ABSTRACT

China continues to experience growing pains when it comes to its philosophical and social systems. As the country undergoes a massive clash of forces between authoritarianism and individuality, the people, who are undergoing sweeping changes of personal and national identity, are inevitably affected. Evan Osnos, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with The New Yorker, illustrates the changes in a series of in-depth personal narratives that combine a scholarly treatise and a riveting travel essay. This work is the extraordinary culmination of Osnos' reporting for The Chicago Tribune while living in China between 2005 and 2013. Like them, Osnos himself is an unstoppable force when it comes to searching out the truth behind the stories. Osnos accounts for the newfound opportunities—fortune, truth, and faith—available to the Chinese today that they were previously denied by poverty and politics. Having obtained all three, the current generation now yearns for more, especially more information.