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

by Evan Osnos

That verdict became a sensation, and the more interested I became in the case of Little Yueyue, the more I noticed that practically every person I met had heard about the “Peng Yu case.” Often people volunteered similar stories: a helpful young member of the urban middle class done in by a gimlet-eyed scam artist. The lesson never changed: what little you have assembled in life can be gone in an instant. After a young man named Chen was falsely accused of injuring a cyclist, he told reporters, “I really don’t know if I will help out again if I encounter a similar situation.”

“In America, an individual is the basis of civil society, but in China, the collective is breaking down, and there is nothing yet there to replace it … When you come to a new place, you take care of yourself; you make a life with your family at its core—your wife, your husband, your child—and everybody else becomes less important,” he said. “You divide your mind.”

The Chinese were not the first people to suspect that urbanization was damaging their moral health. In 1964, Americans were shocked by the murder of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kitty Genovese in New York. As The New York Times described it at the time, “For more than half an hour thirty-eight respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman,” and none of them called police or came to her aid. Americans embraced the story because it conformed to their fears of becoming an uncaring urban society, and the “Genovese syndrome,” as it was known, became a standard explanation in social psychology.

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.

A man named She Xianglin served eleven years for the murder of his estranged wife—until she returned one day to visit her family. It turned out that she had moved to another province and remarried; the defendant, who had been tortured for ten days and ten nights into a false confession, was released in 2005. A study of Chinese attitudes published in the journal Science in 2013 found that young Chinese men and women were, in the researchers’ words, “less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals.”

“Everyone has some cash in his pocket, but the money isn’t safe. You need a sense of security to be comfortable,” he said. I asked Chen how he would’ve responded if he had seen the little girl in the road. He said nothing for a moment. “If it was before Reform and Opening Up, I would have rushed out and risked my life to save her,” he said. “But after? I would probably hesitate. I wouldn’t be that brave. That’s what I’m trying to say: this is the world we’re in now.” 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.”

The clearest evidence against the theory that Chinese people no longer cared about one another was that they did care: for every video of people ignoring each other, there were examples of people risking themselves to protect others. When a disturbed man with a knife burst into a primary school in Henan in December 2012 and wounded twenty-two children, surveillance footage showed another man dashing after him, armed with nothing but a broom.

For all the atomizing effects of the market age, the culture of giving was not shrinking; it was growing. Private philanthropic organizations, which had been shuttered or taken over by the Party, were returning. Blood donations had grown so much that the old blood merchants who used to go door-to-door, standing peasants on their heads, all but disappeared. After the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, more than a quarter of a million volunteers went to help; most of them were young and most of them paid their own way to get there. Zhou Runan, the anthropologist, told me, “Young people are training to become fully rounded individuals, not selfish isolated people. That’s where the hope is: in the young.”

In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own.

Lin spent the trip to Thailand in his hotel room, absorbed in the book—“I never even went to the pool”—and when he returned, he began frequenting a Buddhist institute near his apartment in Beijing. His moment of transformation came when he grasped the idea, as he put it, that “this world is a fantasy.” He found it impossible to imagine going back to the work he had before. He asked, “Why should we attach ourselves to money and fame and social status?” 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.” Buddhism gave him answers that journalism never could. “I’ve been searching for the truth for a long time,” he said.

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. The stereotype of the Chinese citizen content to delay moral questions until he was car-and-home-equipped looked increasingly out of date.

“If you can become a billionaire by blatantly plagiarizing an American website and then putting it on the market, who’s going to go out and innovate?”

At times, the institutional reflex to exert control was breathtakingly counterproductive. At one point, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a popular software system called Node.js because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Behind the sting of that embarrassment was a question—a deep question about China’s future: How could China ever hope to invent the next big thing, the next Facebook, if it didn’t dare to let its people use this one?

Ai Weiwei decided to out-bug the police: he set up four webcams in his studio, including one on the ceiling of his bedroom, and he began broadcasting his life on the Web. He called it Weiweicam.com. The cops were flummoxed. After a few weeks, they ordered him to pull the plug. He could not conduct surveillance on himself.

“I think almost every level of the society today realizes China is facing a great crisis in terms of trust, ideology, moral standards, and many, many other ways … It’s not going to last. Without change in the basic political structure, China has come to the end. This so-called miracle is not going to last.” He said, “After ninety years of success, it is still an underground party. They can never really pronounce their ideas and they can never meet anybody who challenges them intellectually.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet-era poet, once asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?” In Murong’s view, China’s intellectuals were so beaten down that they were brawling on the floor over scraps. With so many thinkers “spending so much energy fighting over words and ink, we have forgotten to criticize government authority; we have forgotten to pay attention to social welfare. That should worry us.”

“In Beijing there are more than ten million commuters crossing the city every day, along with tens of thousands of trucks bringing in food, and bringing out incredible amounts of garbage. When you put all these problems together, it’s impossible to do it without a powerful government,” he said, adding, “We must understand ourselves. We mustn’t ignore what’s special about us. In sixty years we have become the second-largest economy in the world—maybe the first, depending on how you measure it—and in that that time, we never colonized anyone.”

“Everything is headed in one direction: the American direction,” he said. “It’s the mainstream view, and you’re not supposed to question it. People say everything has to be more like the United States in economics, law, journalism. That’s the conventional wisdom.” To my surprise, Tang had come to believe that most people in the government saw it that way, too, even if they didn’t voice it. “Ever since opening up became national policy, most government officials are pro-reform, and it’s very difficult for them to accept alternative views.”

“These people who control the media say they are liberal, but they act like authoritarians. Alternative views are blocked.”

“You Americans have this basic belief—a common value—but for China, this is still a problem. There are different beliefs—liberal and traditional, Maoism, all sorts of things.”

The term reminded me of the book from the seventies about the “Emperor of the Blue Ants.” Back then, the metaphor had been a fair description of China’s reality, but a generation later, the young and ambitious called themselves ants out of resentment. If China did not begin to integrate them into the cities, the urban underclass would reach five hundred million people by 2030 (half the entire urban population), but the government found this fact uncomfortable, so in December 2010 the agency responsible for unemployment data put out a set of rosy statistics reporting that more than 90 percent of the previous year’s college graduates were now employed. People mocked this claim; the Web was rife with testimonials from students who said their schools forced them to describe themselves as “employed” in order to boost the numbers and protect the schools’ reputations.

“Everyone has his own ideals, aspirations and dreams … The greatest dream of the Chinese people in recent times has been to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation … No one will be well-off unless the state and the nation are well-off.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

From afar, China was often described as marching inexorably toward better days. But inside the country, people were more circumspect. 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.” In my final months in Beijing, that feeling of fragility took hold more deeply.

In July 2013, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, wrote in his column in The New York Times, “The country’s whole way of doing business, the economic system that has driven three decades of incredible growth, has reached its limits.”