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

by Evan Osnos

Low-skilled jobs weren’t the problem—those wages were climbing—but there weren’t enough white-collar jobs to employ each year’s crop of more than six million new college graduates. Between 2003 and 2009, the average starting salary for migrant workers had grown by nearly 80 percent, but for college graduates, starting wages were flat.

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.)

Yet, for all the talk about income, it was becoming clear that people cared most of all about the gap in opportunity.

They found that in other developing countries, parents’ education was the most decisive factor in determining how much a child would earn someday. But in China, the decisive factor was “parental connections.”

The longer I lived in China, the more it seemed that people had come to see the economic boom as a train with a limited number of seats. For those who found a seat—because they arrived early, they had the right family, they paid the right bribe—progress was beyond their imagination.

“What is the most common feeling in China today?” the Tsinghua sociologist Guo Yuhua wrote in 2012. “I think many people would say disappointment.

In Havel’s view, the key to life under a Communist Party was the maintenance of a double life—the willingness to say one thing in public and another in private, because of fear or interest or a combination of the two. Eventually that double life became untenable.

Christopher Adolph, and Mingxing Liu) challenged one of the essential shibboleths surrounding China’s rise: the Party had always maintained that its ruthless devotion to development—“the hard truth,” as Deng put it—ensured meritocracy because it rewarded cadres who made the shrewdest economic decisions. But the researchers found no evidence to support this; 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.

they began receiving a warning: “In accordance with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, search results for ‘the truth’ have not been displayed.”

A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.

The Little Red Book was used as a “demon-exposing mirror” that could unmask “class enemies,” and in two provinces, the fervor descended into cannibalism: class enemies were disemboweled, and their organs were consumed at communal banquets.

Outsiders often saw the Chinese as pragmatists with little time for faith, but for thousands of years the country had been knitted together by beliefs and rituals.

Now and then, a surge of patriotism provided a form and direction to people’s lives, but it was, as the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote of the nationalism in his own country, “like cheap liquor”: “It gets you drunk after only a few shots and makes you hysterical,” he wrote, “but after your drunken rampage you are left with nothing but an awful headache the next morning.”

“To assess a country’s true strength and prosperity, you can’t simply look at GNP growth and not look at the inner experience of each ordinary person: Does he feel safe? Is he happy?”

My neighbor Huang Wenyi lived next door with his mother, who was eighty-eight. When I once asked her if she had old photos of the family, she said, “They were burned during the Cultural Revolution.” And then she laughed, the particular hollow Chinese laugh reserved for awful things.

People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit.

The Chinese pride themselves on “humaneness,” or ren, as it was known, and it was an idea as fundamental to conceptions of morality in China as the principle of “do unto others” was in the West. But in recent years, as a practical matter, kids in China were also raised to be mindful of less inspiring concerns, such as zuo haoshi bei e—which means “doing something helpful and getting cheated in the process.”

In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn’t been motivated by guilt.

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.

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.

“Now even the fin on a fish can be fake … In the past, if you didn’t have enough food, I would give you a bite. That’s how it was. But after Reform and Opening Up, it’s different. If you have one bite of food and I have one bite, I will try to take yours and have two for myself, and leave you with nothing. “We’ve learned all these bad habits from countries like yours,” he said, smiling,

Hannah Arendt once identified a “peculiar kind of cynicism” that takes hold in societies prone to the “consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth.”

“The moral character of the ruler is the wind,” he said, “the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.”

Sandel climbed the stage. Behind him, an enormous plastic banner carried the Chinese title of his latest book, What Money Can’t Buy, in which he asked whether too many features of modern life were becoming what he called “instruments of profit.”

“The question of markets,” he said, “is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?”

Sandel had spent much of his career considering what he called “the moral responsibility we have to one another as fellow citizens.”

But by 1980, American liberals had put aside the language of morality and virtue because it came to be seen as “what the religious right does,” he said.

“I began to feel that something was missing in this kind of value-neutral politics, and I think it was no accident that there was a stretch of time from 1968 until 1992 when American liberalism was more or less moribund, when it had lost its capacity to inspire.”

I watched him speak to several more college groups in Beijing, and it was clear that when Sandel described the “skyboxification” of life—the division of America into a world for the affluent and a world for everyone else—Chinese listeners heard much in common.

Officially, China recognized five religions—Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism—and believers could worship in state-controlled settings.

simply abandoned the project and coined a new term: the Kung Fu Panda problem. This describes the fact that the most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.

On the lush campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Xue Lan, the dean of the school of public policy, lamented that many of China’s institutions were standing in the way of some of the country’s most talented young people.

Fostering the development of radical new ideas would take more than declaring the ambition to do so; it would require strong courts insulated from political interference and capable of protecting intellectual property, so that entrepreneurs could trust each other enough to put forward innovations and collaborate;

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.

in China, people joke that tax evasion is the national sport. Government researchers estimated in 2011 that tax fraud cost the state ¥1 trillion—about $157 billion—and they found that the largest culprits were, in fact, state-owned enterprises.

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. He joked about writing a book on tax law, probably a first for a contemporary artist. To him, knowledge of any kind was the most powerful art he could produce. “Their power is based on ignorance,” he said. “We’re not supposed to know.”

The government had closed his production company, Fake Cultural Development Ltd., because it failed to update the annual registration. (That would have been difficult, because the police had seized the documents and stamps to do so.) “It’s like you’re playing chess with a person from outer space,” he said. “They play a way you can never imagine, and the game is designed so that they must be the winner. I’m forced to play with them, and no matter how smart I move, I will be the loser.”

Fang was a biochemist with a degree from Michigan State who had leaped to prominence by exposing quack science and academic corruption. In China, this was risky work: Fang was attacked by thugs carrying a hammer and pepper spray, and it turned out that they had been hired by a doctor whom he had accused of fabricating data.

“Not since the Cultural Revolution have Chinese intellectuals expressed as much hatred toward each other.” Why had this issue, of all things, caused a fight so intense?

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?”

is autocracy that creates chaos,” she wrote during the Middle East uprising, “while democracy breeds peace. Supporting an autocracy is in reality trading short-term interests for long-term costs.”

“Growing up in China, there are very few chances for you to feel like that—to be lifted spiritually, to be working on something bigger than yourself, more important than your immediate, ordinary life circle.” Nationalism, in that sense, was a kind of religion, and people placed their faith in it just as they did in Confucianism or Christianity or the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Viewed from afar, the bursts of nationalism, the occasional violence, could make it appear as if China were boiling with patriotic anger. But, up close, it was not, and it was difficult to know how many people really shared that sentiment.

Patriotism is not about bullying mothers of children who died in the earthquake, while calling for people to stand up to the foreign bullies of our motherland,”

“If Chinese kids can’t even go to school in China, what use is more territory?”

asked him if he believed the Party would eventually reform itself from within. “That’s hard to imagine,” he said. “It still believes in the power of violence, that it can control situations, finally, with force.”

the Party had once taken pains to avoid the perception of nepotism, but now it placed political reliability above all, and the incoming generation included a larger share of hereditary rule at the top than any time in the history of the People’s Republic.

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.”

Overall, they found, “economic growth is not enough; job security and a social safety net are also critical to people’s happiness.

Under Xi Jinping, the Party showed no sign that it saw a way out of its ideological gymnastics. It continued to carry the banner of socialism and the ideas that came with it (Thought Reform, the primacy of the Party in Power), while, on all sides, the Party was confronting unbridled Wild West capitalism and a clamorous market of ideas.