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

by Evan Osnos

But, up close, the deepest changes were intimate and perceptual, buried in daily rhythms in ways that were easy to overlook. The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life.

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.

Several of the new plutocrats have been among the world’s most dedicated thieves; others have been holders of high public office. Some have been both.

To outsiders, Chairman Mao was the “Emperor of the Blue Ants,”

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.

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.

Chinese leaders do not threaten to “bury” America, the way Khrushchev did, and even China’s fiercest nationalists do not seek imperial conquest or ethnic cleansing.

“Our method of doing business,” said the railway man Charles Francis Adams, Jr., a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, “is founded upon lying, cheating and stealing.”

In the early years of the twenty-first century, China encompasses two universes: the world’s newest superpower and the world’s largest authoritarian state.

In the eighteenth century, imperial China controlled one-third of the world’s wealth; its most advanced cities were as prosperous and commercialized as Great Britain and the Netherlands. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was crippled by invasion, civil war, and political upheaval.

Deng Xiaoping had been China’s paramount leader for less than six months.

The return of “household” farming, as it was known, spread so fast that a farmer compared it to a germ in a henhouse.

Deng and the other leaders squabbled constantly, but the combination of Deng’s charisma, Chen’s hesitation to move too fast, and Zhao’s competence was startlingly successful.

“Can we tolerate this kind of freedom of speech which flagrantly contravenes the principles of our constitution?” The Party would never embrace “individualist democracy.” It would have economic freedom but political control. For China to thrive, there must be limits on “emancipating the mind.”

the island of Quemoy, known during the Cold War as the “lighthouse of the free world,” because it was the final spit of land before the Communist shoreline.

The armies still shelled each other, but only on schedule: the mainland fired on odd-numbered days; Taiwan returned fire the rest of the week.

By then, Lin was far ahead of them. From the command post, he had to cross just three hundred yards to reach the gray-brown boulders on the shore.

Can Say No. Written by a group of young intellectuals, it decried China’s “infatuation with America,” which, they argued, had suppressed the national imagination with a diet of visas, foreign aid, and advertising.

It’s hard to overstate how large a change this was. In the heyday of socialism, there had been a movie called Must Never Forget, which told the story of a man whose lust for a new wool suit drives him insane.

Lin was a prominent economist in his late fifties

China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks. (In 2012 the country became, for the first time, more urban than rural.)

The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other. I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “Tongzhi, let’s hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up.

The word for waitresses and shopgirls, xiaojie, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes.

But the change that startled me most surrounded the word for “ambition,” ye xin—literally, “wild heart.” In Chinese, a wild heart had always carried the suggestion of savage abandon and absurd expectations—

When the summer heat began to break, I set off to see a man I had read about named Chen Guangcheng.

Chen studied massage and acupuncture—virtually the only education available to the blind in China—but he was more interested in the law,

In one case, he prevented local leaders from gaining control of land and renting it back to peasants at higher prices.

Just before I reached it, a pair of men blocked my path. One was lean and bony, with red chapped cheeks; the other was stout and smiling.

She said that local family-planning officials had locked her there, above the fertilizer store, because her daughter-in-law would not agree to a forced sterilization or pay the fees for having too many children,

People were beginning to call these detention centers “black jails.” It was difficult to figure out how many there were or where they were located. You had to look for them, town by town.

The week I returned from Shandong, the Ministry of Public Security expanded a list of information officially “prohibited” from the Web.

“If the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?” Yahoo! held firm, and when Shi Tao’s mother sued the company for exposing her son to harm, Yahoo! filed a motion to dismiss.

I asked around and found a one-story house for rent at No. 45 Caochang Bei Xiang. Most people in these old homes used a communal public toilet around the corner from my front door.

The window above my desk was filled with a view of Beijing’s ancient Drum Tower, a soaring wooden pavilion built in 1272.

Controlling time was so closely associated with imperial power that when foreign armies invaded Beijing in 1900, they made a point to climb the Drum Tower and slash the leather drums with bayonets. For a while, the Chinese renamed it the Realizing Humiliation Tower.

Regardless, the abrupt disappearance of one of Taiwan’s most celebrated soldiers was humiliating.

He also went to Sichuan to see the ancient dam built by his hero Li Bing.

But once the novelty wore off, life for defectors was hard. Huang Zhi-cheng, a Taiwanese pilot who landed his plane on the mainland in 1981, recalled, “At first, it’s hello, hello, and then they leave you to fend for yourself.”

It was, by mainland Chinese standards, a radical act: historically, personal choice was a low priority for the Chinese, for reasons both modern and ancient, including, in the beginning, the land itself.

Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who studies cultural differences in how people see the world, found that in ancient China, fertile plains and rivers lent themselves to rice farming that required irrigation and compelled people “to cultivate the land in concert with one another.”

The philosopher Xunzi, in the third century B.C.E., believed that only social rituals and models could control individual “wayward” appetites, just as steam and pressure could straighten a warped slab of wood.

One of China’s most famous classical paintings, an eleventh-century scroll by Fan Kuan entitled Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, is often called China’s Mona Lisa. But compared to Leonardo’s full-frame portrait, Fan Kuan’s work depicts a tiny figure of a horseman enveloped by vast, misty mountains.

To enliven its message, the Party promoted models of sacrifice. In 1959, newspapers highlighted a soldier named Lei Feng

Let your public self be like rice in a dinner: bland and inconspicuous, taking on the flavors of its surroundings while giving off no flavor of its own.”

Beginning in 1980, China designated special economic zones, which used tax advantages to attract foreign investment, technology, and links to customers abroad.

only the Public Security Bureau could change your household registration, or hukou. But new machines and fertilizers demanded fewer hands in the fields, and in 1985 the government officially permitted rural people to live and work temporarily in cities.

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

The desire to leave—to “go out,” as it was known—swept through villages. It didn’t necessarily engulf the men and women who were most successful or confident. On the contrary, it often settled on the misfits—the restless, the willful, the unblessed.

In 1978, nearly 80 percent of the Chinese population had been working on a farm; by 1994 this figure had fallen to less than 50 percent.

Of all the upheavals in Chinese life, there was none more intimate than the opportunity to choose one’s mate.