Age of Ambition
by Evan Osnos
Summary
Age of Ambition is Evan Osnos's portrait of China in the boom years, drawn from the eight years, 2005 to 2013, he spent in Beijing for the Chicago Tribune and then the New Yorker, and its organizing insight is in the title: the defining fact of the new China was the unleashed ambition of a billion people who had been told for a generation to want nothing. Osnos braids the book from three strands he calls fortune, truth, and faith. Fortune gives us the strivers, the English teaching evangelist Crazy English Li Yang, the online dating tycoon, the gold farmers and gamblers of the coastal cities, and Lin Yifu, the Taiwanese army officer who defected to the mainland by swimming and rose to chief economist of the World Bank. Truth follows those who insisted on it, the investigative editor Hu Shuli, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, the artist Ai Weiwei, and the censors and nationalists arrayed against them. Faith traces the hunger underneath the money, the return of religion, philosophy, and moral panic in a society that had burned its old certainties, crystallized in the national anguish over a toddler struck by vans while eighteen passersby did nothing. Osnos writes with the New Yorker's patience and a genuine affection for his subjects' audacity, and he had the historian's luck of catching the era's exact ending: the book closes just as Xi Jinping's great tightening begins. It won the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction and stands as the essential chronicle of China's gilded age.
Historical Context & Significance
The book appeared in 2014, just as the openness it documented was closing, which gives it the value of a time capsule sealed at the top: the China of contending voices, muckraking magazines, and negotiable boundaries that Osnos left in 2013 was being renovated into the surveillance state of the Xi era even as reviewers praised the portrait. The 2014 National Book Award placed it in the succession of great correspondent books running back through Butterfield's Bitter Sea on this same list. Osnos's later work turned the method on America in Wildland, but Age of Ambition remains the standard account of the boom's human interior, the book readers open when they need to remember that the other, arguing, hoping China existed.