Larry Bassett’s Reviews > Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China > Status Update

So much of it would have been impossible just a few years ago: the journey to the city, the online identity, the interior life so at odds with the image he projected to the world. Anybody who scratched beneath the surface of Chinese life discovered a more complicated conception of the good life that had made room for the pursuit of values and dignity alongside the pursuit of cars and apartments.

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.

Thirty years after China embarked on its fitful embrace of the free market, it has no single unifying doctrine—no “central melody”—and there is nothing predestined about what kind of country it is becoming. When the president unveiled the Chinese Dream, he intended it to be unifying, but instead, his people interpreted it as Chinese “Dreams”—plural.

“For several hundred years we’ve been a prisoner of this Western-centric view, which divided the world into two camps: West and East, democracy and authoritarianism, light and dark. Everything light belonged to the West, and everything dark belonged to the East. This worldview should be overturned.”

In the spring of 2013, Sarabeth and I began preparing to leave Beijing. After eight years, we wanted the chance to think about China with the help of some distance. We would miss it immensely, and we would be back, but it was time.

The collision of Han Han and Fang Zhouzi, two of China’s most influential commentators, caused a sensation; it generated fifteen million Weibo posts in two weeks. Some of Han Han’s critics went so far as to ask the Taxation Bureau to investigate him; they questioned whether his car races had been fixed; they even accused him of overstating his height.

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.

Over the years that I’d known him, Ai Weiwei had become as much a symbol as a man; he was the most famous dissident China had ever known. There were books and movies and articles about him. But once the artist became a celebrity, the art world lost patience and seemed eager to find the next voice.

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.

Indeed, the inherent drama of an individual standing up to the state was obviously seductive, and it helped explain why the most famous image from China in the past thirty years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square.