So here we are, slap-bang in the middle of China’s Age of Ambition, where brightness is lauded and obscurity shunned. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. History and memory have been worked like a piece of warm tar, until China, along with the rest of the planet, is disgorged from a subway stop in a city resembling something out of Star Wars. China, the geographical entity that encompasses within its borders more than 1.3 billion people, or 19.4% of humanity (those numbers again!), has been ripped to shreds and reconstituted three times since 1949. The baling hou, or “post-eighty” generation born after the death of Mao, came to identify their parents - those who lived through the privations and brutality of the Cultural Revolution - as a different species belonging to a different world. Percentages, digits, decimal points: What the math doesn’t explain, at least not in any meaningful way, is how profoundly Chinese society has changed in the span of half a generation. How should we define the modern Chinese miracle? Let’s pick a few numbers almost at random: in three decades, 300 million Chinese have risen from absolute poverty 200 million have moved from farms to industry 100 million have joined the middle class half a million are now millionaires. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

Age of ambition by evan osnos