The complications and contradictions of China in a time of great change
Evan Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker, recently left China after eight years covering the country, but not before writing a book on China's Age of Ambition , due to be released in early May. He spoke to Kit Gillet.
It's an age of collision between aspiration and authoritarianism. It's a period in which the Chinese, despite the enduring political constraints, have seized control of the course and objective of their lives in a way that was not possible before. As recently as 40 years ago, they had no control over whom they married, where they worked, what they read, how they worshipped. Today they have absorbed the right to do each of those things, and they are doing them with gusto.
Sometimes I met people in the course of working as a journalist, and they ended up becoming more important to my understanding of the country than the events themselves. Michael Zhang, for instance, had been a security guard, and then a teacher at Crazy English, an English-teaching programme I was writing about in . After that story was published, I [spent] time with Michael over the next five years. I got to know his family, I visited him in Guangdong, and he visited me in Beijing. It simply wouldn't have been possible to write this kind of book if I hadn't lived there and watched people's lives evolve.
Part of China's curious appeal is that every foreigner thinks he or she has arrived at an extraordinary moment. Matteo Ricci probably looked at those who splashed ashore in the 1580s and pitied them for missing the action. I was … there for various landmarks in history - the first Nobel peace prize (if one doesn't include the Dalai Lama in exile), the Olympics, the arrival of China as the world's second-largest economy - but I was often less interested in the official calendar than in smaller, less apparent changes: the way people confronted new choices, the innovation of new forms of censorship and new ways to dodge it, the dawning ability for ordinary Chinese to travel and challenge what they thought they knew.
