A China Book for the Reluctant Outsiders

Somewhere between three and four stars. This book has formidable scope and breadth, but this precisely hindered its potential to shed more light on the complexity of the human experience in a very specific time of the country’s history.

What I admire about Osnos‘ writing, though, is his snack at using such bespoke terms to capture the Zeitgeist — from “age of ambition”, to “age of malaise” in his more recent New Yorker article (which I consider easier to resonate with than this book). Maybe I am just disappointed by mismatched expectations. This book, as it seems to me, is more a book for the outsider looking in than for those living in this titular “age of ambition”. The judges for the National Book Award write, “Engrossing and edifying, this book succeeds admirably in answering the question, ‘What, in the end, is the idea of China?’”. To that I remain unconvinced. Nothing can definitively represent the idea of “China”. Not even “modern China”. For what it’s worth, this book is a solid start on understanding China and sparking dialogue between China and the so-called West. Yet it cannot stop here.