41
" China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
42
" Within weeks of his arrival, the planet was hit by the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crisis posed a conundrum for Lin: Officials from the United States, Europe, and the IMF called on China to raise the value of its currency, to boost the buying power of Chinese consumers and make products from other countries relatively cheaper. Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat from New York, told reporters, “China’s currency manipulation is like a boot to the throat of our recovery.” But Lin saw the issue very differently. Forcing China to raise its currency “won’t help this imbalance and can deter the global recovery,” he told an audience in Hong Kong, arguing that such a move would only depress U.S. consumer demand, because raising the value of the currency would make Chinese exports more expensive, and it would not help the U.S. economy, because Americans don’t produce many of the things they buy from China. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
46
" The market waits for no one,” she said. “If I don’t develop today, if I wait for a year, or two or three years, to develop, I will have nothing for the market, and I will miss the opportunity. And we will just be ordinary, like any other factory! "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
47
" When he visited developing countries, he made a point to say they reminded him of China three decades ago. “Can other developing countries achieve a performance similar to that achieved by China over the past three decades?” he asked in a speech he called “The China Miracle Demystified.” “The answer is clearly yes.” He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post–Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but “from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories.” When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident: he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
48
" Where people were once dazzled to be online, now their expectations had soared, and they did not bother to hide their contempt for those who sought to curtail their freedom on the Web. Nobody was more despised than a computer science professor in his fifties named Fang Binxing. Fang had played a central role in designing the architecture of censorship, and the state media wrote admiringly of him as the “father of the Great Firewall.” But when Fang opened his own social media account, a user exhorted others, “Quick, throw bricks at Fang Binxing!” Another chimed in, “Enemies of the people will eventually face trial.” Censors removed the insults as fast as possible, but they couldn’t keep up, and the lacerating comments poured in. People called Fang a “eunuch” and a “running dog.” Someone Photoshopped his head onto a voodoo doll with a pin in its forehead. In digital terms, Fang had stepped into the hands of a frenzied mob. Less than three hours after Web users spotted him, the Father of the Great Firewall shut down his account and recoiled from the digital world that he had helped create. A few months later, in May 2011, Fang was lecturing at Wuhan University when a student threw an egg at him, followed by a shoe, hitting the professor in the chest. Teachers tried to detain the shoe thrower, a science student from a nearby college, but other students shielded him and led him to safety. He was instantly famous online. People offered him cash and vacations in Hong Kong and Singapore. A female blogger offered to sleep with him. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
49
" I look forward to the day when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect; a country where different values, ideas, beliefs, and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist; a country where expression of both majority and minority views will be secure, and, in particular, where political views that differ from those of the people in power will be fully respected and protected; a country where all political views will be spread out beneath the sun for citizens to choose among, and every citizen will be able to express views without the slightest of fears; a country where it will be impossible to suffer persecution for expressing a political view. I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
50
" What the Party did not say was that it considered Liu a special kind of threat. His contacts overseas and his embrace of the Internet merged two of the Party’s most neuralgic issues: the threat of a foreign-backed “color revolution” and the organizing potential of the Web. The previous year, President Hu Jintao told the Politburo, “Whether we can cope with the Internet” will determine “the stability of the state.” At Liu’s trial that December, the prosecution needed just fourteen minutes to present its case. When it was Liu’s turn to speak, he denied none of the charges. Instead, he read a statement in which he predicted that the ruling against him would not “pass the test of history”: I look forward to the day when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect; a country where different values, ideas, beliefs, and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist; a country where expression of both majority and minority views will be secure, and, in particular, where political views that differ from those of the people in power will be fully respected and protected; a country where all political views will be spread out beneath the sun for citizens to choose among, and every citizen will be able to express views without the slightest of fears; a country where it will be impossible to suffer persecution for expressing a political view. I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes. Midway through Liu’s statement, the judge abruptly cut him off, saying the prosecution used only fourteen minutes and so the defense must do the same. (Chinese lawyers had never encountered this principle before.) Two days later, on Christmas Day 2009, the court sentenced Liu to eleven years in prison. This was lengthy by Chinese standards; local activists interpreted it as a deterrent to others, in the spirit of the old saying “Kill a chicken to scare the monkeys. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
53
" My school has meetings constantly,” he went on. They are a fact of life in a state-run organization. “The meetings, you discover, are really boring and useless. Sometimes, in meetings, I write literary essays, and people think I’m taking notes, that I’m especially dedicated.” He laughed, and continued, “But then sometimes I think about the fact that China is holding meetings every day, and even though these meetings are meaningless, China has still developed so fast. How has this happened? There must be some reason. This is what interests me. "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
57
" Sitting in the cool quiet of a California night, sipping his coffee, Liu said that he was not willing to risk all that his generation enjoyed at home in order to hasten the liberties he had come to know in America. “Do you live on democracy?” he asked me. “You eat bread, you drink coffee. All these are not brought by democracy. Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can’t feed their own people. “Chinese people have begun to think, ‘One part is the good life, another part is democracy,’” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But without democracy, if we can still have the good life, why should we choose democracy? "
― Evan Osnos , Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
