Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China
Evan Osnos
Random House
Pp 416
Rs 699

WE SHARED the firm belief that the exponential economic growth of China would spur the world economy onward. China’s economic growth would lift all boats. It was, therefore, a shock to see the collapse of the stock markets in China. This seemed to have almost a domino effect on stock markets across the world, which reeled with the tremors from the Chinese quake.

The efforts of the People’s Bank of China to stave off the crises, including by exercise of the lender of last resort function, proved completely ineffectual. This put a question mark on the larger role and ability of central banks to tame economic forces through liquidity injection. The cutting of interest rates by the PBOC did little to stem the fall of stocks and underlined the weak macroeconomic fundamentals, which form the base of the Chinese export-led economic miracle.

It was in this background that I picked up Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos. It is a deeply humane book divided in three parts, titled Fortune, Truth and Faith.

Age of Ambition tells the story of the rapid change in China’s fortunes, in a wide arc of sweeping strokes. This metamorphosis was dramatic, as it embraced one-sixth of humanity and brought complete and cataclysmic change in politics and economics. The greatest image is of ‘flying geese’ of a fever of aspiration, a belief in the sheer new possibilities. Osnos lived in China for eight years and was witness to this transformation first-hand. The change was hundred times the scale and ten times the speed of the first industrial revolution that created modern Britain. The Chinese people once hungry for food are now hungry and ambitious. They are the world’s largest consumers of energy, movies, beer, steel and platinum. China, at one stage, built more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined.

By every measure, the Chinese people have achieved longer, healthier and more educated lives, yet China is riven by contradictions. In this insight lie the seeds of the great unravelling. Osnos explains that the Chinese are proud of their civilisation, but they are eager to embrace the West. They resent the influence of the communist party, and for some there is a return to Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity. The chapter headings of this book—Unfettered, No Longer a Slave, Cut-throat, Acquired Taste, Dancing in Shackles, Sandstorms, All That Glitters, The Hard Truth, Passing by and Breaking Out—are epigrammatic and tell their own stories. The people who are at the centre of it construct the weltanschauung of the age. Extremely rapid ascent to wealth, riches and power lead to a moral unhinging and an equally rapid fall. Sadly, there is no one and nothing that cushions the fall. This is presently the hard landing that the world is witness to today. The deeper problem underlying China’s rise was pervasive corruption and moral disregard, he writes. In the modern age, corruption and growth flourished together, people cared most about the gap in opportunity, leading to a sense of immense possibility and boundless pessimism, of disappointment from insufficient improvement in lives amid rapid economic growth.

The gap between the meritocratic myth and oligarchic reality was becoming clearer and measurable. He writes that China has the greatest wealth and still the greatest poverty. There is very little in between. This Sandel describes as the ‘skyboxification’ of life, a division into the world for the affluent and the world for everyone else. The image that lingers in the mind is that of a speeding bullet train. Those who are on it are comfortable, but for those running behind it, it just recedes into the far distance. This is not a happy state. What is necessary is for economic growth to happen in such a manner that the fruits of growth are equitable. Thus, growth and the opportunities and choices it presents must be available to all citizens of the country, or it will only lead to the great unravelling.

By Deepali Pant-Joshi

Deepali Pant-Joshi is executive director, Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai. Views expressed are personal