Highlights

The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life. Some who tried succeeded; many others did not.

. . .

In the age of ambition, life sped up. Under socialism, there had rarely been any reason to rush. Except for Mao’s fantasies of leaping forward, people worked at the pace of the bureaucracy and the seasons.

. . .

One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call “the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. “The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves,” Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. “So people got the idea that taking a risk is not just okay; it has utility.

. . .

Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It’s impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation’s economy grow.

. . .

In the Internet age, the greatest force is not avarice or love or violence, but devotion to an interest.

. . .

This conservatism is distinct from a status-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a country that has only a status quo and not a principle.”

. . .

For rally races we travel widely, because they’re on dirt roads, often in small, poor places. Young people there don’t care about literature or art or film or freedom or democracy, but they know they need one thing: justice. What they see around them is unfair.”

. . .

Michael, by contrast, saw his own life as an epic fable of frustration and triumph. He wrote, “I was extremely lonely and confused from 2002 to 2007. I wanted to be someone great. I didn’t want a commonplace life … Was I really destined to be a failure? What should I do? Maybe I was doomed to be an ordinary person.” The prospect of conformity offended him. He wrote, “Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family?

. . .

To his detractors, Ai Weiwei was too quick to satisfy Western expectations of “the dissident,” too willing to reduce the complexity of today’s China into black-and-white absolutes that appealed to foreign sympathies.

. . .

“Everyone has the thirst for exploring the truth, including me … We have more freedom of speech than we did. But at the same time, as soon as you get that freedom, you begin to see that certain people have even more freedom. So then we feel unfree again. It’s the comparison that’s depressing.”

. . .

Skepticism and criticism were like muscles, and they grew with exercise.

. . .

The hardest part about writing from China was not navigating the authoritarian bureaucracy or the occasional stint in a police station. It was the problem of proportions: How much of the drama was light and how much was dark? How much was about opportunity and how much was about repression? From far away it was difficult for outsiders to judge, but I found that up close it wasn’t much easier, because it depended on where you were looking.

. . .

Popularity always struck me as an odd way to measure the importance of an idea in a country that censored ideas.

. . .

When an economy thrives, citizens can tolerate even flagrant corruption. But when it slows, that same level of corruption can become intolerable.

. . .

They were conscripted into a parable, but the morality play did not do justice to the layers of their lives.

. . .

“The question of markets,” he said, “is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale?”

. . .

I’m still young and I don’t have much power to change much, but I can influence their thinking.

. . .

The more inequality you experience, the more you crave equality, the more you want justice.

. . .

“He had to support four children going to school,” Michael said. “He never complained.”

. . .

Michael wasn’t remotely interested in politics, but for him, a name was about dignity, and there was nothing political about that.

. . .

As long as it’s a dialect of human beings, it’s legitimate.