Evan Osnos writes about international affairs for The New Yorker. On the occasion of a recent profile, we’re speaking about the “ruthlessly pragmatic” rise of Xi Jinping, who Osnos says has “emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao.”
China is in its own gilded age, says The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, into a second generation of ultra-modern tech, a still-developing country bristling with billionaires. On the eve of Chris’ trip to China, we’re wondering how a country with nearly a century of poverty, collectivism, and authoritarian rule adapts to its explosive (and vastly unequal) wealth.
On the verge of my own first plunge into China, I’m in conversation with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. He’s been eight years in the new China, reenacting the role of the foreign correspondent on the grand scale: covering an impossibly big story of politics and culture, police stories and natural disasters, with bold strokes and a novelist’s eye.
Age of Ambition is the title of a fine hard-cover condensation of what he sees going on in China. It’s something new in the world – not least as a very long running and high-functioning dictatorship. But another big pattern he began to see was a mirror of a boom era in American history, the first Gilded Age of expansion building railroads and everything else in the late 19th C.
