Age of Ambition in the new China - by Evan Osnos

ISBN: 0374535272
Date read: 2024-11-18
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Journalist in China for many years focuses on three aspects of ~2013 Chinese culture: money, truth, faith. The first section was especially interesting with good insights.

my notes

The age of ambition sorted people not by their pasts, but by their futures.

The word for “ambition” ye xin — literally, “wild heart”.

The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.

The Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The government unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history.

Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life.
There was a new government slogan around town: “Borrow Money to Realize Your Dreams.”

Something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called leisure studies.

Small towns felt half-abandoned.
The call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull.

A Chinese friend asked which American cities to visit on his next trip to the United States, I suggested New York, and he responded as tactfully as he could, “Every time I go, it looks the same.”
China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks.

In the seven years I had been gone, the language had changed.
The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other.
I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “Tongzhi, let’s hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up.
The word for waitresses and shopgirls, xiaojie, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes.

Historically, personal choice was a low priority for the Chinese, for reasons both modern and ancient, including, in the beginning, the land itself.
In ancient China, fertile plains and rivers lent themselves to rice farming that required irrigation and compelled people to cultivate the land in concert with one another.
By contrast, the ancient Greeks, who lived amid mountains and coastlines, relied on herding, trading, and fishing, and they were able to be more independent.
In that history, we saw the makings of Greek ideas about personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought.

In imperial Chinese law, punishment was collective: judges sentenced not just the guilty individual but also family members, neighbors, and community leaders.

Mao relied on propaganda and education — “Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.”
In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.

In the village hierarchy, the only person who ranked lower than a young woman was a young woman who had something better in mind for her future.

Confucius has exhaustive advice about justice and duty, but he mentions emotion, qing, only once.

Even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries — one of the highest levels in the world.

Mattel opened a six-story Barbie megastore in downtown Shanghai, with a spa and a cocktail bar — only to discover that Chinese parents did not approve of Barbie’s study habits.

The Party made an important change to its constitution: it stopped calling itself a “revolutionary party” and started calling itself the “Party in Power.”
China’s rulers had altered their reason for being.
By becoming the Party in Power, the former rebels who’d spent decades lambasting their enemies as “counterrevolutionaries” turned themselves into such ardent defenders of the status quo that even the word revolution was now problematic.
In 2004, prime minister Wen Jiabao said, “Unity and stability are really more important than anything else.”

The Party and the people were now facing in opposite directions:
Chinese society was becoming more diverse, raucous, and freewheeling.
The Party was becoming more homogenous, buttoned-down, and conservative.

Macau feels like China amplified and miniaturized.

How Americans acclimated to sudden fortune in the 1870s:
One man had little holes bored into his teeth, into which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight.
The American political system at the time was subject to criticisms similar to those facing China’s political system today: corruption, lack of rule of law, weakness in the face of corporate monopolies.
When strikes and demonstrations raged across the United States in the 1870s and ’80s, they were met with force.
Pennsylvania Railroad exec said to give the strikers “a rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that kind of bread.”
Europeans liked to say that America had gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.

Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external.
To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck.

Gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets.
The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino.

Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth.
Launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job.
Unlike Las Vegas, where most of the profits came from coins fed into slot machines, three-quarters of the revenue in Macau was derived from enormous bets made in VIP rooms.

The cushion hypothesis: traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed.
For those who have come from poverty to the middle class the thinking may be, “If I lose half my money, well, I’ve lived through that. I won’t be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I’m a millionaire!”

Distilled understanding of values, priorities, and desires:
The Party made sure that art, literature, and other expressions of taste adhered to what it later called the zhuxuanlu—“the central melody”—of Chinese society.
The Party discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy was to embrace it: in 2006, after years of threatening to demolish Factory 798, a former military electronics plant in Beijing that had been turned into a cluster of galleries and studios, the municipal government designated it as a “creative industry area,” and tour buses filled the streets around it.

Chinese attitudes toward Western culture were a mix of pity, envy, and resentment:
Pity for the barbarians outside the Middle Kingdom, envy for their strength, and resentment for their incursions into China.
“Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.”
Until the final years of Mao’s reign, when he established ties with the United States, admiring the West was a punishable offense.

In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role: interpreter, raconteur, and field marshal, with a duty to relay more than facts.
Chinese guidebook says the guide should “express approval or disapproval, praise or opposition, pleasure or contempt.”

Europe: on the surface, it appears to rely on everyone’s self-discipline, but behind it all there are strict laws.

A typical Chinese breakfast consists of a bowl of congee (a rice porridge), a deep-fried cruller, and perhaps a basket of pork buns.
In Europe, he warned, in his most tactful voice, “Throughout our trip, breakfast will rarely be more than bread, cold ham, milk, and coffee.”
The bus was silent for a moment.

Tour guide asked us to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind in the hotel, because some of his older travelers used to have a habit of hiding cash in the toilet tank or the ventilation ducts.
“The worst case I’ve had was a guest who sewed money into the hem of the curtains,” he told us.

If a traveler on official business encountered a journalist, the authors offered a strategy: “Answer in a simple way; avoid the truth and emphasize the empty.”

“Europeans sometimes move slowly. Let them do things their way, because if we’re rushing, then they’ll feel rushed, and that will put them in a bad mood, and then we’ll think that they’re discriminating against us, which is not necessarily the case.”

Why did China fall behind?
We cast aside our three core ideas - Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism - and that was a mistake.
We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978.
We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster.

On the bus, people asked if we could stop at a Western restaurant; we had been in Europe for a week and had yet to sit down to a lunch or a dinner that was not Chinese.
Nearly half of all Chinese tourists in one market survey reported eating no more than one “European-style” meal on a trip to the West.
But Li warned us that Western food can take too long to serve, and if we ate it too fast, it would give us indigestion.
“Save it for your next trip,” he said, and everyone consented.

Central Propaganda Department is compared to the Vatican’s influence over the Catholic world.
To learn the art of modern spin, the Communist Party studied the masters:
Tony Blair’s response to mad cow disease and the Bush administration’s handling of the U.S. media after 9/11.

He pruned and massaged his facts until they were, in his words, “clearer than truth.”

“Intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre.

90% Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country - the highest share of any of the 24 countries surveyed that spring by the Pew Research Center.

bainian guochi - the “century of national humiliation” - an arc of events extending from China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation of Chinese soil during World War II.
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.

Some of them see that liberalism in the West has lost its belief in itself, and they turn to Leo Strauss for conservatism that is based on principle, on ‘natural right.’
This conservatism is distinct from a status-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a country that has only a status quo and not a principle.

The key to China’s rise was the fusion of the market and strong government.

Whenever faced a choice between growth or the environment, growth won; between social security and growth, growth won.
The costs of transformation were harsh.

In a jailhouse poem, he wrote, “Besides a lie / I own nothing.”

Life was fluid, and nobody ever seemed too far from success or failure.

Serving as a mirror for his fans was perhaps his greatest strength.
He articulated what others thought but didn’t say.
While China’s boldest intellectuals and dissidents stood out for being flamboyantly atypical, he excelled at being typical, for allowing his fans to relate to him enough that the principles he espoused felt within reach.

Whatever you’re trying to cover up becomes the truth.

Spring is sandstorm season in Beijing.

At one point, Beijing had more temples than any other city in Asia.

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.

Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”:
old customs
old culture
old habits
old ideas.
Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave.
Hundreds of temples were destroyed.

He would rather break than bend.

I often marveled at how much people in China had managed to put behind them: revolution, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present.

An anthropologist who studied Hardware City told me that nobody was more alert to the risk of being tricked than migrants far from home.
In America, an individual is the basis of civil society, but in China, the collective is breaking down, and there is nothing yet there to replace it.
When you come to a new place, you take care of yourself; you make a life with your family at its core - your wife, your husband, your child - and everybody else becomes less important.
You divide your mind.

The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang examined 26 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 26 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.
People picked up more reasons to fear the law than to trust it.

Several weeks after Yueyue died, the city of Shenzhen drafted China’s first regulation to protect Good Samaritans from legal liability.
It shifted the burden of proof to the accusers, and it laid out punishments for false accusations ranging from a public apology to detention.
The law stopped short of requiring passersby to get involved - as they are required to do in Japan, France, and elsewhere.

I asked him, “When your grand-daughter grows up, what kind of person do you want her to be?”
“That depends on what’s going on in society,” he said.
“If good people run things, she should be a good person. If it’s bad people, well, you have no choice but to be bad.”

Michael J. Sandel acquired a level of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars.
A professor of political philosophy, he taught a popular course called Justice, which introduced students to the pillars of Western thought: Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, and others.
Sandel had acquired an almost preposterous level of celebrity.
His Chinese lectures on Western political philosophy had been watched at least twenty million times.
His latest book, What Money Can’t Buy, in which he asked whether too many features of modern life were becoming what he called “instruments of profit.”
In a nation where everything seemed to have a price tag - a military commission, a marriage, a seat in kindergarten - his audience was rapt.

The free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.

Christianity has probably become China’s largest nongovernmental organization.

China churned out more television programming than any other country - more than 14,000 shows a year - but other countries didn’t want them, so China imported fifteen times as much television content as it exported.