Can’t Buy Me Love

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. By EVAN OSNOS. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014, 416 pp. $27.00.

Ever since the late 1970s, when China began the process of reforming and opening up its economy, Western observers have struggled to make sense of the country’s rise and to predict the future path of Chinese society and politics. Early in the reform period, most China experts in the West -- along with some members of China’s leadership -- assumed that economic development would inevitably lead to political reforms. As Chinese citizens grew wealthier, the thinking went, they