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. Age of Ambitionprovides a vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation. 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. As 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. 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. 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.
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