Age of Ambition

China has always been a mystery to the West, since the days of Marco Polo. They have been a people reluctant to join the rest of the world, at least until recently, as they are on the verge of having the largest economy in the world. In Evan Osnos' National Book Award-winning book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, a paradoxical nation is put under an excellent reporters' microscope. Here is a nation that has brought its nation prosperity, but at an Orwellian price.

"In the eighteenth century, imperial China controlled one-third of the world's wealth; its most advanced cities were as prosperous and commercialized as Great Britain and the Netherlands. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, China was crippled by invasion, civil war, and political upheaval." Economically, it became a backwater, and under the suffocating rule of Mao Zedong, while the country was a power, its people were not particularly happy or prosperous. The China of today is not Mao's China.

China's transformation has been breathtaking: "In 1949 the average life expectancy was thirty-six, and the literacy rate was 20 percent. By 2012, life expectancy was seventy-five, and the literacy rate was above 90 percent." "The Chinese people no longer want for food--the average citizen eats six times as much meat as in 1976--but this is a ravenous era of a different kind, a period when people have awoken with a hunger for new sensations, ideas, and respect. China is the world's largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; its is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined."

But, as Osnos points, this is a deal with the devil. "The government was offering its people a bargain: prosperity in exchange for loyalty. Chairman Mao had railed against bourgeois indulgences, but now Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life."

That loyalty is not so much asked for but enforced. Osnos mentions many Orwellian touches, such as journalists receiving text messages demanding that certain words be left out of news stories and that news items be downplayed or completely ignored. When a devastating earthquake hit and killed many schoolchildren in what was apparently a shoddily-made school, the government did not reveal a list of the dead. June 3rd, the date of the Tiananmen Square protests, is perpetually banned from articles. The Central Publicity Department, or what Orwell called "The Ministry of Truth" in 1984, does not exist on paper. It has no address and no sign.

Osnos, who lived in Beijing for about a decade, covers a lot of ground. Mostly he interviews dissidents, such as the artist Ai Weiwei, who tried to get the names of those dead children, but ended up getting arrested for tax reasons. He talks to Liu Xiaobo, who won a Nobel Peace Prize, which enraged Chinese authorities (he, nor his wife, were allowed to go pick it up--he was in jail). The most interesting story is that of a blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, who helped the people of his village fight the government. He is eventually kept under house arrest, but escapes, breaking his foot, crossing a river, and making it to the American embassy. He is now in the United States, a human rights advocate.

Osnos also talks to those who have been swept up in China's prosperity, such as a woman who became rich by starting an Internet dating service (because of one-child laws, sonograms, and abortion, there are many, many more men in China that women), a man who created something of a cult while teaching English (by shouting, mostly) and a man who created a fortune and lost it through corruption. Corruption is very rampant in China--almost everything is bought, including government positions.

It has become more difficult for China to keep a lid on dissent. The Internet plays a great part, although the government has a "Great Firewall" to try to block sensitive information. But a blogger and novelist, Han Han, has managed to tweak the government without being arrested. In contrast, Osnos talks to another blogger who has attempted to back up his country's government, believing that a free market economy and liberal democracy are not compatible.

I found some statistics and facts in the book stunning. China now hungers for Olympic gold medals--Mao did not believe in athletic competitions, because they undermined equality. China has an average of sixty coal miner deaths a week, which I have trouble wrapping my mind around. And for all the advancements in the economy, China's per capita income falls between Turkmenistan and Namibia.

Though there has been no revolution to speak of, the China of Mao, which believed in everybody being the same, to the China of today, is profound, as income inequality is greater than that of the United States. And like the United States, the poor seem unwilling to do anything about it, because the government has led them to believe that it can all be theirs, with a little luck.