♪ >> this week on "q&a," our guest is journalist and author evan osnos, who discusses his new book, "age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new china." >> evan osnos, in your new book, under the acknowledgments you start off by saying, "none of my grandparents lived to see this

book but they are responsible for its inception." >> my grandparents on my father's side came from poland. they were polish jews. they left at the beginning of world war ii. on my mother's side, my mother's father was an american diplomat sent to hungary who was kicked out. he was accused of being a spy which he wasn't. in some ways, these stories, the experience of being ejected from poland or hungary, formed a backdrop in our family's story about life under authoritarianism. i think it always -- i was always interested in what it felt like to live in a country where there were fundamental constraints on how you live and what you could care about and what your values were. when there was a moment in my life where i could go to a place

to dig into that, china was the place that fascinated me. that family story is very present in my interpretation. >> when you first went there in 1996, could you speak chinese? >> i was learning chinese. i started the previous year. if anybody told you how hard chinese was going to be, you would never undertake the process. i ended up taking about four years of college chinese before i moved to china. i was just starting when i went for the first time. >> i am going to ask you a question in english and i want you to answer in chinese. what is this book about? >> [speaking chinese] you would say in chinese -- [speaking chinese] what i mean is that this book is about ambition. literally in chinese, it is about the wild heart. that is the term people use in chinese to describe ambition.

"wild heart," for a long time in chinese was an unimaginable idea. if you are accused of being ambitious, you are accused of being wild hearted. that was a death sentence. what it meant was that you put the group before anything else. -- i'm sorry, you put yourself before the group. for chinese history, that was unimaginable under the confucian period or the socialist period. when i got there, things were beginning to change in some deep way. what i began to hear around me was people talking about themselves, not in a self glamorizing or self-promotional way, but just in a self protective way. they would say that it matters what i want in this world. even the term in chinese for myself was transforming. people were getting comfortable using it. in the united states, we talk about the me generation. in china, it was a revolution in our conception of what it meant

to be a person. in the past, people would always talk about the group, the family, the clan, the factory. all of a sudden, beginning after 1979 when the country embarked on this economic transition, people had no choice but to think about themselves. that became the fundamental dynamic that drove my eight-year fascination and investigation of china. >> you married in the middle of all this. how did you meet your wife? >> i met my wife in beijing, sarabeth berman who is from massachusetts. she went to china for a year and met me. she stayed for the next six years and we came home together. >> does she speak chinese? >> she does. she learned it living, working in an all chinese environment.

she was the only foreigner working in a modern dance company in china. she was the manager. all day long, she was surrounded by chinese speakers. they would go to places like italy and she was their link to the rest of the world. she has a natural understanding of how people talk day-to-day rather than learning in the classroom. >> what difference does it make in trying to write this book and working for the "new yorker" and writing about china, that you spoke the language? >> i couldn't have done the kind of work that we do at the new yorker if i didn't speak the language.

so much of what makes a "new yorker" story and what makes this book is the texture, the minor strokes of conversation, the little choices that people make when they use an expression, when they choose an idiom. for instance, the fascination i have with this concept of the wild heart, that would be inaccessible to me if i hadn't studied chinese. studying mandarin is one of these processes that goes on your whole life. there are still times when i go with a translator for an interview because i know that person is going to be speaking about something technical or using a dialect. it gives me a cushion. i can think about what is on the wall behind them or how they are holding themselves with their emotional experience. it buys time too. this is one of the great secrets of working with a translator. it slows the whole thing down. one of the experiences in this book that was a big part of my life in china, was going on a tour of europe with chinese tourists. it was an idea that came from an

editor at the "new yorker." he said, "i heard the chinese people are beginning to go to europe." i thought, maybe i will sign up for a tour and go with them. that was a case where there were 39 chinese tourists and me. from the get go, they were incredibly welcoming. i often thought if the roles were reversed and this was a group of american tourists and a chinese journalist showed up, how would we respond? i spent this whole 10-day trip, five countries, 10 days, we ate almost entirely chinese food in all these countries, but they were speaking to each other in chinese. the ability to participate in that conversation without it being burdensome for them was the only way a story like that becomes possible. >> what did you learn about them being on that trip? had you been to those european places before? >> i had, i was born in london.

flying to germany with most of them, almost all of them entirely were leaving asia for the first time. there was one guy who had been outside of asia and he was like magellan. then there was the guide. he was much more than a guide. he was a storyteller, an authority figure. the first thing he told us to do on the bus was to synchronize our watches. we weren't going to miss a single second of europe. we would go country to country. in some ways, our imagination from the west is that we think of it as being this muscular figure starting to make its way in the world and it feels brave

and strong maybe in some ways that we don't at this moment. the truth was that there was a great sense of self-consciousness and vulnerability as they made their way out into these unfamiliar places. we would go to chinese restaurants. i thought, why would we do this? why would we go to france and italy and eat general tso's chicken? it is like americans that go to paris and eat a hamburger. that applies also politically and economically with the way china conducts itself. it has not acclimated to having the body of a superpower but it does not yet have all the experience that comes with that. one of the things that was striking about that experience was they also looked at some things in europe and the united states and they were not impressed. they would look at downtown milan and say, "why is there

graffiti everywhere? why are these people on strike? they want to work less?" this is a radical notion for a chinese tour group. fundamentally, what they were impressed by was the power of the western education system. they would return to that subject, western schools, western universities, the power of creative thinking. i think that more than anything else is the thing that appeals to chinese people today about what we have in the west. it is not our physical infrastructure. it is not our wealth. it is that we have this culture in which people are able to pursue idiosyncratic intellectual ideas, that they haven't been able to do. >> you write in the book about "china stand up!" what is the story behind this video? >> "china stand up!" was a video that emerged in 2008. the olympic torch was making its way around the world. it became a symbol in many ways of china.

it attracted protests and people used it as an opportunity to express their complaints of china's handling of tibet and human rights abuses. inside china, this stirred a nationalist response among young people. this video is like a manifesto for that argument. this very proud and defensive response to the world's criticism of china. it became the most popular video in china, second only to a tv blooper of a news anchor doing something silly. that demonstrates some things are universal about the internet. this video was fascinating because it was clearly an attempt to express an idea that i didn't recognize. i had been in china for three years. this was an idea that was becoming much more powerful in chinese life. that was a proud interpretation of chinese history and the

chinese president. it was a response to criticisms from the west. i said i had to figure out who made this video. >> who made it? >> not a guy that i expected. i had an image of who it would be. it would be somebody that was angry, isolated from the west, probably living in the proverbial "parents' basement," totally unaware of what it means to be an american. a chinese friend helped me trace this video back. there was no name attached to it. he traced it back to a guy in shanghai at a university. i said, can i come see you? he said, sure. before i left, i said i am going to meet this guy who made this very almost militant video. if you don't hear from me, ring the bell. i got there and the first thing he did was try to pay for my taxi fare. he was a graduate student studying western philosophy.

he was dressed the same as i was. khakis and a blue shirt. he was studying the work of edmund herzel. very esoteric elements of western philosophy. he said, you are familiar. of course, naturally all americans are. i wasn't. like all americans, i wikipedia'd. what was interesting about him was, he spoke german, he spoke english. he was studying ancient greek. he was studying latin. he was deeply literate. his room was this personal library that he had assembled. yet it had not made him instinctively affectionate towards the west. what it had done was heightened his sense of the ways in which

china was either being drawn into or excluded from the international system. that had become for a whole generation of talented, successful young chinese people, a dominant fact of their interpretation of the world. which was that china could only go so far. >> two names, tang jie. we are going to show some of it. i have broken it into three. how many people -- do you have any sense of how many people have seen this in china? >> millions. by that time i got interested, it was already up to one million. that was a couple weeks after it happened. it is still on the web today. it remains a manifesto for this community that calls itself the angry youth.

the angry youth in chinese is a stripe of chinese society that is angry for all kinds of reasons. the thing that draws them together is that they are proud of china and frustrated by their own sense that their lives are somehow limited. >> i wrote down what is said on there but it is the script right below. they will see it. the music, did you figure out what the music is? >> it has the sort of surging strings. i said to him, where did you find this? he said, i just typed into the internet, "moving music," and it eventually pointed him to an artist called vangelis. this was the soundtrack to a movie called "1492" which he liked because this meant it was about globalization. >> did he also do "chariots of fire?" let's watch this and talk about it.

♪ >> you go back to the beginning.

we saw chairman mao dead since 1976. right after that, famous words, imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us. do they really think that in china today? >> fundamentally, they do. the language has changed. they don't really talk about imperialism unless it is in the context of this creed where they are trying to register their contempt for what the west was doing. they do feel in a deep way that the west will probably never allow china to achieve its full superpower status without putting up a fight.

that has become a key element of the way that chinese leaders see this moment in their rise in the world. it is a very anxious moment. they see a certain inevitability, they were for most of human history one of the greatest civilizations in the world. at this point, when you look back, whenever a country has emerged to challenge an incumbent power, in this cas the united states, most of the time it has led to conflict. both sides are aware of this. if you read in the chinese press, they write about thucydides' trap. the chinese recognize the threat of this moment. this is an important point.

that concept of china's -- the antagonism that china encounters has become an important part of the education system. that was not an accident. tang jie who is the creator of this video was raised in a period in which china was searching for the thing that would pull the people together. socialism was in the rearview mirror. they realized that was not their economic salvation. in 1989, the 25th anniversary will be this spring, tiananmen square was an indication that it was not going to satisfy people. they said, we will rely on two things. after the failure to mobilize,

the failure to inspire people, that is how he explained tiananmen square. those things are prosperity and nationalism, the ability to wrap people around the flag. patriotism. this young man and many people in his generation have grown up being told about the ways in which western countries have sought to keep china down. they are not wrong. in the 19th century, china was carved up like a melon. that is the term they use to describe the way that foreign powers took control of chinese land. they talk about a century of humiliation. this is taught explicitly in chinese schools. china has weathered this century. that is the dominant fact of what it means to think about chinese history if you are a young person today. they spend a lot of energy

focusing on preventing china from being humiliated again. >> let's watch some more from that video. ♪

>> let's start with the last part, the dalai lama. tibet has three or four main people at the most. >> they have a vast territory with this very sparse population. >> how many people do they have in china? >> 1.4 billion people. >> why is there so much fuss about this tiny populated country? >> they call it an administrative region, autonomous administrative region. tibet is this immensely neuralgic issue in china. it represents the possibility that their territory could be broken up someday.

the tibetans and the han chinese which makes up the majority of the population, they have a different interpretation of how chinese is tibet. there is a contemporary debate. is there a way to have a more robust tibetan life inside chinese borders? the tibetans want to be able to worship more frequently. they want fewer han chinese moving into the tibetan areas. the reason we hear so much about tibet in the west is because the chinese really do believe that if they lost tibet, if somehow it was able to achieve independence, that would lead to similar secessionist movements elsewhere in china. china has 56 ethnicities. this goes back to this 19th century history. if they were -- if they allowed

their territorial integrity to be compromised, they would eventually lose everything. that is why they draw this hard line on any independent movement inside tibet. the person they blame most of all is the dalai lama. >> why do we americans -- why is there so much fuss over the dalai lama? >> i think you would probably agree with this. he is a sort of accidental celebrity of history. i spent some time writing about him. he is a fascinating figure for a few reasons. he never left china -- he left when he was young but he never left asia until he was in his mid 30's. he was a guy who lived very much the life of his predecessor. he had -- he realized at a certain point that if he did not

turn the tibetan cause into a charismatic issue, if he did not allow himself to be, the face of something that people would connect with, this issue -- the tibetans are not the only people in the world who have what they claim to be a claim on greater independence within the borders of the country. part of it i think is that americans going back 100 years have invested mystical significance in tibetans. mountains, buddhism, it is an astonishing culture. he has been an extraordinary spokesman for tibet in a way that i don't think people would have predicted. he was chosen when he was a toddler by the doctrine of tibetan buddhism. he was said to be the reincarnation of the predecessor. he has turned out to be in many ways the principal opponent of the chinese government.

his great friend was pope john paul. in some ways, the role the pope played against the soviet empire has become the role the dalai lama plays against china. how much of the financial support to keep them going comes from america? >> we don't know. there is a lot of different kinds of support he receives. the conspiracy theories in china, there are all kinds, that he is a cia operative and things like that. the truth is probably a lot simpler than that. he has been enormously effective at being able to put himself into a conversation in the west that tibet wouldn't naturally occupy. he has written dozens of books, some of which range from traditional tibetan buddhism doctrine, all the way to things about neuroscience and getting towards the self-help genre. he has made himself popular to all kinds of people. >> back to the beginning of that video.

it said, "we provide for them by low-cost commodities made in china, but our people still have a rough time." >> what they are talking about is the goods that china sends abroad around the world. they are right. i should say, tang jie is self-conscious about the english he put in that video. he sent it out on the web and it became a phenomenon before he could correct his grammar. he would want me to say that. what they mean by that is that china has become the factory to the world. it sends products around the planet in a way that makes our lifestyles possible. we couldn't have the quality of life we enjoy if we didn't have low-cost goods and labor in china. yet, in china the standard of living remains only about 1/6 of what it is in the united states in terms of per capita income. that is a source of frustration.

people realize, "we work hard, we are participating in the global economy, we play by the rules in some cases and yet we are not enjoying the quality of life that they have in the west." for most of chinese history, people had no idea what life was like outside. this gets back to this tour of europe. chinese people can now sit on a computer and have a pretty accurate understanding of what it feels like to live in washington dc. that heightens this conflict. >> one more clip from the movie and we will move to other stuff. ♪

>> they said in the middle, thanks to cnn, bbc, all the liar western media. their behavior have educated a whole generation of young chinese. >> what they were responding to was, there had been a series of video clips they had found on western television in which people had made mistakes. they identified for instance a protest in nepal as being a protest in tibet. the chinese would say, these are nepali policemen, not chinese policemen using batons and so

on. the reason they fixated on this was they found it evidence of an embedded antipathy towards china. that is what this was about, a generation of young chinese. they had gotten into the best schools, gotten great jobs. they were bankers, successful young professors and they discovered that their image of china, this country that had given them all this opportunity, was not the image they had abroad. in fact, abroad we focused on other things, political culture, abuses of human rights as we see them. in that difference, in that discovery was enormous energy that was released. when they say that they thank these western news organizations, there was irony. i know that a lot of these young

people go online every day. they jumped the wall, they get outside of the filters that the chinese government has put on the internet and search information from these western news organizations. they take pride in their curiosity. they take pride in their ability to ferret out the information. when they went abroad -- when they went online and found that some of these detections of china were not accurate, that was in a sense humiliating. it said that these western news organizations that we put our faith in, did not live up to our expectations. in so many ways, i think this moment -- there have been since then others and there will be more -- there will be moments when the chinese public rise up to oppose what they see as the west's mistreatment of china. one of the things i think is key

is that so many of these young people who talk about nationalism, who stand up in defense of the communist party or in defense of china, oftentimes they are doing it because it is the available vocabulary for them. you are allowed to go out in the street and say, "down with japan for its crimes during world war ii." or "down with the united states for its restraint of china's rise."

but you can't go out and say, "i am frustrated because i can't get the job i thought i was going to have and i am frustrated because i can't buy a house," or "i am frustrated by environmental pollution." there is a sort of opportunistic quality to some of these protests. >> the latest number i could find is as many as 200,000 chinese students in the united states. they have censors on the internet in china but they allow 200,000 students. i think it is the largest number ever and they can have access to everything here. why do they do that? >> there is a recognition that they cannot afford to cut themselves off from the technical dividend that comes from sending young people abroad. the young people that went overseas and got economics training were essential to them being able to develop financial markets and financial institutions to succeed as an economy. when they go abroad, there is the risk -- when you open the window, mosquitoes can fly in. when you send these young people abroad, they may pick up some unsavory ideas. the reality has turned out to be complicated. oftentimes, i have gotten to know chinese students who go overseas and they become even more patriotic about china. that is logical.

you can understand why you are feeling a little bit out of sorts. you hear people criticizing china and say, "it is my responsibility to stand up for it." >> we found this, don't know who it is, but they are chinese students talking about democracy. >> it might not suit china. it isn't such a good thing. maybe china would evolve towards democracy on its own. >> i think the most intriguing thing about american government is that they put personal liberty as the main thing. >> the americans tend to picture american soldier on the street in iraq saving iraq people from hell. whenever there is, a

dictatorship, as someone would call it, the u.s. tend to think it is their job to save those people. they haven't realized that democracy is an absolute value in u.s. but it might not be the absolute in other countries. >> how much there do they young people want democracy and do they know what it is? >> the word itself is toxic in a way. it has been for so many years identified as a threat to the gains that chinese people have made over the course of the last generation. if you ask somebody outright, you are going to get very few people who say that is a terrific idea for china. when you dig beneath that, the ideas that we consider to be essential to open society are very much in demand in china. for instance, rule of law, the ability to pursue an issue in court, this didn't matter 40 years ago when nobody had any property. all of a sudden, people have accumulated a nest egg. they bought a house, a car.

if somebody is able to abuse their power to take that away from you, that has inspired a sudden respect for the institutions that can help them. that is one of the things you hear. we want rule of law. in some ways, it has been decoupled from the specific democratic objective. the other thing they think of is justice. if you ask people in china, do you think your system delivers justice, i think you would have had a lot more -- there would be a long pause. what they know is that there is not justice right now for vast numbers of people. this is why we see unrest on the chinese streets.

the numbers are remarkable. chinese today contend with about 180,000 acts of civil unrest every year. that is about 500 a day somewhere in the country. people aren't doing that because it is a convenient solution. it is a very dangerous thing to do. they have deep grievances about how it is that the system is going to protect what they have acquired. chinese people have worked unbelievably hard for the last 40 years. as they look around and try to figure out, what do we need to protect ourselves, the first answer is not democracy. often, one of the first answers is the court system. we need accountability in some way to maintain some kind of supervision on the leadership. >> ai weiwei is someone that you write about. sometime back there was a exhibit with him. there is a documentary. do you know him?

>> i do. he is an artist who does a lot of different kinds of art. some of it is sculpture, some of it is video. he began as a portrait painter on the street in times square in new york. he lived in the united states for ten years. he is a very unusual man. he comes from -- his background is important. he is the son of china's most famous modern poet, who was at one point beloved by the party and at other points cast out into internal exile in the western reaches of the country. ai weiwei grew up in this environment in which he saw what happens when you put yourself, you end up on the receiving end of, when you are a political target in china. >> you can see that he has some strong feelings.

>> there are particular moments which allow a voice to change the way that people think. >> in some cases, they call him holy ai. >> it is like venus or something like the god of love. >> basically they consider him a god. >> that is a very dangerous description in china. >> do you think art has a power to stop dictatorship? >> [indiscernible] >> among all chinese artists, he is probably the only one who

deep down really cares about this country. weiwei would put his life on the line for something he believes in. >> the americans fear china. >> [indiscernible] >> that is one of his talents, communication. how to make people believe in his ideas. >> what did you see there? you were in it. >> he has become over the course of the last six years, he has become the face of a certain kind of energy in china. this belief that people deserve the chance to define what they think is cool and what they think matters and what they think is politically important. in practical terms, in 2008, his life changed substantially.

he had been an emerging artist. he had a tense but ultimately, a legal relationship with the government. he was hired to be a consultant on the deal being -- on the building of one of these stadiums in beijing. in the course of that process, he concluded that there was something wrong about the way china was going about its production of the olympics. he believed it was becoming an advertisement for the government. he called it a fake smile. what he meant was that it was disguising internal troubles. there wasn't justice delivered in a way that he felt was meaningful. that put him at odds with the government. his relationship deteriorated to the point that he was eventually arrested. he was held, detained on what they described as tax charges. the government was also clear.

to the state-run media, they described him as being out of step with the chinese mainstream. they said he put himself ahead of the people. they had accused him of the sorts of things that you can be accused of in the cultural revolution. this was a very polarizing moment. for some people, in the chinese middle class, they looked at the guy and said, he is nothing like us. he speaks english because he lived in the united states. he comes from this illustrious background. he is able to speak his mind because he knows that nobody will harm him. then there was another pocket of people. ai weiwei is very much a creature of the internet. he spends all day online. he estimated he spends 11 hours a day on the internet.

there are all these people in little villages and towns who don't have any reason to find something in common with this essentially wealthy well-connected artist in beijing. but in his message about individual dignity, they found something powerful. he did a project which was quite remarkable. this got a lot of attention in europe and the united states. he commissioned the creation of 200 million tiny ceramic sesame seeds -- sunflower seeds. i was with him in his studio when he had just begun work on it. he only had a few thousand of them at that point. there was a little mound of them in his studio. i said, what are you going to do with these? he said, i have no idea. but each one was individually painted. each one was a little different. it is a little bit like the terra-cotta warriors. each one has a different face

than the others. it became a kind of grand metaphor for chinese life. you had all these people that look the same from far away but in fact each one is different and distinctive. this became this iconic image in china for a certain kind of young politically animated person. people started saying, send me a sunflower seed. i want to give it to a girl in my class in high school. people started spray painting sunflower seeds like graffiti. he became an enormous irritant and threat to the chinese government, not the cause he would be able to undermine the chinese government. but the fact is that what he represented, a certain kind of electricity, the power of the individual mind, was very unsettling. for that reason, he had to be curtailed. >> i want to ask you to be short about this. there is too many to mention. you have got all kinds of characters in the book. i will mention a couple and you can mention whoever you want to. who is michael? >> michael taught me more about china than anybody else.

he is nobody that anybody has ever heard of. he is an english teacher in a little town. he is the son of a coal miner. he worked as a security guard on the edge of this english learning camp. he couldn't afford to go to the camp to study english himself but he was desperate. he decided at a certain point in his life that if he could learn english, that it would transform his life. he would no longer just be the son of a coal miner in a little town. he could go anywhere. english was this idea much larger than the language itself. it was about self creation. it almost became a religion. china after all has no state religion anymore. it has no dominant faith. what it has is the opportunity for people to choose for themselves what matters. for him, english became everything.

he would practice english in front of the mirror. it was an obsession. it was also a pathway to do something else. what he taught me was, as he said, "just because i was born to a poor family, why should i be like everybody else?" in that statement was a very powerful idea, a rejection of conformity. it was this idea that simply by the fact of being who he was, he had a right to be ambitious. he was a very important person. >> who is or was the street sweeper? >> somebody who i met at the tail end of my years in china. this was a guy in the neighborhood where i lived.

my wife and i lived in a house in a chinese neighborhood. these are little alleys. the actual street we were on was called the alley of national studies. that was a kind of grand term for this tiny one-way street. it was called that because it was in the heart of this historically important area. national studies meaning the study of history and philosophy. it was right next to the lama temple, a temple devoted to tibetan buddhism. it would be a little bit like living next to the lincoln memorial. >> didn't you say that there was music all day long? was it the confucian temple? is it a church? >> it is a 700-year-old strine.

it looks like a large wooden -- shrine. it looks like a large wooden pavillion with a golden roof. it was silent when we moved in. it was like living against the edge of a great cathedral. one day out of nowhere, a speaker crackled to life inside the temple and they were reciting confucian lines from the classics, the great old confucian philosophy. it played for 20 minutes. i thought, that is the end of that. then it played an hour later. i said, maybe this is just a festival. it became an all day affair. the chinese government had realized that they were in need of a state philosophy, an idea that could give people something to hold onto. a moral foundation for the culture. there was no organized religion in any real way. there is, but for the sake of discussion there was not the kind of -- it didn't see itself as a confucian society.

so confucius was revived essentially. 2,500 years after his death. all of a sudden, the temple became active. there were tour groups going through all day long. people were being taught how to pray towards his statue. >> did you work in your house all the time? >> i did. i had to get used to this sound of the confucian philosophy. i asked my neighbor -- he said, do you hear it in your house? he said, it is driving me nuts. he said, you should go complain about it. i said, why me? he said, you are a foreigner. they will listen to you. >> back to the street sweeper. >> the street sweeper was one of a crew of guys who worked in the neighborhood.

they all wore these aren't outfits. i couldn't really tell them apart because they were the same hats and outfits. they would go around the neighborhood and sweep up the streets. one day i was talking with that guy who runs the scrapyard. one of the sweepers came up to us and said, can you see on the face of that rock is the face of the emperor? we said, what? he spoke with a very strong provincial accent. he said, come back to us when you have learned how to speak proper beijing dialect and wandered back off into his house. the sweeper said, people don't respect me. they think i have no education, no culture. what they don't know is i am a poet. in fact, i am the super king of chinese couplets. if you go online, you will find information about me.

he said, i run a forum on the internet about modern chinese poetry. i looked him up and there he was. he looked completely different. by the time i met him, he was in his late 50's and looked totally different. he was wearing this kind of outfit that made him indistinguishable from others. online, he had an entire life that was impossible 20 years ago. he had found people all over china just like him, people who had taken an interest and found something inspiring in this poetry. some of his poetry was kind of inaccessible. some of it was wonderful and thrilling. it was terrific to imagine that this person who would have no ability to identify with a cultural community because he

was not born into the station that would allow that, he had found that for himself. that was one of the defining facts of the period that i described in this book. the internet had awakened people to the sense of aspiration and ambition. if you want to be a poet, you can go out and do it. >> who is lin yifu? >> lin yifu started his life as lin jong yi. he was a young lieutenant in the army of taiwan. in the late 1970's, taiwan and china were at war with each other, had been since 1949 when the losing side of the chinese civil war fled to taiwan. he was a real star in the taiwan army. he was posted to this incredibly sensitive point in the conflict, this island very close to the chinese mainland. in the 1950's, americans would have recognized it.

it was known as the lighthouse of the free world. he was posted there to defend taiwan from chinese aggression. at this point, they weren't fighting but he made privately a very dangerous judgment. he said, if i am going to make an imprint on the world, i need to go to mainland china. this was 1979. if you remember what an outrageous idea it was, even to make contact with china was illegal at this point. on top of it, china was poorer than north korea per capita. the idea that you could imagine your future in china was a radical idea. he said, i need to get to china. the way he was going to get to china was by defecting from the army and swimming to the mainland, which was only about a mile. but it was dangerous. if he was caught, he would be shot on sight.

he would be tried as a traitor if they caught him. >> how much time did you spend with him? >> i interviewed him many times. he changed his name when he got to the mainland and has turned out to be a prominent figure. he became the chief economist of the world bank, which is amazing when you think about what his life has traversed. his life was a kind of metaphor for this period. he woke up on a certain day at a certain hour of his choosing and decided, i am going to change my life. he left his wife and his children behind in taiwan. they eventually reunited. when he came to china, he became one of the first people to get a western phd in economics. he went to the university of chicago.

the heartland of free market thinking. he came back to china armed with this education and began moving up the ranks in china. he could never get into the highest ranks because people always wondered if he was a taiwanese spy. he had made this completely audacious defection to the mainland. he ended up becoming in some ways the most ardent spokesman for his adopted country. >> this is just the scene of the train wreck that happened. you write about the train wreck. it is on the screen here right now. when did this happen and why did you write about this? >> in the summer of 2011, this train wreck happened. it became a signal moment for the chinese middle class. this was one of china's new, fast trains. they are amazing. china has built more high-speed rails than the rest of the world combined and continues to plan an enormous network across the country. for years, chinese trains have

been a symbol of backwardness. they were smelly and slow. traveling on chinese train was not something you wanted to do. all of a sudden, they built this enormous engineering triumph. in the summer of 2011, two trains collided. that is what we are seeing in that video. part of the train fell off of an overpass near the city of wenzhou in eastern china. it became a symbol for the frustrations of many people in china, particularly this new middle class. in order to buy your ticket, you have to have some money. it is expensive. people were proud. one of the women on that train wrote in a text message, she said, i feel like i am flying home.

when these two trains collided, it became a kind of grand symbol of the ways in which chinese people felt they weren't being told the truth by their own government. shortly after the crash, one of the first thing that happened was the government said, we are going to bury the train car. it is going to make it easier for the rescue operation. people said, that doesn't make any sense. you are trying to get rid of the evidence. that is what they thought. it became -- people were able to exert pressure on the government through the power of the internet, in ways they hadn't before. you had thousands of messages, millions in fact on the chinese web. people were demanding information. there has been this very clear process over the last couple of decades.

first people demand prosperity. they wanted to get themselves out of poverty. as they ascended a little bit, they needed -- they could no longer afford to be uninformed. they needed to be able to know what was going on. who was setting the roles? were they fair? was it safe? this train crash became a symbol of that. i went back and looked at how the train crash had happened. what became clear was that this enormously important project was also riddled with corruption. there had been an enormous amount of money that had been stolen. it led me eventually to the subject of the minister of railways himself. he was a kind of walking manifestation of china's ambitions. they called him greatly leo because he had such ideas of what was possible. >> we are out of time. evan osnos, the name of the book is "age of ambition: chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the

new china." you are in washington now. how long do you expect to stay here with the new yorker in this town? >> we will be here for a few years. it takes a while to find your way around. >> you want to go back to china? >> eventually. >> evan osnos, thank you. we are out of time. ♪ >> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q-and-a.org. "q&a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. [captions copyright national >>