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 m