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. Two potent, antagonistic forces a swelling individualism and a political structure intent on controlling it shape a rising superpower in this revealing journalistic portrait. Winner of the bronze medal for the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2015 Arthur Ross Book Award Writing with great narrative verve and a keen sense of irony, Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals-fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture-consider themselves 'angry youth,' dedicated to resisting the West's influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth? In Age of Ambition, Osnos describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control.

What we don't see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically changes.

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction.Īs the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, Evan Osnos was on the ground in China for years, witness to profound political, economic, and cultural upheaval.Īge of Ambition provides a vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation.įrom abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy-or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction finalist

Age of ambition