Age of Ambition opens with a comparison between early-21st-century China and late-19th-century America. Citing such impressive statistics as a sixfold increase in the amount of meat consumed by the average Chinese and a 30-fold rise in annual income, Evan Osnos likens contemporary China to “America at its own moment of transformation—the period that Mark Twain and Charles Warner named the Gilded Age.” The difference, of course, is that Twain and Warner were free to satirize the greed, immorality, and corruption of their country’s governing elites: Their famous 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, helped to foment a period of intense political opposition and reform.
Political satirists in the People’s Republic of China have a tougher time. Asked to describe the state of freedom in contemporary China, a friend who speaks fluent Mandarin and has spent many years there as a student, a diplomat, and a trade negotiator, offered this reply: “China is a dynamic country with a fast-growing economy where millions of people have more wealth and personal freedom than ever before. It is also a brutal police state, where, if you persist in saying the wrong thing, you will be taken away and not see your family for a very long time.”
These disparate realities are hard to reconcile, which is why many American business leaders, educators, and NGO workers focus on the first, sunnier view—especially when, as is often the case, it serves their interests to do so. At the same time, a critical minority of exiles, activists, and strategic thinkers focus on the second, darker image of China as a ruthless party-state intent on depriving 1.3 billion human beings of their unalienable rights. The result is a perspective less polarized than compartmentalized.
Evan Osnos is mindful of this compartmentalization:
Rather than false modesty, this comment reflects Osnos’s impatience with fellow expatriates—journalists and other Westerners living in China—who think that the West pays “too much attention to dissidents” and try to live down this “stereotype” by paying too little attention.
For Osnos, democracy and freedom are relevant to the concerns of ordinary Chinese. He admits the obscurity, or unpopularity, of certain dissidents famous in the West, such as the renowned conceptual artist Ai Weiwei or the Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (who could not attend the award ceremony in Oslo because he was, and still is, being held in prison). But to his credit, Osnos also says that “those arguments wore thin with me. Popularity always struck me as an odd way to measure the importance of an idea in a country that censored ideas.”
Like most books by journalists, Age of Ambition is a compendium of previously published pieces. The value of this genre depends not only on the quality of the writing, but also on the coherence of the editing. Unfortunately, coherence is somewhat lacking here. Rather than offer sustained portraits of individuals, as Osnos does in his New Yorker essays, this book compiles passages from those essays into three thematically titled sections: “Fame,” “Fortune,” and “Faith.” The result is a readable book marred by a tendency to jump around from person to person, place to place, and time to time—often without providing dates. This garbled chronology is especially vexing because, as Osnos reminds us, the most urgent questions regarding rapid change in China have to do with the overall direction of that change. Thus, it matters whether a certain event or interview occurred closer to his arrival in 2005 or to his departure in 2013.
Chronology is of special importance when pondering why the party-state silences some dissident voices while tolerating, even encouraging, others. Describing Chinese society as “the collision of two forces: aspiration and authoritarianism,” Osnos states that “the Chinese people have taken control of freedoms that used to be governed almost entirely by others”; but he then adds that “as those liberties have expanded,” so has “the Communist Party’s commitment to control”—to the point where it now “contradicts the riot of life outside.”
This formulation is appealing, but it doesn’t quite capture the flavor of 21st-century authoritarianism in China. The contradiction Osnos describes is not static. Nor is it moving in the direction, dear to American hearts, of expanding individual liberty and shrinking government control. The Chinese people are seizing some freedoms for themselves. But more important, the Chinese Communist party is engaged in what might be called Glasnost 2.0—a deliberate rationing of liberties for the express purpose of entrenching its own power.
The process began in the 1990s, after the Tiananmen Square crisis, when the Central Propaganda Department (officially translated as Central Publicity Department) began using methods drawn less from “Mao Zedong Thought” than from American social science. Particularly influential was the argument, set forth by Walter Lippmann and the midcentury political scientist Harold Lasswell, that democracy is not a viable form of government for advanced industrial societies because the problems facing those societies are too complex for ordinary citizens to understand.
For Lippmann and his fellow progressives, the solution was technocracy, or government by experts. Of course, democracy being an inviolable ideal, a crucial component of technocracy was public relations, defined as the science of molding public opinion to accept, or at least to not obstruct, the decisions taken by enlightened technocrats. The progressive faith in expertise was roundly challenged by John Dewey, among others; and while modern liberals still confidently invoke the authority of “science” in policy debate, technocratic rule is no longer seen as a solution to the problems of democratic governance—in America.
In China, the opposite is true: Reliance on experts is waxing, not waning. As one of Osnos’s interlocutors explained, “Yes, it’s a one-party state, but the administrators are selected from among the elites, and elites picked from 1.3 billion people might as well be called super-elites.” In 2007, I interviewed a Chinese professor of “media axiology,” a field he described as “the study of how the media construct the social values.” The goal, his interpreter added with a broad smile that seemed to illustrate the point, was “to make the Chinese people happy about the changes.”
If any authoritarian country can do this, China can. The Central Propaganda Department is larger than any other bureaucracy in the party-state except the military. And its purview extends not only to the educational system and news media—both of which are heavily monitored and censored—but also, Osnos claims, to a realm rarely scrutinized by Americans: commercial entertainment.
According to the Hong Kong-based media scholar Anthony Fung, the Central Propaganda Department decided in 2001 to divide China’s cultural industries into two categories: wenhua shiye, or cultural products with meaningful political content, and wenhua zhenye, or profit-making entertainment. Since then, the strategy has been to keep a tight rein on the former while giving free rein to the latter, on the assumption that entertainment, including Western-style films, popular music, and television shows, will bring revenue to the state without posing any political threat.
Not surprisingly, this strategy is aimed at youth, whose obsession with American popular culture raises the specter of jazz, rock music, and Hollywood movies luring young Russians and Eastern Europeans away from Soviet rule during the Cold War. The Soviets tried to co-opt these forms of expression, but without much success. Believing they can do better, the Chinese are lavishing resources—and expertise—on the creation of a homegrown entertainment industry that, without crossing any red lines, is edgy enough to keep restless youth in the fold.
Through this lens, we can see why one dissident voice, that of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, has been silenced, while another, that of Han Han, a celebrity novelist and blogger whom Osnos has profiled at length, has not. Liu was the moving force behind Charter ’08, a manifesto calling for a gradual transition to constitutional democracy; Han, by contrast, was a smart-alecky teenager when his first novel, Triple Door, about the travails of Chinese youth preparing for exams, became an unexpected bestseller in 2000.
When he first catapulted to fame as a symbol of his generation, Han Han enjoyed a certain license to satirize the regime. (Just to cite one example of his irreverent wit, he had this to say about the quality of the pro-Communist party messages continually posted on Chinese websites by the thousands of online stooges called 50 Centers: “Just because you see a crowd of people standing on the corner eating shit doesn’t make you want to elbow your way in for a bite.”) At the same time, Han’s license had a definite expiration date. Blessed with what Osnos calls “insolent glamour,” he was happy to sound like a dissident as long as it was cool to do so. But as anyone who sorts through this book’s garbled chronology will suspect, Han was eventually persuaded that there are other, more rewarding, ways to be cool, such as driving race cars, endorsing luxury products, and, most recently, directing bland teenybopper movies.
In 2013, Han told Osnos that politics was “boring” and that “I have other ways to express my anger. Or I can choose not to express it at all.”
The seeming co-optation of Han Han is paralleled by that of another self-created star, Li Yuchun. A complete unknown when she entered Super Girl, an American Idol-style singing contest that swept Chinese television in 2005, Li emerged victorious from a competition that drew 120,000 participants and 400 million viewers. Assertive and tomboyish, Li departed so drastically from the doll-like norm that it was clear millions of Chinese had just experienced what one observer called “a euphoria of voting.” The significance of Super Girl may be lost to Americans, who are frequently asked to vote on matters both trivial and weighty. In China, however, the spectacle of masses of people voting, and in some cases publicly campaigning, for their favorite contestant caused official consternation. To judge by what happened next, the order must have come down to neutralize the show and (if possible) co-opt the star.
This happened in stages. First, China Daily asked, “How come an imitation democratic system ends up selecting the singer who has the least ability to carry a tune?” Second, a rumor was planted about Li’s sexual orientation. Third, a state poll found high levels of public disapproval of Super Girl, and it was canceled. Fourth, Super Girl was revived in a form that perturbed even the compliant editors of China Daily. “The public . . . voting system was dropped,” they griped, “in favor of professional musicians and starmakers from entertainment companies acting as judges. It was the least interesting competition of the three years, because we all knew the answer.”
As for Li Yuchun, she is now a party-approved recording artist, exported under the Westernized name of Chris Lee. In 2008, she released an album called Youth of China, billed as a “gift blessing” to the Beijing Olympics. On the many websites devoted to her, there is little or no mention of her debut as an independent spirit whose disruptive power to win votes was threatening enough to provoke a government crackdown.
Age of Ambition doesn’t track the story of Li Yuchun as closely as I have done. But in other ways, it explores the gray area between the bright and dark extremes of present-day China. This gray area is hard for Americans to see because, rather than looking foreign, it looks very familiar. When I was in China, several people remarked to me that no other culture in history has had as big an impact on China as America’s is having today. If that is true, then we need to pay closer attention to the ways in which our culture ignites, but also dampens, the sparks of genuine freedom.
Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, is the author of Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad.
