PROGRAM

Evan Osnos was The New Yorker’s staff writer in Beijing from 2008 to 2013 and that experience provided the vantage point that resulted in his book, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. To tell the story of the New China, Osnos looks at everyday people and their challenges. The book won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction and was on The Economist’s list of “Best Books of 2014.”

In Age of Ambition, Osnos describes the greatest collision taking place in that country: the clash between the rise of the individual and the Communist Party’s struggle to retain control. He asks probing questions: Why does a government with more success lifting people from poverty than any civilization in history choose to put strict restraints on freedom of expression? Why do millions of young Chinese professionals  – fluent in English and devoted to Western pop culture – consider themselves “angry youth,” dedicated to resisting the West’s influence? How are Chinese from all strata finding meaning after two decades of the relentless pursuit of wealth? Osnos follows the moving stories of everyday people and reveals life in the new China to be a battleground between aspiration and authoritarianism, in which only one can prevail.

Mr. Osnos will be interviewed by Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of 15 books, ten of them about China, most recently Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century, written with John DeLury.