Paperback: Age of Ambition (2014) describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China's story - one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions and in the halls of power of the world's largest authoritarian regime.
Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world's largest buyer of Rolls Royce and Ferraris yet the word 'luxury' is banned from billboards.
"China today is riven with contradictions. It is the world's largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. It has two of the world's most valuable Internet companies and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history's largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison."
And why does a government that has lifted more people from poverty than any other so strictly restrain freedom of expression?
"This book is the result of eight years of reporting and living in China. I moved to Beijing in June 2005 and stayed until July 2013, when my wife, Sarabeth Berman, and I moved to Washington DC. The vast majority of my research relied on personal experience and interviews, but I am indebted to a range of scholars, journalists, artists and authors for their work," wrote Evan Osnos.
Based on eight years of research, Age of Ambition is a stunning narrative that reveals China as we have never understood it before.
About the author: Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He was the magazine's correspondent in China, where lived in a restored house in Beijing north of the Forbidden City, from 2005 until 2013, when he moved to Washington DC. He has received many prizes including the Asia Society's Osborn Elliot Prize for Excellence in Journalism in Asia and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Osnos previously worked as the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Age of Ambition was the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for non-fiction.
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