Actually, i didnt talk about this today, but i actually went to law school, got a law degree as well because i was thinking that i dont want to do medicine, i want to do health policy, i want to be in government, i want to be in the middle of things. But then i took a step back because i realized i really liked seeing patients. There was something about being able to connect with people and making a difference this peoples lives that you cant replicate it in so many other areas of life. Despite all the hard work, thats what brought me back to it. It sounds like something you might read on a hallmark card, but there was something valuable that brought me back into medicine. Thats where i came from, from there. So, yeah. Any other final questions . Hurt. Oh, one more. [inaudible] if so, like what are some of the things that stand out to you . Do i review medical School Applications . Yeah, great question because, actually, i do. Ive been part of the Admissions Committee for a number of year its coming full circle because im at the school i attended. Yeah. I think, again, theres been this concern about focus on numbers and being sort of too much focus on numbers. I think theres actually been a concerted effort more so, its still a work this progress, to actually try to get to know people, the person really reading your application, understanding where theyre coming from, what are their goals, what have they done. So i think theres a lot more tf that personal side thats happening in the applications, more so than what was happening in years past. I think we are going towards that process. One of the things a lot of People Struggle with, theres a whole other piece i didnt talk about, but how africanamerican men are actually i talk about the low numbers of black doctors but africanamerican men in particular, the numbers are really going down in terms of blacks going to medical school that speaks to a lot of different issues. I think a lot of it is about having role models, about people knowing the process, knowing the path. And so i think thats a really important piece as well. So part of what we do is outreach to schools. A lot of hbcus, for instance, in north carolina, and we try and reach out to those, to the students there and try and help them know what they need to do to get where they need to go. Thats one big piece of what i do. Yeah, great. Any final questions . All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for coming out today. I appreciate everything. [applause] [inaudible conversations] well, thank you. So ill be signing some books afterwards, so if youd like to personalize a copy. So the books are available [inaudible conversations] every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. Keep watching for more here on c c cspan2, and watch any of our past programs online at booktv. Org. Next, a program from the recent National Book festival. National book award winner evan osnos reported on chinas political and social landscape. S and it is my pleasure to introduce our guest for this program, evan os, this os. Osnos. E van was born in 1976 and is a staff writer for the new yorker as well as a fellow at the brookings institution. He writes about Foreign Affairs and politics. Fo hes the author of age of ambition chasing fortune, truth and faith in the new china. That wonderful work won the 2014 National Book award. It is the fruit of evans 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. A colleague of mine at the Washington Post wrote a wonderful review of evans book in which he had this to say. Quote in the pages of the new yorker, evan osnos has portrayed, explained and poked fun at this new china better than any other writer from the west or the east. In the age of ambition, osnoshe takes his reporting a step further, illuminating what he calls chinas gilded age, its appetites, challenges and dilemmas in a way few have done. Evan also is a contributor to this American Life on public radio and front line, the pbs series. Before moving tofr the new york, he was the beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune where he contributed to a series that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Hes received the aegis societys Osborn Elliot prize for excellence and journalism on asia and a moore record ar mirror award for profile writing. Please welcome evan osnos. [applause] thank you very much to david for that, the very kind introduction, and thank you to all of you. Youve heard this from other authors, but i have to tell you, it is a special pleasure to be here with people who choose to be inside on a Beautiful Day to talk about books. Youpl are selfselecting, and we are an endangered species, and i thank you for coming here together. I think thered are, im guessin, a lot of people in this room who are interested, as i am, in theh subject of china. And what it means for all of us. On thise side of the world. For me, well, and if you want to know what it actually feels like to be be a writer in china, its useful to remember an observation by John King Fairbanks whos one of the Great American china scholars, started the program at harvard. And fairbanks said, and i quote, china is a journalists dream and a statisticians nightmare because, he said, it has morear human drama and fewer verifiable facts per square mile than anywhere else in the world. I once mentioned that to awo colleague in the new yorkers factchecking department, and they didnt find that funny in the slightest, actually. [laughter] fair bans said that in 1947 fair bans said that in 1947 and in some ways, of course, the observation is still accurate. But china, actually, has become a much more knowable place, a much more verifiable place simply because somebody like me can go and live this for eight years and, simply by virtue of technology and transportation, you can get halfway across china in a a morning and begin your reporting or, in fact, you can go online and begin to understand a bit about whats goingin on. Re its not a substitute, by any means, for living there over a long period of time, but it is a place now we are beginning i should say we no longer have the luxury of imagining its unknowable. S we thousand have a responsibility to know it. And yet in other ways i think china has become more puzzling to us as we begin to ask larger questions about it, questions about its intentions in the, world, about its seeming contradictions. There are so many things about it that dont seem to make sense. There are things about it where we say but i thought on paper it says this, but in reality it says this. And that is, ultimately, what our responsibility is as writers, is to try to begin to make some sense of it on theou page. I want to read just a few lines from the very first page of agy of ambition, because i think itll frame how i have approached the place in writing. Whenever a new idea sweeps acrosspp china, a new fashion, a philosophy, a way of life, the, chinese describe it as a fever. In the first years after the country opened to the world, people contracted western business suit fever. Fever and e 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 look looking at the place about a kind of focus on the internet changes in peoples lives, the perceptual changes, the things that dont always turn up in the headlines that are the forces that are propelling china through history at this moment. This is a period that ive called the age of ambition and im referring to two specific things. One is a grand National Ambition to stake out some greater glorious place for china and the world and then the other kind of ambition is the force of 1. 4 billion individual aspirations of one kind or another each now distinct and potent in ways that were never possible before in chinese history and if you begin to understand those two kinds of ambitions i think you begin to understand some of the Choices China is making collectively and also on an individual basis and the tension that is created for the country and ultimately for its relationship with the rest of the world. When we talk about where china is and where its going its too remind ourselves for a moment about the past that path that its traveled over the last quartercentury. Two decades ago i got interested in china. I walked into a class on contemporary chinese politics and for me it was absolutely electrifying. It was this apparatchik story of civil war and this tragic force of the chairman and then of course he led china out of seclusion and back into the world and then you had after all the events of Tiananmen Square, the democracy demonstrations in 1989 which at that point happened just five years earlier and i was absolutely fascinated by them not only because they were young people barely older than i was that had built up its intensity at the heart of the party power but you saw very clearly they were torn between what it meant to be of the east and of the west. They had these haircuts and boomboxes and in some cases they carried placards that had the words of Patrick Henry give me liberty or give me death and they also say the International Great party him hat man when it came time for them to present their demand to the leadership they did it in the traditional style down on their knees in a formal petition that they ended up to be his apparatchiks that were still still buttoned up in their suits that you have this sense of the place at the moment of the extraordinary demands. I dont know exactly what he wants, but he wants more of it. We marked the anniversary 25 years ago last year and i flew to beijing in 1996. I loved the sense of this place that was beginning to unfold in front of you when you were able to travel in ways that you couldnt before but it wasnt a very clamorous place. At the time when you want to go out for a nice night on the town they were described as a perfect replica of the holiday inn that he had seen in palo alto california. China is home to about 30 of the skyscrapers under construction worldwide. I should say its the last generation the story of china has been one of growth and a sudden new plenty that we may be having a different conversation but for the moment the thing that has been the defining factor of peoples experience has been the sense that they have of things they didnt have before. This is also a ravenous era of a different kind in which people have awoken with a hunger for new ideas and new inspiration and respect. The boom years hasnt met the chance to climb out of poverty for the first time with about 200 a year in 1978 the average income today is about 6,000 a year but with that has come an enormous gap between the rich and poor the poor and the income of the Life Expectancy between the richest places in the poorest places is the difference between new york city and if you think that kind of gap is a political issue in the United States you can imagine how awkward it is in the peoples republic that is ruled by the communist party and so that is one of the byproducts that has in some ways introduced a contradiction that is hard for china to reconcile so what do the leaders today the people that are running the country, what is it that they wont actually, what is their ambition and aspiration for china . This current generation of leaders in the Standing Committee came into power when i was living in beijing in november of 2012 and i got this invitation to go and see the unveiling of the leadership and thats what it is because until that moment you dont know who it is thats going to be running the country and its always held in the same place at the great hall of the people in this vast building inside Tiananmen Square built by the hands of the volunteers in the 1950s. So i go to see the unveiling and its all man in this case the president and the premiere and the other leaders of the Standing Committee and they come out on stage in the formation of you just saw and the first thing that you notice is the conformity. They were virtually identical in dark suits and they were virtually identical red ties with the exception of one i can talk about. Their hair was dyed the identical shade of black which i mentioned not as a plaintiff humor but its a relevant issue in chinese politics to book and appear that you have many years ahead of you in your professional life but to those watching at home the message was unmistakably clear that we have come together around a shared idea of what we represent and a spire to. There are no idiosyncrasies or divisions. We are one group. You remember this was coming after a turbulent time in chinese politics. Then the leader of the new president who will be among us in washington, d. C. In a few weeks, he steps forward to get his first visit, his first address to the nation as the general secretary in the party and of the party and what does he say . What he says is quite striking. He says he will dedicate himself above all to what he called the great renewal of the nation and he wouldve been would then repeat this over and over in the weeks to come. The great renewal is the chinese dream and you begin to see that it is now appearing everywhere. It was on bus shelters and Television Advertisements and there were songs dedicated so what does it mean . It sounds like the American Dream but what does it actually try to convey . It has a couple of meanings that are quite clear. One of course is extending this period of growth and transformation that has been essential, china as you know is building more airports and railroads and the rest of the world combined for instance. China landed a spacecraft on the the moon and is talking about the mission to mars and the mission to the deepest reaches of the ocean and china today wants more money to the developing world than the world bank and that number is about to continue to grow. But the idea of the chinese dream is also about Something Else into something less physical. It was about trying to pull people together in a country that is increasingly driven by centrifugal forces that are driving in all kinds of new directions, trying to pull people together around a common idea of what china could be to pull people together to unite and this was important to the leader of the communist party to unite the needs of the party to reinvigorate support for the communist party all with the goal of restoring china to the status that it once enjoyed. This was a civilization that was printing books for a hundred years before gutenberg. The country that was recently as the 18th century controlled one third of the worlds wealth. So if you are the leader of the Chinese Communist party that is the goal you are trying to reclaim and that full sense of what china can be today no surprises putting it into greater confrontation and great tension with the rest of the world not only with the United States and also the neighbors for instant around the East China Sea and South China Sea i think many of us have begun to wonder does china imagine itself going past the United States to become the most powerful country in the world . Doesnt see itself as a rival in its ability to influence others and the ability to intervene in ways that we want to. I think that its especially tempting for us to feel that way now when we sense in our own politics a kind of paralysis and inability to get things done as we would like to but i think its important to remember there are reasons to believe the chinese leaders have a sense of what is possible and what is not possible and the simple fact is china today is not prepared to go past the United States in so many ways the developing country today and being the preeminent power is expensive area you are expected to take the leading role in things like the response to the Islamic State or policing the international ceilings which are so essential to the Economic Health and as much as the military is growing and growing very fast its annual spending officially is only a fraction of what our defense spending is in the United States to put in perspective they have about a dozen aircraft carriers and china has one instead of imagining that china is preparing past, it perceives itself as returning to a position of greatness in a a multicolor world, returning to the position of leadership is not something short of being the preeminent power. So that gives us a sense of division of the journey and if that is what chinese leaders aspire to i think the question we should be asking is whether or not his people feel the s