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Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
4/5. The author lived in China from 2005 to 2013, and wrote this book to capture some of the changes in China just in that time period, with reflections decades before and prognostications into the future.
Excellent. I started reading about China for work purposes, and have kept going out of increasing personal curiosity. This book is the first really good, lengthy, meaty account that really gets at Chinese society, as fractured and contradictory as it is, rather than focusing on the geopolitical. The book is divided into three parts on moneymaking (which of course touches on political structures and China's absolutely bonkers rise out of poverty), dealing with censorship particularly in art and on the internet, and matters of spirituality broadly and formal religion in specific. Every section is terrific, but the chapters on censorship are particularly excellent as they give an unusually nuanced view of how non-party citizens deal with it, what parts work to change minds and what don't.
Highly recommended, particularly for anyone like me who has been neck-deep in China analysis from the national security perspective and who has gotten a little blinkered by all the talk of the hundred year plan, etc.
Content notes: Child death, imprisonment and torture, other state violence.
4/5. The author lived in China from 2005 to 2013, and wrote this book to capture some of the changes in China just in that time period, with reflections decades before and prognostications into the future.
Excellent. I started reading about China for work purposes, and have kept going out of increasing personal curiosity. This book is the first really good, lengthy, meaty account that really gets at Chinese society, as fractured and contradictory as it is, rather than focusing on the geopolitical. The book is divided into three parts on moneymaking (which of course touches on political structures and China's absolutely bonkers rise out of poverty), dealing with censorship particularly in art and on the internet, and matters of spirituality broadly and formal religion in specific. Every section is terrific, but the chapters on censorship are particularly excellent as they give an unusually nuanced view of how non-party citizens deal with it, what parts work to change minds and what don't.
Highly recommended, particularly for anyone like me who has been neck-deep in China analysis from the national security perspective and who has gotten a little blinkered by all the talk of the hundred year plan, etc.
Content notes: Child death, imprisonment and torture, other state violence.