Age of Ambition - by Evan Osnos
Published:
Age of Ambition - by Evan Osnos
Read: 2018-12-22
Recommend: 10/10
This book gave me a deeper understanding of my motherland, chronicling many events and individuals I was familiar with, such as the Beijing Olympics, Chen Guangcheng, Ai Weiwei, and Lin Zhengyi (also known as Justin Yifu Lin). As Evan Osnos put it, understanding these figures and events helps us gauge how far China has—or has not—progressed toward becoming a modern, open society.
The Chinese government portrays Lin Zhengyi as a hero, and I’m glad I learned more about his background. He was the first Chinese student since the Cultural Revolution to pursue a PhD in economics in the U.S. He is a highly self-motivated individual, dedicated to making a significant impact.
I also appreciated how Evan Osnos compared Han Han to Lei Feng, describing both as bearers of an ideal that no one could fully live up to
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
“Hope is like a path in the countryside: originally there was no path, but once people begin to pass, a way appears.”
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.
[挖社会主义墙角] digging up the cornerstone of socialism,
[中国特色社会主义]“socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
[癞蛤蟆想吃天鹅肉] ye xin—literally, “wild heart.” In Chinese, a wild heart had always carried the suggestion of savage abandon and absurd expectations—a toad who dreams of devouring a swan,
steady traffic of mice and beetles and geckos,
Gong’s mother, Jiang Xiaoyuan, would have none of it. She moved into the dorm and carried her daughter on her back—up and down the stairs to the classrooms, back and forth to the toilet. (Gong trained herself to use the bathroom no more than twice a day.) While Gong was in class, her mother hustled outside to the street to sell fruit from baskets to make extra money. I wondered if the story was a metaphor, until I met her mother. “There was one especially tall building, the laboratory, and her class was up on the fourth floor,” Jiang said, scowling at the memory of it. Gong had never seriously considered an alternative. “School was the only way out,” Jiang told me. “We never wanted for her to work in the fields like us.”
The guide advised us to focus most on the san bao (“the three treasures”): the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, and the Mona Lisa.
“the most dangerous woman in China,” though she downplayed it, saying that she was just “a woodpecker,” forever hammering at a tree, trying not to knock it down but to make it grow straighter.
Article 35 of the Chinese constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and the press, but regulations gave the government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses. There were twenty-eight reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country. (In 2009, Iran overtook China in this, for the first time in ten years.)
Caijing produced a series of indispensable reports, and they were planning yet another when the Department put an end to it. From its headquarters on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the Department issued a daily stream of directives to editors that outlined the latest dos and don’ts. By definition, these reports were secret—the public was not allowed to learn what it couldn’t learn—and when I arrived in 2005, it was less than three months after reporter Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for describing the contents of a propaganda directive. To prevent further leaks, censors now preferred to deliver instructions orally. Leaders at the headquarters of state television had a special red telephone for this purpose. Other news organizations received instructions at meetings that reporters called “going to class.”
“If you stay in China as a journalist, you will never really join the international mainstream.” She was determined to prove him wrong, even if it meant working the angles within the Chinese system. If a magazine like hers broke the rules, the Department gave it a warning known as a yellow card, as in soccer. Three yellow cards in one year, and she could be shut down. The Department wasn’t reading stories before publication; on the contrary, it was up to editors themselves to guess how far they could go and compute the risk of wandering past an ill-defined limit. That was a specific kind of pressure, which China scholar Perry Link once compared to living beneath an “anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier.” “Normally, the great snake doesn’t move,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its silent constant message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadows makes his or her large and small adjustments—all quite ‘naturally.’”
Her approach appealed to reformers in the government who genuinely wanted to solve problems but didn’t want to give up power to do so. Some Chinese journalists said that Hu’s greatest skill was playing interest groups against one another, whether by amplifying the central government’s effort to round up corrupt mayors or by letting one wing of the government thwart a rival wing’s agenda. Allow the most powerful group to endure, the theory went, and you could do real, even profitable, journalism. Hu saw censorship as a matter of negotiation; when propaganda officials raged, she tried not to argue. She promised to improve, to pay more attention, to avoid that mistake in the future. “In Chinese, we say that you can bore a hole in a stone by the steady dripping of water,” her friend Qian Gang told me. Other journalists preferred a noisier metaphor: they called it “dancing in shackles.”
Besides, she was a businesswoman and she had to think about competition; the Internet was expanding, and she had to keep up. She thought that a story could be published if it carried the right tone and facts. “If it’s not absolutely forbidden,” she said, “we do it.” On June 9, Caijing published a twelve-page investigative report on the earthquake, including the school collapses. It was cool and definitive. According to the report, heedless economic growth, squandered public funds, and rampant neglect of construction standards had led to disaster. In a way that had rarely been articulated before, the report peeled away a layer of mythology that usually clung to China’s pursuit of fortune: the boom years were bringing poor stretches of the countryside into a new era, but the costs of that rise were becoming clear. The story detailed how local cadres had cut corners, but it stopped short of assigning responsibility by name. She was called in for criticism but was not punished. From her perch, straddling the line between the inside and the outside, she had made a judgment call; if she dwelled on the names of specific corrupt officials, it might score a point for accountability, but the scoop would leave her vulnerable to retribution. She told me, “We try not to give any excuses to the cadres who don’t want to get criticized.” Ultimately, she said, the important question was not “which person didn’t use good-quality bricks fifteen years ago” but something deeper. “We need further reform,” she said. “We need checks and balances. We need transparency. We say it this way. No simple words. No slogans.” It was a game of a certain, subtle kind, and she had won that round. She would not win others yet to come.
In a nation divided by dialect, geography, and class, the Web allowed people to find each other in unprecedented ways. A group of Chinese volunteers came together and began translating every word of The Economist magazine each week and offering it free to readers. Explaining their goal, the translators wrote, “In the Internet age, the greatest force is not avarice or love or violence, but devotion to an interest.”
Emotion and policy became harder to separate. When Chinese diplomats denounced the actions of another government, they often said it “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” They invoked this idea with increasing frequency; one journalist, Fang Kecheng, counted up those occasions and found that China’s feelings were hurt only three times between 1949 and 1978, but by the eighties and nineties it was happening an average of five times each year.
was studying at Peking University in 1980 when the University of Chicago economist Theodore Schultz visited Beijing to deliver a speech. Lin was assigned to translate because he spoke English from his years in Taiwan. Schultz, who had recently won the Nobel, was impressed; he returned to Chicago and helped arrange a scholarship. Lin Yifu would, again, be a first: the first Chinese student since the Cultural Revolution to study for an American PhD in economics. If that wasn’t enough to make him stand out, he was choosing to go to Chicago, the crucible of free-market thought. In 1982, Lin arrived in the United States, and it allowed him to reunite with his wife and children, who went there, too. Since his defection, he and his wife, Chen Yunying, had maintained occasional secret contact. She even sent him a poem that included the line “I understand you, I understand what you did.” Once in America, Chen studied for a doctorate at George Washington University.
Yet, the measurements were clear: 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.
In June 2008, Lin and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. Everything he brought fit in two suitcases. They rented a house on the edge of Georgetown, with a patio where Lin could write in the open air. They put a treadmill in the kitchen. On business trips, when colleagues went out to socialize, he went up to his hotel room and worked late into the night.
he didn’t smoke, barely drank, and had no interest in nightclubs. Han’s parents had worked for the government: his mother, Zhou Qiaorong, dispensed benefits at a local welfare office; his father, Han Renjun, once wanted to write fiction but dead-ended at a local Party newspaper, and he resented the path of advancement. “He didn’t like the kind of life in which you have to drink every day and kiss your leaders’ asses,” his son told me. Before the parents knew if they were having a boy or a girl, they agreed to name the baby Han Han, the father’s abandoned pen name. As the son’s work became recognized, his heckling of the establishment complicated their government jobs; he offered to support them financially, and they took early retirement.
[吃饭了没？] The publisher Lu Jinbo believed that Han’s fans gravitated to him for a simple reason: They saw in his life and writings a rare kind of truth. “In China, our culture forces us to say things that we don’t really think. If I say, ‘Please come over to my place for dinner today,’ the truth is I don’t really want you to come. And you’ll say, ‘You’re too kind, but I have other arrangements.’ This is the way people are used to communicating, whether it’s leaders in the newspaper or regular people. All Chinese people understand that what you say and what you think often don’t match up.
“Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family?”
“Kafka’s castle,” Ai murmured. Two hours stretched into three, and I asked him why he was bothering with this if he did not expect a response. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said. “You can’t simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Twenty minutes before closing time, the man behind the glass finally accepted the filing, and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The old woman was still yelling.
[鸡同鸭讲] Each side was trying to persuade the other, but they spoke different languages. It was the kind of conversation the Chinese call a “chicken talking to a duck.” Cluck, cluck. Quack, quack. Neither side understood a thing.
Each assignment, W. explained, began with an order to “influence public understanding” or “stabilize netizens’ emotions.” If he openly praised the government, people ignored him or mocked him as a “fifty-center,” so he worked the angles: If there was a gathering crowd, he’d throw in a dumb joke or insert a boring advertisement, to encourage casual readers to wander off. If people were criticizing the Party about, say, rising gas prices, he might lob in a grenade of an idea: “If you’re too poor to drive, then it serves you right.” “Once people see that, they start to attack me,” he said, “and gradually the subject moves from gas prices to my comments. Mission accomplished.”
When a fat man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am skinny.” When a bearded man lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I am not bearded.” When a man who sold sunflower seeds lost his freedom, you said, “It has nothing to do with me, because I don’t sell sunflower seeds.” But when they come for the skinny, beardless ones who never sold sunflower seeds, there will be nobody left to speak up for you.
the People’s Republic was spending more on domestic security than on foreign defense; it was devoting more money to policing and surveilling its own people than it was on defending against threats from abroad.
Understanding why Ai Weiwei was arrested—or why Gao Zhisheng was abused, or why Liu Xiaobo was in prison—was vital to understanding China. The degree to which it could accept a figure such as Ai Weiwei was a measure of how far China had or had not moved toward a modern, open society.
in forty-seven years of service, high-speed trains in Japan had recorded just one fatality, a passenger caught in a closing door.
China was pursuing material satisfaction, and people found that it could satisfy only some of their yearnings; on the existential questions—meaning, self-cultivation, life itself—it was a dead end. Now and then, a surge of patriotism provided a form and direction to people’s lives, but it was, as the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote of the nationalism in his own country, “like cheap liquor”: “It gets you drunk after only a few shots and makes you hysterical,” he wrote, “but after your drunken rampage you are left with nothing but an awful headache the next morning.”
Faced with so many options, some people hedged with a bit of spiritual promiscuity: before the school exams each spring, I watched Chinese parents stream past the gates of the Lama Temple to pray for good scores. Then they crossed the street to pray at the Confucius Temple, and some finished the afternoon at a Catholic Church, just in case.
Li Ling, a Peking University professor, took aim at what he called the “manufactured Confucius,” and wrote, “The real Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king … He had no power or status—only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He traveled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers of his day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous … He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a homeless dog than a sage. This was the real Confucius.”
“What did I have to fear about helping a child?”
only three or four people who heard her cries understood what was happening to her, and at least one witness probably called the police during the attack. Officers, however, arrived too late to save her. (The story of thirty-eight silent bystanders had been mentioned to the newspaper, not incidentally, by the police commissioner.) In the case of Little Yueyue, apathy might not have been the only explanation for why people hesitated. The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang examined twenty-six cases of Good Samaritans who had been the victims of extortion in China, and he found that, in every instance, the local police and the courts treated the helpers as guilty until proven innocent. In none of the twenty-six cases was the extortionist ever required to provide a witness to back up the accusation; nor was the extortionist ever punished, even after the helper was found to be falsely accused.
I sometimes wondered how things might be different in China if its leaders, instead of flying the flags of Lei Feng and a harmonious society, offered credible signs that they were trying to make their institutions more ethical and trustworthy and honest. In its actions, and its inactions, a state enacts a moral view, at least according to Confucius. “The moral character of the ruler is the wind,” he said, “the moral character of those beneath him is the grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends.” In its abuses and deceptions, the Chinese government was failing to make a persuasive argument for what it meant to be Chinese in the modern world. The Party had rested its legitimacy on prosperity, stability, and a pantheon of hollow heroes. In doing so, it had disarmed itself in the battle for the soul, and it sent Chinese individuals out to wander the market of ideas in search of icons of their own.
The film director Lu Chuan once agreed to produce a short film for the Beijing Olympics, but he was inundated with so many official “directions and orders” that he simply abandoned the project and coined a new term: the Kung Fu Panda problem. This describes the fact that the most successful film ever made about two of China’s national symbols, kung fu and pandas, had to be made by a foreign studio (DreamWorks), because no Chinese filmmaker would ever have been allowed to have fun with such solemn subjects.
The artist was awed by the response. “A young girl walked in with a backpack full of money and said, ‘Where do you want this?’” he told me. “‘It was the savings for a car, and now I can’t buy the car. It’s yours.’” He added, “That people would raise their voices and act, to give money to a person the state said is a ‘criminal’? This is an unthinkable situation.” His accountant posted a running tally of donations. The list of givers was eclectic—I recognized the name of a father whose son had fallen ill from drinking tainted milk—and by the end of the first week, supporters had donated even more money than the artist needed for a deposit. After the subject of his donations became the most trending topic on Weibo, his account was shut down. My phone buzzed with a new order for Chinese journalists:
in China, people joke that tax evasion is the national sport. Government researchers estimated in 2011 that tax fraud cost the state ¥1 trillion—about $157 billion—and they found that the largest culprits were, in fact, state-owned enterprises. Several times a day I received spam text messages offering to sell me fake invoices for business expenses I could use to evade taxes.
His son was now three and a half, and I asked Ai how he planned to explain the family’s situation to him. He was silent for a long time and his eyes reddened. Then he said that he nursed a strange fantasy about that problem: “I want my son to grow slower,” he said. “I don’t want him to be mature too soon, to understand.” It was the first time I’d heard Ai vote for ignorance over knowledge. “The situation is not explainable. It’s not rational. It doesn’t really make sense to me. I cannot figure out why it has to be this way.” His mood seemed to startle him, and he changed the subject. For all his troubles, he sensed a broader change gathering around him. “I think almost every level of the society today realizes China is facing a great crisis in terms of trust, ideology, moral standards, and many, many other ways … It’s not going to last. Without change in the basic political structure, China has come to the end. This so-called miracle is not going to last.” He said, “After ninety years of success, it is still an underground party. They can never really pronounce their ideas and they can never meet anybody who challenges them intellectually.”
after Han Han declined to speak up against Ai Weiwei’s detention, their relationship soured, and the artist described the writer as “too acquiescent.” I saw, in these critiques, a common root: people had projected what they wanted to see onto Han Han, and then he had defied their projections. In that sense, he was the ultimate amateur, an icon of Me Generation individualist politics. The more I saw his face peering out from bus shelters and subway ads, the more I was reminded of the soldier Lei Feng, the old socialist poster boy. Willingly or not, Han Han had become a kind of Lei Feng in denim—a bearer of a faith that no man could fulfill.
Growing up in China, there are very few chances for you to feel like that—to be lifted spiritually, to be working on something bigger than yourself, more important than your immediate, ordinary life circle.” Nationalism, in that sense, was a kind of religion, and people placed their faith in it just as they did in Confucianism or Christianity or the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
A popular essay by a Nanjing author pointed out that China was defending sacred territory in the East China Sea while migrant laborers were unable to send their children to school in Beijing. “If Chinese kids can’t even go to school in China, what use is more territory?” it asked. There were jokes going around about the “fifty-centers,” who could always find a way to defend the Party. If a fifty-center heard someone say, “This egg tastes terrible,” he would answer, “How about you try to lay an egg and see how it tastes?”
Lin’s response was to pour himself even more deeply into his work. He published three books in three years, and the last time I saw him he gave me the bound galleys for a fourth. I read them, and I enjoyed our conversations. But part of him would remain unknowable to me. I had been drawn to him years earlier by the audacity of his decision to defect. I had imagined it to be the act of an idealist. But over the years, I had come to see a practical side to his choice as well. He was a man who believed, above all, in his own power to achieve his ambitions, and he would do whatever it took to do so. And that, I realized, was fitting. It was the energy of China’s boom distilled to its hardest truth: a solitary man who decided that he could realize his future only by going to the People’s Republic. Soon I would meet another who believed he could realize his future only by leaving it.
The Party had reasons to be nervous: it was trapped in a predicament of its own creation. It had recommitted itself to the suppression of heretical ideas and the maintenance of stability, but that approach was producing more heresy and instability. The Party was rightly convinced that China’s future depended on innovating ideas that would be felt around the globe, and yet it feared the reverse: absorbing “global values” was a threat to its survival.