state-owned factories—how to swipe parts from the storeroom, how to build lamps for sale on the black market. For Wu, who would later become a prominent writer and editor, it introduced him to the world of parallel realities. “One narrative was public,” he told me, “and one was real.”

In 1998, Hu received a phone call from Wang Boming, one of the hotel room financiers. He was starting a magazine and wanted her to run it. She had two conditions: Wang would not use her pages to promote his other businesses, and he would give her a budget of a quarter of a million dollars (substantial in those days) to pay salaries that were high enough to prevent reporters from taking bribes. Wang agreed. It was no charity: he and his reform-minded allies in the government believed that, as China’s economy modernized, it could no longer rely on the tottering state-run press. People could no longer afford to be uninformed.

For decades the censors had skillfully suppressed unwelcome news (epidemics, natural disasters, civil unrest), but technology and travel were making this increasingly difficult. When the cover-up of the SARS virus became known, Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Peking University, ignored the taboo against acknowledging the Department’s invisible authority and wrote, “The Central Propaganda Department is the only dead spot in China that does not operate by rules and regulations; it is a dark empire in which the rays of law do not shine.” The university fired him for it.

In her office one afternoon, I asked Hu why she thought other publications had been punished while Caijing had not. “We never say a word in a very emotional or casual way, like ‘You lied,’” she said. “We try to analyze the system and say why a good idea or a good wish cannot become reality.” When I posed the same question to Cheng Yizhong, a former editor in chief of the Southern Metropolis Daily, one of China’s liveliest papers, who spent five months in jail for angering authorities, he saw it differently. He drew a distinction between his campaign for limiting police powers and Hu’s focus on raising government performance. “Caijing’s topics haven’t affected the fundamental ruling system, so it is relatively safe,” he said, adding, “I am not criticizing Hu Shuli, but in some ways Caijing is just serving a more powerful or relatively better interest group.”

Tang was baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation were somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

Emotion and policy became harder to separate. When Chinese diplomats denounced the actions of another government, they often said it “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” They invoked this idea with increasing frequency; one journalist, Fang Kecheng, counted up those occasions and found that China’s feelings were hurt only three times between 1949 and 1978, but by the eighties and nineties it was happening an average of five times each year.

“Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”

Yet, the measurements were clear: In 1949 the average life expectancy was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent.

At the Bank, Lin churned out a series of papers intended to “revisit” the understanding of how poor countries get rich, much if it anathema to the Washington Consensus that prevailed in the 1990s. Writing with the Cameroonian economist Célestin Monga, he argued that governments must “regain center stage.” Industrial policy, in which governments seek to support certain sectors, known to critics as “picking winners,” has a bad name in the West, he said, and for good reason: it has failed far more often than it has succeeded. But he argued that the only thing worse was not having an industrial policy. He pointed to a recent study of thirteen fast-growing economies. “In all the successful countries, the governments play a very proactive role,” he told me. He argued for a “soft” industrial policy in which a clamorous free market produced new industries and firms, and the government spotted the best prospects and helped them grow by giving them tax breaks and building infrastructure such as the ports and highways going up all over the Chinese mainland. It was the marriage of Chicago and Beijing: to rise out of poverty, he and Monga wrote, markets were “indispensable,” but government would be “equally indispensable.”

“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.” He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post–Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but “from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories.” When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident: he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves.”

As the debate widened, words once benign took on a political edge. Lin Yifu liked to describe the economic boom as the “China miracle,” but the liberal writer and critic Liu Xiaobo took issue with the phrase; he wrote that all he could see was “the ‘miracle’ of systemic corruption, the ‘miracle’ of an unjust society, the ‘miracle’ of moral decline, and the ‘miracle’ of a squandered future.” The boom was becoming “a robber baron’s paradise,” he wrote. “Only with money can the Party maintain control of China’s major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue states and purchase diplomatic support.”

“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 want to show that it’s not only the hope of the international community, but also the hope of the Chinese people to improve their human rights situation.”

To illustrate his point, he mentioned a news clip he’d seen recently about a seventeen-year-old migrant worker who stood in the aisle of a train for sixty-two hours to get home. It was the kind of ordeal that Chinese papers had always featured as portraits of fortitude. But Han had a different view of the man’s experience of standing on the train for two and a half days. “The guy had to wear adult diapers,” Han said, appalled. It became the basis of his next blog post. Young Chinese, he wrote, were increasingly being “used by the process of urbanization.” He laid out the deal that the boom was offering his generation: “Work for a whole year, stand in line for a whole day, buy a full-price ticket, wear diapers, and stand the whole way home—how dignified!”

The publisher Lu Jinbo believed that Han’s fans gravitated to him for a simple reason: They saw in his life and writings a rare kind of truth. “In China, our culture forces us to say things that we don’t really think. If I say, ‘Please come over to my place for dinner today,’ the truth is I don’t really want you to come. And you’ll say, ‘You’re too kind, but I have other arrangements.’ This is the way people are used to communicating, whether it’s leaders in the newspaper or regular people. All Chinese people understand that what you say and what you think often don’t match up. But Han Han isn’t like this. He doesn’t consider other people’s feelings and just says what’s on his mind, or he’ll say nothing.” In short, Lu said, “If Han Han says, ‘This is true,’ then ten million fans will say, ‘This is true.’ If he says, ‘This is fake,’ then it’s fake.”

We shouldn’t do things a certain way just because Rembrandt did it that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.”

In China, the subversive dynamics of the Internet age—the rebirth of irony, the search for community, the courage to complain—had stirred a hunger for a new kind of critical voice. The editor Hu Shuli and her journalists couldn’t satisfy it; they had neither the independence nor the desire to channel popular outrage. Classic dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo were too earnest and elitist to speak for the broader public. Tang Jie and the nationalists alienated people with their ferocity, and Han Han was usually too glib to share a stage with his elders. But Ai Weiwei combined ironclad Red credentials with a populist flair; he spoke in a vernacular that mixed irony, imagination, and rage. “There are people who say that he is doing some kind of performance art,” Chen Danqing, a Chinese painter and social critic, told me. “But I think he long ago surpassed that definition. He is doing something more interesting, more ambiguous.” Chen added, “He wants to see how far an individual’s power can go.”

Across town, at his studio, Ai Weiwei read that line—“There are no dissidents in China”—and it lingered with him. Ai’s visitors were increasingly using it to describe him, but the word dissident struck him as too simple to encompass the new range of dissent that was taking root in China. In the West, it had the ring of defiant moral clarity in the face of repressive power, but in China, becoming a “dissident” was complicated in ways that outsiders often underestimated.

The stereotype of Western journalists was that we paid too much attention to dissidents. It was, we were told, because we sympathized with their hopes for liberal democracy, because they spoke English and knew how to give a sound-bite.

One year after the arrival of the microblogging site Weibo, a study found that 70 percent of Chinese social media users relied on social media as their main source of news; in America, that number was 9 percent.

That autumn, to help ward off the global recession, Chinese leaders more than doubled spending on high-speed rail and upped the target to ten thousand miles of track by 2020, the equivalent of building America’s first transcontinental route five times over. China prepared to export its railway technology to Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey. It charted a freight line through the mountains of Colombia that would challenge the Panama Canal, and it signed on to build the “pilgrim express,” carrying the faithful between Medina and Mecca. In January 2011, President Obama cited China’s railway boom in his State of the Union address as evidence that “our infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped.” The next month, the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, blocked construction of America’s first high-speed train by rejecting federal funds. Amtrak had unveiled a plan to reach speeds comparable to China’s by 2040.

In 2011 the central bank posted to the Web an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials had fled the country, having stolen $120 billion—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. (The report was promptly removed.)

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. Nationwide, 46 percent of parents said in a survey that strong “social connections” or fees were the only way to get their children a good education. By 2011, according to a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, authorities were opening corruption cases at the rate of one a day for department-level officials, the equivalent of a city mayor.

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. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. 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.

“The Chinese are more successful,” then U.S. transportation secretary Ray LaHood told a reporter, “because in their country only three people make the decision. In our country, three thousand people do.”

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 apartment that Michael and his parents could afford was on the other side of the complex, beside the tile stores, not the lake. We stepped back into the elevator, and Michael seemed uncomfortable. Speaking in English, so his parents couldn’t understand, he said, “I won’t live here. I will put my parents here. I need to be back in a big city like Shenzhen or Beijing or Shanghai. Qingyuan is countryside. Second tier. They just learn ‘exam English.’ They don’t have big dreams here.”

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.)

After years of not daring to measure the Gini coefficient, in January 2013 the government finally published a figure, 0.47, but many specialists dismissed it; the economist Xu Xiaonian called it “a fairy tale.” (An independent calculation put the figure at 0.61, higher than the level in Zimbabwe.)

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.

Writing in 2010, the authors ranked “urban China among the least socially mobile places in the world.”

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.”

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. “What is the most common feeling in China today?” the Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua wrote in 2012. “I think many people would say disappointment. This feeling comes from the insufficient improvement in lives amid rapid economic growth. It also comes from the contrast between the degree to which individual social status is rising and the idea of the ‘rise of a great and powerful nation.’”

on the contrary, Chinese officials with good economic track records were no more likely to be promoted than those who performed poorly. What mattered most was their connections with senior leaders.

Others were growing weary of this version of Confucius. The insistence on harmony seemed to leave little room for a politics of negotiation, for an honest clash of ideas. Li Ling, a Peking University professor, took aim at what he called the “manufactured Confucius,” and wrote, “The real Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king … He had no power or status—only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He traveled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers of his day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous … He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a homeless dog than a sage. This was the real Confucius.”

For many people, living in China in this day and age felt like living on a newly prosperous island that was surrounded by treacherous currents—stay on dry land, and life could be safe and rewarding; lose your footing for a moment, and the world could collapse.