In the late 1990s, a joke circulated in Beijing depicting the difference between a go-go China and the all-too-staid United States. In Palo Alto, a young woman goes out to dinner with a Chinese entrepreneur. Driving her home, he accelerates through an intersection as the light changes to red. When they arrive at her house, she won’t invite him in. He obviously isn’t dependable, she says. He risked her life back there at the crossing.
In Beijing, the entrepreneur lands another date and, taking that woman home, slows down at a yellow light. At her doorstep, she, too, snubs him. Why did he stop? Clearly he doesn’t know how to grab opportunities when he sees them.
To say that China has transformed itself over the past several decades is an understatement. The erstwhile “sick man of Asia” now boasts the world’s second-biggest economy and has more trade with more countries than any other nation. Twenty-five years ago, in 1989 — when millions of Chinese marched for more freedom and less corruption in demonstrations that ended with a crackdown around Tiananmen Square — China’s per-capita gross domestic product, a measure of its economic output, was a paltry $403 a year. This year it will top $7,000. When my college classmates in China graduated in 1982, their salaries averaged $100 a month; now they all own at least one apartment and boast flat-screen TVs bigger than my family’s minivan.
But this voyage from Third World basket case to global powerhouse has not been without its challenges. China produces more carbon dioxide than any other country; its air, soil and water are laced with heavy metals and other toxins. The gap between rich and poor is bigger than America’s. And while economic reforms have raced ahead, people are still thrown in jail for speaking their minds.
In the pages of the New Yorker, Evan Osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new China better than any other writer from the West or the East. In “Age of Ambition,” Osnos takes his reporting a step further, illuminating what he calls China’s Gilded Age, its appetites, challenges and dilemmas, in a way few have done.
Two themes drive this compelling and accessible investigation of the modern Middle Kingdom. The first is hunger. China is living through “a ravenous era,” Osnos declares early in the book. And it’s a hunger not just for meat — the consumption of which has increased sixfold since the 1970s. After 40 years of dead-end Maoism, Chinese are combing the globe for commodities, wealth, experiences and respect. The second theme is the chase. “All over China people were embarking on journeys, joining the largest migration in human history,” Osnos writes, and he doesn’t mean that just in physical terms. He peppers the book with tales of characters making spiritual, economic, emotional and philosophical expeditions that have transformed their lives and the world as we know it.
And it all has happened so fast. As Osnos notes, the 1980 edition of China’s authoritative dictionary, “The Sea of Words,” described individualism as “the heart of the Bourgeois worldview, behavior that benefits oneself at the expense of others.” But today Chinese have embraced the idea that they can be the agents of their own fate with an alacrity that perhaps only an American observer can really understand.
Dividing the book into three sections, Osnos depicts the pursuit of wealth, freedom and something to believe in. Along the way the reader is treated to a series of finely wrought portraits of Chinese searchers.
We meet Lin Yifu, who as a young officer in the army on Taiwan makes the remarkable decision to swim to China in 1979, then earn a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago and, as the World Bank’s chief economist, become one of the principal cheerleaders of China’s hybrid economic model of unfettered capitalism and state control.
There’s Gong Hainan, a peasant who founded a dating website in a typical rags-to-riches story that has become central to China’s sense of itself. The prominent dissidents Ai Weiwei and Liu Xiaobo also receive deeply insightful treatment.
Osnos’ examination of Chinese ambition is equally ambitious in revealing the national traits of modern Chinese. While Chinese describe themselves as more cautious than Americans, Osnos notes at one point, psychological research has shown that they take consistently higher risks with their investments than Americans of comparable wealth.
And finally, amid all of China’s frenetic energy and miraculous economic growth, Osnos observes that its Gilded Age is an era without any “central melody”; there’s a huge spiritual hole in the middle of the Chinese soul, and, he argues, it makes that great country’s future uncertain and a bit scary for them and for us.
John Pomfret, the author of “Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China,” is working on a book about the United States and China.
URBANIZATION: CHINA
CHINA
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos (Farrar Straus Giroux)
