Station but entire people, and entire language group. First however, modern world works including what you think is the modern pristine roles of social democracies in scandinavia. Its not there. Its just more sophisticated allusion. At all about inches one cable gives you a sense of the wealth of information that is housed on wikileaks site. I want to thank julian assange, the middle of the night there for joining us. I think everyone who was happy to see you. [applause] thanks. And if the julian paved the way like the wizard of oz on the screen, lets remember as we leave that Chelsea Manning is behind bars, Edward Snowden is in exile, julian is in this embassy and other whistleblowers have had their lives ruined, have been targeted after under tremendous russia right now. All of you have one of these books. Make sure you tell your friends about it, talk about it on social media. Buy another copy and give it to someone. And most of all be out there in public whenever the crosshairs are aimed at any whistleblowers or any journalists. Thank you, guys. Thank you, bauhaus. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] next, another program from the 15th annual National Book festival. National book awardwinning author evan osnos reports on chinas current political and social landscape. L and it is my pleasure to , a introduce our guest for thisis m program, evan osnos. Evan was born in 1976 and is a staff writer for the new writer for yorker as well as april at the brooking ts institution. He writes about fort affairs and politics. Is the author of age of fo ambition chasing fortune, truth and faith in the newrt china. And the wonderful work one to 2014 National Book award. It is the fruit of evidence eight years of living and working in beijing. In the book he traces the rise of the individual in china and the clash between aspiration and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism. He had this to say, and the pages of the new yorker evan oz knows has portrayed, explained, and poked fun at the state china better than any other writer from the leicester east eliminating the gilded age, appetite, challenges, and dilemmas in a way thatew ve do in the way you have done. Also is a contributor to this American Life on public radio and frontline. Before moving to the new yorker he was a beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune we contributed to a series that won the 2,008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The award for young journalists and the award for profile writing. Please welcome evan oz knows. Thank you very much. Thank you to all of you. You have heard this from other offers. It is a special pleasure to be here with people who choose to be inside to talk about books. You are self selecting, and we we are an endangered species and i thank you for coming here. Ii think that there are a lot of people in this room interested in the suspect of chat the subject of china for me if you want to know what it feels like to be a writer in china it is useful to remember and observation like john king fairbank, one of the Great American china scholars. And he said, and i quote, quote, china is a journalist dream and statisticians nightmare because it has more human drama and fewer verifiable facts per square mile than anywhere else in the world. I once mentioned that to a colleague and they did not find that funny in the slightest. He said that in 1947 and in some ways the observation is still accurate. China has become a much more verifiable place simply because someone like me can go and live there for eight years and can simply by virtue of technology and transportation get halfway across china in a morning and begin your reporting or you can go online and begin to understand bit about whats going on. It is not a substitute but a place where we are beginning i should say we no longer have the luxury of imagining that it is unknowable. And yet in other ways china has become more puzzling as we began to try to ask larger questions about it, its intentions in the world , but its seeming contradictions. So many things do not seem to make sense. On paper it says this been a reality is is this which is ultimately what our responsibility is as writers , try to make some sense of it on the page. I want to read a few lines i think it will frame now i have approached the place in writing. A new fashion, philosophy, way of life, they describe it as a favor. People contracted western business suit fever and john paul saw fever and private telephone fever. It was difficult to predict when or where a fever would ignite or what it would leave behind. In the village of shaw job population 1,564 theyre was a fever for the american cop show hunter better known in chinese as expert detective hunker. When the show appeared on Chinese Television in 1990 the villagers started to gather to watch detective rick hunter of the Los Angeles Police department go undercover with his partner, detective deedee mccall, and the villagers came to inspect the detective and find at least two occasions to other his trademark phrase works for me, though in chinese and came across as a religious man because works for me was mistranslated as whatever god wants. [laughter] the fever passed from one person to the next and affected each in a different way. Some months later when the police tried to search the home of a local farmer the man told him to come back when they had a warrant , aa word that he had learned from expert detective hunt to a. Why do i begin a discussion of china with the somewhat specific experience of a single village 25 years ago . For me it is about a waya way of seeing, a way of looking at the place, about a kind of focus on the intimate changes in peoples lives, the perceptual changes, the things that do not always turn up in the headlines but are in there own way the forces that are propelling china through history at this moment. I have come to call this the age of ambition and am referring to two specific things. One is this grand National Ambition to stake out a greater, more glorious place for china and the world command the other kind of ambition is the force of 1. 4 billion individual aspirations of one kind or another,another, each now distinct and potent in ways really that were never possible before in chinese history. If you begin to understand those two kinds of ambition you begin to understand some of the choices that china is making collectively and on an individual basis and the tensions that is creating in its relationship with the rest of the world. When we talk about where china is and where it is going, it is useful to remind ourselves about the path that it has traveled over the past quartercentury. Two decades ago i got interested. I watch the class it was absolutely electrifying, this operatic story of revolution and civil war and this massive protean in many ways tragic force of chairman mao and then Deng Xiaoping led china out of seclusion and back into the world, and then you had after all the events at tiananmen square, the democracy demonstrations and 89 which it happened just five years earlier. I was absolutely fascinated by the. They built this tent city at the signature of party power but becausethe because you saw if you remember very clearly that they were torn between what it meant to be of the east end of the west. They had shag haircuts and them boxes. In somein some cases they carried placards that have the words of Patrick Henry and then they also sang the Great Communist Party him. When it came time for them to present their demands they did it in the traditional style down on their knees in a formal petition that they handed out to these apparatchiks who were still buttoned up in the mao suits, but he had the sense of this place that was right at that moment on the cusp of extraordinary new demands. People are demanding so much more of the country, themselves. There was a student protester who said that spring to a reporter something that helps me understand what the moment meant. I dont know exactly what we want, but we want more of it. That movement ended in bloodshed and remarked that anniversary. I flew to beijing and 96. At the time china was a different place than it yesterday. At the time the economy was smaller. Beijing, there are people in this room over theyre. It smelled like coal and wet wool and sheep tobacco and i absolutely love the sense of this place that was just sort of beginning to unfold in front of you. You are able to travel in ways you could not before, but it was not a glamorous place. A glamorous place. When he wanted to go out for a nice night on the town you would go to the jingle a hotel which the architect described as aa perfect replica of a holiday and he had seen in palo alto, california. China is home to about 30 percent of the skyscrapers under construction worldwide. China today is defined i should say, the last generation the story of china has been one of growth and sudden new plan. We may be having a different conversation in a year, but for the moment the defining fact has been the sudden sense that they have things that they did not have before. Your average person eats six times as much meat as he or she did in 1976, but this is also aa ravenous era of a different kind in which people have awoken with the hunger for knew ideas and new inspiration and respect. The boom year has not met the onset of great fortune. People made about 200 a year. The average income is about 6,000 a year. With that has come an enormous gap between the rich and poor, the difference in income and Life Expectancy between the richest places and poorest places is the difference between new york city and ghana. If you think that that kind of gap is a political issue, you can imagine how awkward it is in the peoples republic which is still ruled by the communist party that is one of the byproducts of this time that has introduced a contradiction that is hard for china to reconcile. What do chinese leaders today, the people running the country, what is it that they want . What is there ambition, aspiration . Well, this current generation of leaders, the leaders of the Standing Committee of the politburo came into power around was living in beijing in november of 2012 and got this invitation to go and see the unveiling of the new leadership. Until that moment you dont know who will be running the country, and it is always in the same place at the great hall of the people in this vast building built by the hands of volunteers in the 1950s. I go to see the unveiling. Seven men, the president and the premier and the other members of the Standing Committee. They come out on stage and the 1st thing you notice was conformity. They were virtually identical dark suits. They were virtually identical red ties with the exception of one who i can talk about. The hair was dyed to the identical shade of black which i mentioned not as a. Of humor but it is a relevant issue to appear vital and that you have many years ahead of you in your professional life. To thoseto those who are watching at home the message was unmistakably clear. We have comewe have come together around a shared idea of what we represent and aspire. There are no idiosyncrasies. We are one group. This was coming after a turbulent time in chinese politics. And that the new president steps forward to give his 1st visit, his 1st address to the nation has the general secretary of the communist party. What he says is actually quite striking. He will dedicate himself above all to what he called the great renewal of the nation and would then repeat this over and over again. The great renewal is the chinese dream. The chinese dream was on bus shelters and television advertisements. It sounds a little bit like the american dream. The chinese listeners as a couple meetings that are quite clear. One is just extending this growth and transformation. China is building airports and railroads. China landed a spacecraft, talking about a mission to mars and talking about a mission to the deepest regions of the ocean. China today loans more money to the developing world and does the world bank which is about to continue to grow, but the idea of the chinese dream was also about something else, something deeper, something less physical, trying to pull people together in a country that is increasingly driven by centrifugal forces that are driving it in all kinds of knew directions, trying to pull people together around a common idea of what china could be, to pull people together to unite and reinvigorate support of the goal of restoring china to the status that it once enjoyed. As was a civilization that was printing books 400 years before gutenberg, the country that as recently as the 18th century controlled one 3rd of the worlds wealth. Andand so if you are the leader of the Chinese Communist party, thats the goal that your trying to reclaim. And that more that full her sense of what china can and should be is putting it into greater confrontation, greater tension with the rest of the world, not only the United States but also with its neighbors around the east china sea. This china imagine itself vaulting past the United States to become the most powerful country in the world . Does it see itself as a rival to the United States and the ability to influence others in the ability to intervene in ways that we want to. It is especially tempting to feel that way now when we sense in our own politics a kind of paralysis command and ability to get things done, but it is important to remember that there are reasons to believe that chinese leaders have a sense of what is possible and what is not possible. The simple fact is that that china is not prepared to vault past the United States overnight. It is in so many ways a developing country today. Being the preeminent power is expensive. Youre expected to take a leading role. And as much as Chinese Military is growing, the annual spending officially still only a fraction of our defense spending is. The unitedthe United States has about one dozen aircraft carriers in china has one. Instead of imagining china is preparing to vault past us, it perceives itself as returning to a position of greatness in the multi polar so that gives us a sense of what his vision is. The question is whether his people feel the same way. To understand that we have to no a bit more about the aspirations of chinas 1. 4 billion because it is a force that is in its own way the source of chinas greatest strength and its greatest uncertainty. It is useful to. Out the subject of individual aspirations to not merit much attention for most of chinese history. The individual as a force in politics or law was always understood to be embedded in much Larger Forces whether it was the family or village of military or the country command you saw this expressed in all kinds of ways in law and art. This was something that the great writer noticed. If you look back at a painting from the 11th century, and if you look at it what you see is the only individual, the only person the only individual is a horseman driving a car through the mountains and the lower righthand corner. And if you saw that the message was clear. This is where you fit in as an individual into this vast beautiful complex cosmos when you look at the equivalent western image, full framed portrait of an individual. Individual. I think this is the 1st selfie, perhaps. In china the word itself, ambition had a negative connotation. One of the words you can say it in chinese means wild heart. To have a wild heart in china was to have a kind of wolfish ambition, i desire to put yourself in front of others at the expense of others. There was a collection of advice for rulers, and he advised, keep power out of the hands of the ambitious just as you would keep sharp tools out of the hands of the foolish. Had sense that we should be suspicious of individual aspiration extended all the way into the heyday of socialism. You must reveal nothing to others or it can be used against you. Let your public self be like rise in a dinner. Bland and inconspicuous. But i have to tell you that in the china that i have inhabited and where ive lived and written for the last decade, that frame as a way of understanding the place is less and less useful. To change that im describing can be traced to many moments but an essential moment, a crucial moment was in the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping and his peers reope reopened china,n to reopen china after the trauma of the cultural revolution, begin to open a window to the outside world. And year by year people began to leave the collective farms and factories that had so defined their existence. And there were many restrictions. Of course, still on the way people lived. There still are today but within the sphere of the private lives begin to seek out this much greater sense of autonomy. When he talked about leaving the collective farms and factories one of the worst people used in chinese was which means to unfettered, weird more often used for the unveiling of a person or an animal. Outsourcing to a change felt in peoples private lives. And as, some degree of autonomy begin return to the lives they had to make decisions about all kinds of things they have not thought about before. It was immoral and illegal to take a second job, to moonlight. All of your time and energy and aspiration was dedicated to the state, belong to this day. All of a sudden people have to defined themselves. You saw this in small ways. There was a boom in the printed a business card. People needed to be able to identify themselves by name and the things they could do. It was an advertising of the self. You know longer people saying that it was your duty to be a restless screw in the revolution machine. The newspaper said a different message. One headline in the 80s, you must rely on yourself. Blaze your own path and fight. And you begin to visit turning up in the language in other ways. So for instance, you remember the old word for ambition, while hard. Gradually while hard begin to lose some of that negative connotation and edged into neutral territory into continued to evolve to the point where it could chinese bookstore to you can find this book which is called out to arouse a wild card in your children. There are other books in the selfhelp aisles like out of the wild card in your 20s. Advertisers picked up on this and they began to market him a for instance, cell phone, china mobile with some of phone the young people my turf, my decision. You might think this is going on in the cities but maybe in the countryside things are as they have always been. Like so meetings in china to greatest technological period things that had begun in the cities that graduate leach out into the countryside. The point that he go to school today, a school in a rural section of the delta where a Research Went recently and found that the students recite the following pledge. Ever since god created all things on earth there has not been one person like me, my eyes and might use, my brain and my seoul all our exceptional. Nobody speaks or behaves like me. No one before me and no one will after me. I am the biggest miracle of nature. Ive often thought what would be like teaching a roomful of kids who say that every morning . [laughter] challenging i think. But in china today people are asking themselves in one form or another what do i want . What do i want for myself, for my family, what a they would rik in order to get myself . What do i want for my country . I want to give an example of that. I met a woman about 10 years ago was just out of graduate school. She had been born in the mid 1970s. Check in some ways is a typical experience for somebody of her generation. Prepares for farmers. They couldnt read or write but should grow up after the cultural revolution and she had gotten a great education. Gioconda school in beijing. She went to shanghai and got her ph. D. Then at that point her parents said okay, its now time for you to come back to the village and get married. Just like generations happy for you, and who in addition to a nice guy from neighborhood. And, of course, she frankly had no interest in marrying the kind of person that her parents could introduce her to the they inhabited entirely different universes i generation, i experienced. Historically in china matchmakers, parents, factory bosses handled the delicate process of pairing young people. This is not a thing left for amateurs. Matters of the Heart Research business. Young people were paired up on the basis of a similar family background either in terms of financial wealth or political profile. But as this autonomy for turkey peoples lives, but matchmakers were in retreat. Young people wanted to do this for themselves. They really bear hugged the sense that choice over this piece of experience. I want to give you an example of what that was like. I will read you an online personals ad by a young woman who was in graduate school in the city. This is not true. This summer i found on the internet. [laughter] she placed an ad seeking a young man with the following quality. No previous marriages. Masters degree or more, not an only child, no smokers, no alcoholics, no gamblers, not from wuhan, dollar than 172 centimeters, ready to release a year of dating before marriage, sporty, parents who are still together annual salary over 50,000 u. N. Aged between 2632, willing to guarantee for dinners at home each week. Track record of the least to exgirlfriend but no more than four. [laughter] no virgos, no capricorns. [laughter] and if anybodys interested just in afterwards and i will help you get in touch. [laughter] so she realized that there was, though a lot of people in china and facing a similar predicament. She saw business opportunity. She started a company which means beautiful destiny in chinese. It became in fact the most successful dating company in china, dating sector consumer to match. Com. Of logical line until your profile and find a person is right for you. In fact, it became so popular that she brought it out on the public market. She went public on the nasdaq. She made 77 million. I havent checked the stock price actually this week. The point was actually come and i should add, it all happened so fast for her that she almost didnt have a chance for her life to catch up with us to experience. What i met her she looked in his tiny shoebox of an apartment. She moved out into a beautiful villa. The old habits endured. One of which is here for the first time after she moved to announce she was there with her husband and her mother and grandmother and daughter. The first thing i saw was that the family scooter, the moped was in the front hall which was the village style from traditional way. I said why is it your . She said i think its safer to have in the front hall. I said i think its okay, your nextdoor neighbor is the swiss ambassador. I dont think is going to take it. But its your house. Of course, are rules obtained. Its worth saying theres nothing typical about somebody like this that goes and makes 70 million bucks on, by starting an Internet Company but you see in her experience the hallmarks of some of the important things about this period. One of course is the expectation that you deserve something of your own design, that you can create for yourself a reality. Number two is the possibility that you can start a business like this. Every network. She had troubles over the years but you could even begin to imagine doing it. And one of the things that a learned is that over the years as i studied this age of ambition as they came to describe it, i came to see three very specific pursuit. Three things that people were pursuing, the person of fortune, the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of a. The pursuit of fortune i think is perhaps the one thats easiest for us to see from afar and received of course in her story, the idea that after so many years of deprivation that Chinese People were having the opportunity and the ability to try to improve their lot in li life. But whats interesting is what happened next. And what happens next is that you begin taking these things, the things you wanted for so long, you discover that, in fact, you need to know more about the world around you, that that house you just bought, for instance, may not be safe and less you know exactly whos in a position, who are your neighbors . Who are setting the rules in my neighborhood . May be begin to wonder about things like as you check on your smartphone what is the air quality that im breathing . On a smartphone today in big cities in china you can go online and you can see what the air quality is, how it compares to the World Health Organization standards. And what you find is that people in a sense have a thicker conception of what it means and what constitutes the good life. They are pursuing truth as i call it. They begin to say who is setting the rules in our society and who is breaking the rules in our society . You have seen over the course of the last couple of years a whole number of come a vast number of arrests during the anticorruption campaign. All of this is driven in some form by this desired to know more about the country around you. What happens is as people can begin to answer these basic questions about law, about policy, about news and, of course, there are restrictions on what they can read on the web in a newspaper. We all know that. Whats interesting is people can begin to ask deeper questions. These are the hardest questions of all, questions about faith, questions about what does it mean to be after all a citizen in our society . What do we stand for as a colter . What do we pursuing as a nation . What are my obligations to my neighbor . Socialism no longer needs much to any people in any meaningful way so what drives me today . In some ways become his party has become his party to provide people with economic answers over the last generation but has not provided people with moral and just do is send people out oon the road and you see this enormous, this widespread Search Engines on some people are finding their answers, more interest in religion. Theres buddhism and mao wisdom rising. The our nose many christians in china as there are members of the congress party. But its not just religion and thats the interesting thing is that in his pursuit of it, this pursuit of moral meaning its really about people saying im going to choose for myself what i care about and what i want to pursue because the material satisfactions are inadequate. And i will lead with an example of what that feels like for somebody whos in the thick of it. A few years ago you remember when beijing hosted the olympics in 2008 there was right before and an uptick of nationalism. The olympic torch made its way around the world and as a travel around and as a trial and as a trial around were bidding countered protests in one place or another. People were protesting chinese policy. Is the kind that was a reaction. Young chinese especially reacted and said well, the actual reacted great defensively and they said what are these people sing about our country works this doesnt match my image of the place. It was an angry moment. Some of the anger was directed at foreign correspondents. I got a note on my fax machine at work that said corrected your misunderstand on china are you and your loved ones will wish you were dead. It wasnt directed at me personally that was directed at journalists as a group but there was the sense that people were frustrated. In that moment there was a video that popped up on the chinese web and he was angry and is whos called china stand out. That video was manifest of a certain kind, had flags waving in the wind and it had worked for the said china must defend itself against the effort to encircle and contain the country and keep it down. I said and it became popular, second most Popular Video in china. I went down i got in touch with you and i said can i come see you . I had enriched food was good somebody clearly who had come i figured he was in disparate are revealed basement and he said you can come see me. It was good in my do some of the didnt have much of a sense of the west. I got there and i realized quite quickly but my impression was wrong. His name is 26. The first thing he did when i got there was try to pay my taxes are antiwas dressed more or less the same i was. He was at the point getting his ph. D in western political philosophy at a terrific school. He was studying, i asked them to wish her dissertation on . He said its on phenomenology and the work of edmund personal. He said are you familiar with his work on phenomenology. Of course. Of course, every american. [laughter] we are all very familiar. And he was very generous in letting me into his work for a while. I came to understand more about what was going on. In some ways the bottom line was he was enormously proud of the country and experience he had had. Lets be blunt. He had also grown up in an educational environment in which he had not heard much about tiananmen square, not much about details of the cultural revolution but he had the sense that the vision we have China Overseas was not the vision he had of china insight but i think were going to see more of that kind of flash in the years ahead between what china is that people feel on the ground and the china and were beginning to understand from outside. And thank you very much for listening. I appreciate it very much. [applause] ill be happy if anybody has questions come up happy to answer questions. Yes . I read your book. Is really marvelous and its great to see you. I wanted to ask about the activists in tiananmen square. Some of them have been caught up in the age of anxiety, the agent influence but some probably havent. And other questions have to do with tibet and the uighurs. Talk about something of a rite of buddhism. Does that make life any easier for the followers of the dalai lama . And, of course, chinas influence on things like not allowing the dalai lama into south africa. Thats astonishing giving to his ship south africa. The Nobel Laureates also the uighurs situation. Do you see this in terms of ameliorating the Separation Movement and the chinese let down, or will it only get worse . For whole bunch of questions. There are several people with question. Question of the team a generation of people were caught up in that it really was for many of them the defining experience of their lives. The young people and thats where theyve gone in all different directions. Hard to generalize. Some have become members of the new rich. And others never recovered and this is from the political disappointment of what was possible and impossible in the moment. Im afraid the situation in far western china for the uighurs and tibet is not improving. Its getting worse at the moment. I think you see. People would agree with this in beijing that there is growing attention. And it is at the moment frankly no political framework for how to relieve his attention. And attention continues to grow. And the growth is because of policy. I think theres a sense that its going to be one of the defining issues in the next few years for china. Thank you for your questions. I went to china for the first time last year. Aside for an Incredible Development everywhere, what of things that really strikes you is the number of these, which he showed kind of these huge apartment buildings everywhere. Many of which are empty, some half finished, simply finished the Still Standing empty and yet they seem to be building more. Whats happened with all this . Why does this keep going on, and isnt going to be some sort of collapse that will really leave all sorts of people bankrupt or in a bad way to . The ghost city special describing them our real phenomena. They were especially acute two or 33 years ago. Thats when you had which i can suppose terms was in a sense the engine of growth which was a combination of local government policy, the ability of cheap money. These things combined out of the financial to incentivize people to build build build. And today one of the things that were all wondering and we all watched over the last two weeks is china has gone through this roller coaster but the equity markets and generally the question about the future of the economy is whats going to happen to these buildings but in some places i can tell you empty buildings are full because there are still hundreds of millions of people are trying to go from the countryside. Its about a timing issue. They were built at the wrong time that some may fill up at some of the im afraid will not. Thank you so much for your fascinating work at the talk about china interest. You have talked more than i know about china. Added in the era the last of my life. I miss the fun, exciting part. I still follow chinese news but one thing, the often there is this political or censorship of political view a [inaudible] worries me a lot, too. I wonder if you have to which input without about the challenges to get to where you want to go, what you want to know . The reality is for all forces you describe in your question over the last decade peoples lives are becoming larger, more diverse, more diverse demand tended isnt to the system to figure out how to accommodate them because they cannot be put into the box. It is the thing to be watching, who among the leadership will figure out first that if they want to remain in the position they have that they will and must figure out how to adapt