Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition captures China during the pivotal first decades of the 21st century, a period of staggering economic ascent and profound social dislocation. The book moves beyond geopolitical abstraction to ground its analysis in the lived experiences of a diverse cast—from migrant workers and internet entrepreneurs to artists, dissidents, and Party officials. Osnos identifies the central, volatile dynamic of the era: the historic unleashing of individual ambition after centuries of collective struggle, now crashing against the Communist Party’s determination to maintain ultimate political and ideological control.

Through intimate reportage, the work explores the manifestations of this clash. It charts the gold-rush mentality that followed Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, documenting a society scrambling for wealth as the primary measure of success. Yet, it simultaneously reveals the spiritual and moral hangover that accompanied this frenzy, tracing searches for meaning in everything from evangelical Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism, and from avant-garde art to fervent nationalism. The narrative meticulously details the tools of state containment—the Great Firewall, the cadre of online commentators, the calibrated repression—and the constant, ingenious methods of circumvention employed by citizens.

The book functions as an essential corrective to outsider perspectives, rejecting the twin caricatures of China as either a mechanistic superpower or a brittle autocracy. Instead, it presents a nation of overwhelming vitality and contradiction, where hope and frustration are inextricably linked. Osnos argues that understanding this internal tension—between the drive for personal fulfillment and the architecture of authoritarianism—is key to comprehending China’s trajectory and its impact on the world.

Age of Ambition is ultimately a work of historical portraiture, aimed at readers seeking to move beyond headlines and grasp the human texture of a global power in the throes of reinvention. It is less a policy primer than a deeply humanistic account of a society asking, and answering in myriad ways, fundamental questions about truth, faith, and the price of fortune in the modern age.

The critical consensus celebrates the book as a masterful, nuanced, and essential work of contemporary reportage. Readers praise its unparalleled access to the human stories behind China's meteoric rise, finding it both profoundly enlightening and deeply humane. The primary critique is not of the content but of the emotional weight it carries; some note the exhaustive, almost overwhelming nature of confronting such vast societal contradictions. It is universally regarded as a vital text for understanding the psychological and social realities of modern China.