Evan Osnos speaks on Hong Kong, China at Town Hall South
Following a moving Veterans Day tribute performance by members of the Upper St. Clair High School marching band, New Yorker correspondent, author and China specialist Evan Osnos addressed a full auditorium as part of the Town Hall South lecture series.
Osnos has been studying China for 20 years, beginning with his stint as the Beijing bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune, and then as a China correspondent for The New Yorker magazine from 2008 to 2013. He recently released “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.” The book is one of five finalists in the nonfiction category for the National Book Award, and was the well-timed subject of Tuesday’s lecture.
“Hong Kong is in a rare moment of political protest,” Osnos said, recounting that in September, young people, particularly, came into the city streets to protest. They blocked roads and surrounded government offices because they wanted the Beijing government to step back from trying to prescreen candidates for Hong Kong’s free election.
“Life goes on in Hong Kong, but there is a real sense of anxiety, because no one knows how this story will end. Will it lead to Tiananmen Square, or will (China) rule peacefully in the way it will affect the political future in Hong Kong?” Osnos said. “What we know today is that this is the largest challenge that the Communist Party has faced since they returned to control in 1997.
“What happens in Hong Kong is not exactly what happens in the rest of China,” Osnos said. “It’s a city of seven million people versus a country of 1.4 billion – different histories, different political systems. But, Hong Kong has always been a window into what is going on in China.”
Osnos said three pursuits are driving China through the current moment in history: wealth, information and what the Chinese call “national renewal.”
By the end of the 1970s, Osnos said, China was poorer than North Korea, with a per capita income of one-third that of sub-Saharan Africa.
But today, things are much different. The change began in 1978 when Chinese revolutionary Deng Xiaoping combined socialist ideologies with market economic practices. People began to leave their farms and migrate to cities – in fact, it was the largest migration in human history. In 1978, 80 percent of the people in China lived in the countryside. Today, China has 14 cities that are larger than Los Angeles. According to Osnos, the best estimates say that another 300 million will migrate to China’s cities – continuing the country’s evolution. “There are still gains to be made for people in China as they climb up the income ladder,” he said. “China today is home to 30 percent of skyscrapers under construction worldwide.”
Osnos also noted that the Chinese of today eat six times more meat than they did in 1976, thanks to better incomes. But, Osnos cautioned that this boom hasn’t created vast wealth in China. Rather, it has allowed many to take the first steps out of poverty. He said that the income gap is so large in China that the difference between its richest people and its poorest people is the difference between New York City and Ghana.
“The state newspapers used to tell people that their highest calling was to be a ‘rustless screw in the revolutionary machine,'” Osnos said. “In China today, we are seeing people saying to themselves, ‘What do I want out of my own life, and what am I willing to do to get us there?'”
He went on to say that arranged marriages are no longer the norm, that there are journalists in China seeking out serious investigative reporting that is having an impact, and that there is a desire – and sudden need – for information for the people of China.
Despite all of the changes in China, Osnos said it is still a developing country, and that it spends one-fifth of what the United States does on defense.
“I think we have gained a sense of some of the issues that are percolating across China. In Hong Kong, the specific precipitating event was this: After years, China decided that the ways of which Hong Kong was going to choose its own leaders was going to be a very limited process. When that fact was revealed, it sent the protesters into the streets. So, while the cause was this technical dispute, I think the underlying factors were clear: This is about a fundamental disagreement about what will create China’s national renewal.”
Osnos concluded, “As we watch this crisis unfold, we should see it not only as a test of Hong Kong’s political atmosphere, but really as a window into China, its anxieties and underlying dynamics.”