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

by Evan Osnos

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.”