One of them is Hu Gang, a fixer who specialized in bribing judges with lavish banquets and prostitutes.

While Gong's Horatio Alger-like story may sound inspiring, other fortune-chasers in China are less savory characters. Venture capital followed and, after listing her company on the NASDAQ, Gong turned into an overnight multimillionaire. A born entrepreneur, Gong founded an online dating site that quickly drew millions of visitors. She returned to school and scored high enough to get into Peking University, China's most prestigious school. Gong started her journey to the top as a high school dropout working on a Panasonic television assembly line in a city in southern China. One of the most memorable characters in the book is Gong Hainan, a peasant girl who became a successful Internet entrepreneur through sheer grit. Among these individuals, those who chase fortune seem to have done the best in fulfilling their ambitions. We encounter many characters who are chasing different dreams in contemporary China: fortune, truth and faith. Structured mostly around stories of ordinary Chinese citizens, many of whom he got to know personally, Osnos' book explores and maps the complex and evolving terrains of Chinese society. What sets it apart from other reportage on China is the combination of fascinating storytelling, elegant writing, ingenious contextualization and deep insights. His 'Age of Ambition' is by far the most thoughtful and well-crafted work on China written by an American journalist in recent years. Many succumb to the sins of superficiality, oversimplification and lack of perspective.īut Evan Osnos, a writer for the New Yorker who spent eight years reporting from China, has shown that it is still possible to write an illuminating, knowledgeable, absorbing and nuanced book about contemporary China. Several pitfalls await those who attempt to turn their experience in the Middle Kingdom into stories that can capture the lives and aspirations of ordinary people in a nation of 1.3 billion that has been transformed beyond recognition by 35 years of unbridled economic growth. By Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 403 pages $27)Įxplaining China to a Western audience with scant knowledge of its culture, economic system and politics is a daunting task.

Age of ambition