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

by Evan Osnos

in China until the twentieth century. While European protagonists occasionally found happiness, Chinese lovers typically succumbed to forces beyond their control: meddling parents, disease, miscommunication.

When private income began to climb in the eighties, shoppers moved in herds, surging after the same products as their neighbors with a force that became known as “tidal wave consumption.”

study of advertising found that the average person in Shanghai saw three times as many advertisements in a typical day as a consumer in London.

The greatest shock to the marriage tradition came from an unlikely source: in 1997 the State Council restored the right for people to buy and sell their homes.

If a triple without got married, it was called a “naked wedding.” In 2011 this was the title of a Chinese miniseries about a privileged young bride who married her working-class husband over the objections of her parents, and moved in with his family. It became the most popular show in China.

“I’d rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.” That line was too much for the censors.

Before that, the Party’s first and most enduring target had been the tyranny of class. Mao dismantled four million private businesses, nationalized assets, and flattened society so thoroughly that China’s income inequality fell to the lowest level in the socialist world.

“A man getting famous is like a pig fattening up,”

After the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the Party had dedicated itself to preventing its leaders from developing a cult of personality. It succeeded.

a night school called the Weiliang Institute of Interpersonal Relations, in the city of Harbin, offered a “drinking strategy” course. (One tip: after a toast, discreetly spit the liquor into your tea.)

she bought mountains of filthy American wastepaper, hauled it to China at cheap rates, recycled it into cardboard boxes bearing goods marked “Made in China,” and sold those goods to America. The 2006 rich list estimated her fortune at $3.4 billion.

I wanted to meet a man named Li Yang, China’s most popular English teacher and perhaps the world’s only language instructor known to bring students to tears of excitement.

Farmers in remote villages embarked on audacious inventions, earning the nickname “Peasant da Vincis.” Some ideas were grimly pragmatic—a man with kidney disease built his own dialysis machine out of kitchen goods and medical parts, including clothespins and a secondhand blood pump.

By 2007 the top 10 percent of urban Chinese were earning 9.2 times as much as the bottom tenth, up from 8.9 times the previous year.

the city was a Portuguese colony, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions that led W. H. Auden to christen it “a weed from Catholic Europe.”

Within a few more years, the quantity of money passing through Macau would exceed that of Las Vegas six times over.

Around his home village, Fuk Hing, which means “Celebrating Fortune,” he was known by a nickname that he did not much care for: Lang Tou Ping, or Inveterate Gambler Ping.

As winter approached, Siu’s success set in motion a chain of events that showed why, in China’s new landscape of money and power, Macau is a place where it is easy to get into trouble—whether you are a former barber in Hong Kong or one of the richest men in America.

Hal Rothman, the late historian of the American West, wrote that Las Vegas posed the same question to every visitor: “What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?”

Games of chance had been a part of Chinese history since the Xia dynasty (2000–1500 B.C.E.). “The government often imposed rules against them, and yet officials themselves were the ones who gambled the most,”

Intrigue, of one kind or another, had clung to Macau since the city’s founding myths, which described an act of elegant deception: In 1564, or so the story went, local Chinese fishermen sought the help of a visiting Portuguese fleet for a battle against pirates; the Portuguese disguised their cannon inside Chinese boats and waylaid the bandits at sea.

Government tax revenue in Macau was often more than double the budget, and like Kuwait, Macau distributed checks to its residents under a program named the Wealth Partaking Scheme.

A joke making the rounds described a man on a Beijing street corner who is sideswiped by a sports car, which tears his arm off. He gazes in horror at the wound and cries, “My watch!”

“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.”

the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.

“the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed.

For years nobody embodied the spirit of Macau more than Stanley Ho,

Foreign governments suspected Ho of being too cozy with Chinese organized crime. He denied it, but regulators thwarted his family’s efforts to run casinos in the United States and Australia.

Working through junket operators was a legal bypass around this problem, because the operators could recruit rich customers from across China, issue them credit, and then handle the complicated business of collection.

Men who were once known in the local papers by their nicknames, as reputed triad bosses, reinvented themselves as executives in the gaming industry.

To find untapped millionaires, the junket agents took to scouring the business press, looking for new faces.

The notion that a former barber had won as much as seventy-seven million dollars, and outlasted the mobsters charged with getting it back, attracted the attention of members of the Hong Kong press.

Steve Jacobs, filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit that made a range of accusations against Sheldon Adelson. Jacobs said that he and Adelson had discussed the God of Gamblers case, and the allegation that triads were involved with Sands casinos; over Jacobs’s objections, he said, Adelson still sought to “aggressively grow the junket business.” Jacobs’s suit also accused the Sands of hiring a Macau legislator in a way that could put the casino at risk of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars companies from bribing foreign officials.

By 2007, when Siu Yun-Ping hit his streak in Macau, the China scholar Minxin Pei noted that nearly half of all Chinese provinces had sent their chief of transportation to jail.

In May 1942, Chairman Mao, in his talks on the future of art and literature, said, “There is, in fact, no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics.”

The Party would make sure that art, literature, and other expressions of taste adhered to what it later called the zhuxuanlu—“the central melody”—of Chinese society, the Party’s distilled understanding of values, priorities, and desires.

The Party discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy was to embrace it:

“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.”

In 1877, when the Qing dynasty was decaying and Western powers were rising, Chinese reformers dispatched a young scholar named Yan Fu to England to investigate the source of British naval power. He concluded that Britain’s strength lay not in its weapons but in its ideas,

The “Publicity” in the title was for English purposes; the Chinese name was the Central Propaganda Department, and it was one of the People’s Republic’s most powerful and secretive organizations—a government agency with the power to fire editors, silence professors, ban books, and recut movies.

Orwell wrote that political prose, in any country, is intended to “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

But no country has devoted more time and care to the art of propaganda than China, where the emperor Qin Shi Huang governed, in the third century B.C.E., with a policy he called “Keep the Masses Ignorant and They Will Follow.”

Deng and his men urgently needed a new approach, and they found it in the holy land of public relations, America, and in a new, if unlikely, role model: Walter Lippmann, a leading American columnist for much of the twentieth century.

They studied and cited Lippmann’s belief in the power of pictures to, in his words, “magnify emotion while undermining critical thought,”

they adopted his view that good PR can create a “group mind” and “manufacture consent” for the ruling elite.

Instead of withering away, the world of Thought Work grew in scale and sophistication, until it encompassed, by one estimate, a propaganda officer for every one hundred Chinese citizens.

It had a pair of websites, in Chinese and English, that together attracted about 3.2 million unique visitors every month.

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.

I was struck that nineteen years after the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, China’s young elite had risen again, not in pursuit of liberal democracy but in defense of China’s name.

For many, nationalism provided what one young patriot called “our first taste of the sacred rights of freedom of speech.”