Make Money Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
China books seem especially tricky to write, because the writer has to
please two very different types of American reader: the one who has a
great deal of experience with China, and the one who does not. The first
reader cringes if he has to read yet another description of how
Shenzhen used to be a fishing village; but the second reader can't
really understand Shenzhen unless you explain this fact. (As a strange
hybrid of these two readers -- I lived in China but have no deep
expertise in its history -- I often experience the worst of both
worlds.)
This book strikes a rare balance. It's a very absorbing
read, and its multiple story-lines are impressively woven together,
without any of the stitches showing. The people Osnos writes about run
the gamut from a public figure like Lin Yifu (the World Bank economist
who defected to mainland China from Taiwan in 1979) to an obscure figure
like Michael Zhang, a young energetic optimist whom Osnos first meets
at a Crazy English conference and then follows for a few years. (Zhang
turns into one of the most interesting characters in the book.)
Make Money Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Osnos
tells all these individual stories against the backdrop of most of the
major events in China of the last five years: the violence in Xinjiang,
the Liu Xiaobo fiasco, the "Jasmine" events of 2011, Ai Weiwei's ordeal,
the flight of Chen Guangcheng, the Bo Xilai scandal, the bullet train
crash, and so on. You learn a great deal about all these events, but the
book is anchored in its very humane profiles of individual Chinese who
are trying to make their lives better.
