Age of Ambition
Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
*WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014*
A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China.
A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau.
The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the ‘Wastepaper Queen’.
Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China’s story – one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control.
Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Rolls Royces and Ferraris yet the word ‘luxury’ is banned from billboards. It has more Christians than members of the Communist Party. And why does a government that has lifted more people from poverty than any other so strictly restrain freedom of expression?
Based on years of research, Age of Ambition is a stunning narrative that reveals China as we have never understood it before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two potent, antagonistic forces a swelling individualism and a political structure intent on controlling it shape a rising superpower in this revealing journalistic portrait. New Yorker staff writer Osnos, the magazine's former Beijing correspondent, hangs his panorama on vivid first-hand profiles of artists, writers, editors, economists, Internet dating entrepreneurs, conservative nationalists, liberal students, and dissidents, including imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and exiled lawyer-activist Chen Guangcheng. Through their stories, he depicts a people navigating a dizzying shift from socialist austerity, conformity, and idealism to capitalist materialism and self-promotion; it's a society steeped in vehement dogmas the author spies examples in everything from English-language instruction to tour-guide patter but full of private doubt as they struggle to find fulfillment and social connection in a cutthroat market economy. At the center of his account is a shrewd analysis of the battle between an authoritarian, corrupt, and flagrantly privileged Communist Party and a burgeoning Internet-based culture of mockery and dissent, epitomized by an app that leaks secret government censorship rules as soon as they are decreed. Osnos combines scintillating reportage with an eye for telling ironies that illuminate broader trends; without downplaying the uniqueness of Chinese society, he makes its tensions feel achingly familiar for Western readers.
