Age of Ambition Quotes

“Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“To survive in China you must reveal nothing to others. Or it could be used against you … That’s why I’ve come to think the deepest part of the self is best left unclear. Like mist and clouds in a Chinese landscape painting, hide the private part behind your social persona. 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.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“THE PAST DOES NOT EQUAL THE FUTURE. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF. CREATE MIRACLES.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“It is more difficult to choke the mouth of the people than to block the flow of a river.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“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.” In surveys, Chinese casino gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino. The behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee have compared Chinese and American approaches to financial risk. In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In most countries, the long-term effects of kleptocracy are easy to predict: economists calculate that for every point that a nation’s corruption rises on a scale of one to ten, its economic growth drops by 1 percent.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history—and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“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.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The growth of a tree depends on the climate, but I make my own weather. I control my own fate,” he wrote, adding, “You can’t change the starting point of your life, but with study and hard work, you can change the endpoint!”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“A popular Chinese essay by an anonymous author carved out an archetype of the young white-collar class, the men and women who sip cappuccino, date online, have a DINK family, take subways and taxis, fly economy, stay in nice hotels, go to pubs, make long phone calls, listen to the blues, work overtime, go out at night, celebrate Christmas, have one-night-stands … keep The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice on their nightstands. They live for love, manners, culture, art, and experience. In”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Paying for power was so common that in 2012 the Modern Chinese Dictionary, the national authority on language, was compelled to add the word maiguan—“to buy a government promotion.” In some cases, the options read like a restaurant menu. In a small town in Inner Mongolia, the post of chief planner was sold for $103,000. The municipal party secretary was on the block for $101,000. It followed a certain logic: in weak democracies, people paid their way into office by buying votes; in a state where there were no votes to buy, you paid the people who doled out the jobs. Even the military was riddled with patronage; commanders received a string of payments from a pyramid of loyal officers beneath them. A one-star general could reportedly expect to receive ten million dollars in gifts and business deals; a four-star commander stood to earn at least fifty million. Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“He wrote of a country called “C,” ruled by “chunky and witless gluttons” who “spend two hundred billion yuan on drinking and dining and an equal amount on the military budget every year.” Unlike journalists who had to heed the directives from the Department, Ai Weiwei was something new; he had no job from which to be fired for speaking out.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated glumly behind him. “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In 1998 a local publisher translated Paul Fussell’s 1982 cultural satire, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which makes such observations as “the more violent the body contact of the sports you watch, the lower the class.” In Chinese, the satire fell away, and the book sold briskly as a field guide for the new world. “Just having money will not win you universal acclaim, respect, or appreciation,” the translator wrote in the introduction. “What your consumption reveals about you is the more critical issue.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Traditionally, young Chinese couples moved in with the groom’s parents, but by the twenty-first century less than half of them stayed very long, and the economists Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang discovered that parents with sons were building ever larger and more expensive houses for their offspring, to attract better matches—a real estate phenomenon that became known as the “mother-in-law syndrome.” Newspapers encouraged it with headlines such as A HOUSE IS MAN’S DIGNITY. In some villages, a real estate arms race began, as families sought to outdo one another by building extra floors, which sat empty until they could afford to furnish them. Between 2003 and 2011, home prices in Beijing, Shanghai, and other big cities rose by up to 800 percent.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Mao relied on propaganda and education—“Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.” (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.)”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978.” He paused and watched his wife and daughter snapping photographs at the boat’s railing, an orange sun sinking behind the buildings. “We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster,” he said.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“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?”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The People’s Daily summoned the language of another era and warned that constitutionalism, the call to put the Party under the rule of law, was “a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Mao sanctified propaganda and censorship as essential parts of Thought Work, and he relied on them to reframe the Long March as a strategic triumph, not a crushing defeat.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The commander of a mighty army can be captured, but the aspiration of an ordinary man can never be seized. —Confucius”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested—with a series of hypothetical financial decisions—the stereotype proved wrong, and the Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life. Some who tried succeeded; many others did not. More remarkable was that they defied a history that told them never to try.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Mao’s touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango’? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“When Chen Guangcheng was released in September 2009, he had served his full term. There were no more charges against him. And yet he returned to Dongshigu village to find that the local government had prepared for his arrival. They had installed steel shutters on the windows of his house, floodlights around the dirt yard, and cameras to keep an eye on the place twenty-four hours a day. They formed a revolving crew of guards to work in shifts. At one point, Cohen and Chen did their best to estimate the cost of the guards, meals, and other expenses required to keep the blind lawyer isolated from the world around him, and it came to seven million dollars. But as far as Chen was concerned, most of the punishment was mental: now and then, the guards would carry every object from the house out into the courtyard and leave them there for him and his family to bring back in. The guards confiscated his phone and computer and bent the prongs of the television plug so that it was unusable. At one point, Chen managed to smuggle out a short video describing his conditions, but when that was discovered, the guards punished him by rolling him in a blanket and beating him.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Thousands of men and women turned up—urban, well-heeled members of the New Middle-Income Stratum, some with children in their arms—all strolling calmly in the name of protest.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“Sitting in the cool quiet of a California night, sipping his coffee, Liu said that he was not willing to risk all that his generation enjoyed at home in order to hasten the liberties he had come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked me. “You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people. “Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy?”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

“In the hope of finding the China that I recognized, I clung at first to the countryside. It was the China of literature and ink paintings. One month, I did nothing but walk and hitch rides beside the rivers of Sichuan Province. I slept in small towns that felt half-abandoned, because the call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull. The village ancients liked to joke that, when they died, there would be nobody strong enough to carry their casket.”
― Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China