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Let's write a summary of the book's main points: China is growing fast, but many people are discontent with the the lack of freedom. One single party system is inherently problematic much worse than democracy, so is facing crises. The country is overwhelmed with terrible terrible corruptions, and there is great inequality. OK that's it, perfect fit for Western audience, a confirmation of their long suspected idea from an award winning author spending 8 years in China and does speak Chinese decen...
China is far too large and complex for a single book to take the full measure of the country. Instead, Age of Ambition explores three themes: economic changes; censorship; and personal values and ethics. Drawing on Osnos' eight years as a reporter based in China, the book follows a loosely chronological path, and the author does an amazing job weaving his themes around a score of characters - real people he got to know from different walks of life. Although I've read other books about China, alm...
4.5 ☆ "Let some people get rich first and gradually all the people can get rich together." - Chairman Deng Xiaoping 1979That's what kickstarted China's economic reforms, according to the revisionist Communist Party historians. In reality, the shift from a planned economy to capitalism began in the winter of 1978-79 because farmers in the inland village of Xiaogang had designated illicit plots, from which they agreed that produce could be sold for private profit. They dared because Chairman Mao Z...
Now you have no excuse not to know what is really happening in modern China. Author Osnos unveils an energized, powerful, bursting at the seams China. In the 80’s, Party leader Deng Xiaoping permitted private enterprise creating an economy that changed China society into an urban, “free wheeling” machine, while the Party remained totalitarian. It’s a study in contradictions because along with the prosperity of full bellies, high speed trains, and the hammering force of the internet came corrupti...
I don’t think anyone could argue that Evan Osnos wasn’t ambitious in this, his National Book Award-winning compendium of current Chinese political culture. Subtitled Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, this book extends and expands essays he’d already published in The New Yorker magazine and gives outsiders a glimpse into the confusion and mad, exciting reality that is China today.Osnos covers a lot of ground and at the risk of appearing to be a ping-pong ball in the hands of a gi...
Age of Ambition won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2014, and no wonder. Nothing I’ve read about the rise of China for many years has immersed me so deeply into the texture of life in that country or more memorably portrayed its yawning contradictions.Twenty years ago, the extraordinary husband-and-wife reporting team of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. Based on five years of work in China — they won the Pulitzer for...
This is the best book I've read so far on China. It helps you understand the odd dichotomy of big government and free market capitalism that exists there. Something that the vast majority of westerns including myself fail to really understand. That is not a simple topic to summarize but the author presented it - not as a rigid historical background - but as a mix of stories, biographies, of real fascinating people in China. Combining many of the articles the author has written for the New Yorker...
This book, more so than any other I've read on China, best captures the country's current situation, challenges and contradictions. Osnos did a good job of weaving together the characters and themes that he explores--built around the triad of fortune, truth and faith--capturing the way that prosperity and development co-exist with political dissent and spiritual exploration.I lived in China from 2007 to 2011 and, like many aspiring Western 'half-pats' in China, learned a great deal about my surr...
This is a highly interesting account of China at the beginning of the 21st century. The author probes many different aspects, ways of life, and the inhabitants of this large, complex country. What comes through on every page is the extraordinary changes that have occurred in China. Thirty years before this book was written the main concern for most people was getting food on the table. Now they are buying cars, using high-speed rail, educating their children at university (sometimes outside Chin...
Shenzhen landslide, December 2015 Tianjin explosion, August 2015 Oriental Star Cruise Ship Disaster, June 2015There are a lot of China books out there. As China is a constantly changing country, I'm sometimes frustrated by how quickly outdated books become. However, if I had to recommend one book to a person, who is interested to learn about contemporary China, I think Osnos' "Age of Ambition" is the perfect recommendation. He hits the nail about the Party and the stories he collected from the
Disappointed. Except the chapter of the writer's riding along with a group of Chinese for a guided tour in Europe (which is fresh and insightful), the rest stories are either unoriginal or plainly wrong (like the story about Han Han). In comparison, Peter Hessler's River Town and Oracle Bones are much more fun to read and amazingly insightful about China and Chinese, even for native Chinese like me.
I look at China’s meteoric rise in the past four decades with contradictory emotions. I admire the way they execute massive infrastructural projects like highways, bridges and high-speed rail at a rapid pace. I admire the way they have risen to the No.2 position in the world in just four decades. I have always wondered how they produce goods at such low prices that even poorer Asian countries cannot compete with them. On the other hand, I fear their military build-up and attempts to hegemonize i...
Evan Osnos lived in China, specifically Beijing, from 2008 to 2013, covering the enormous changes in that nation as it embraces it own brand of capitalism (and the enormous implications, local and global, of those changes) for the New Yorker. I hadn't read any of Osnos's pieces for the magazine before picking up Age of Ambition, which just won this year's National Book Award, but I imagine much of this lengthy, impressively-reported portrait falls within the previously published category. Or, at...
Without permanent technology leadership, the West will have to leave the top podiumPlease note that I put the original German text at the end of this review. Just if you might be interested.Astonishing is the monopoly position of China in the discipline to kick back as a world power for a second time on the international stage within millennials. A hitherto unique event in history from which the Chinese have learned. Thus, it is unlikely that the entire container ship fleet will be sunk, all boa...
This is a non-fic about what is happening in modern China based on the author’s extensive coverage of the country. I read is as a part of monthly reading for March 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.I think it is extremely hard to make a snapshoot of a country, after all we people usually see ourselves as unique, and here is the state with 1.1 bn individuals! As Evan Osnos wrote (rephrasing) “How much did individual stories really tell us about China? The hardest part about writing from China
An interesting look at contemporary China by a journalist who has spent over a decade living there. Documents the cultural changes of a country in great flux, and tells the story of national changes through individual narratives. I was especially taken with the stories of educated young Chinese nationalists, reviving traditional Eastern thought and insisting on a unique place for China in the world aloof from blind Westernization. This was interesting in the suggestion that "Third Worldism" is s...
This book was so well written and very interesting. I did not all that much about modern China--Osnos has a gift for exploring some of the tensions in the culture. His access to some of the people he profiles is remarkable. This is well worth the read.
Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition is packed with detailed observations and curious facts that will edify anyone looking to learn about modern China’s domestic structure and growing role on the international stage. Osnos is a talented writer whose style can be described as “humanist nonfiction”––a series of interview-based narratives organized by theme and supported by ancillary research. It reminds of me George Packer’s exceptional book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, which is hav...
Growing up in a Western liberal democracy, I held my Chinese heritage in contempt. I didn't understand my parents' generation, who lived through the tail end of the Cultural Revolution and eventually left China in the late 1990s to pursue better lives. I saw in them the remnants of attitudes birthed in the era of Communist rule: a scarcity mindset, collectivist attitudes. Thankfully, with time, I lost my disdain for my parents' culture. I didn't come much closer to understanding it until I read
Nothing groundbreaking. But for Americans who are trying to understand China today, this book provides quite a few fair reflections: Foxconn suicides aren't all about "sweatshop" labor, in studies of Chinese people and anecdotes of Macao casinos Chinese people seem to gamble and take risks a lot more than Americans, public censors/50 cent party/propoganda is even worse than most Americans might realize (but it doesn't quite fool a public probably best described as apathetic), and the Internet is...