Great mall of China

Modern China is a fascinating place. It is a country where the Communist Party strains to maintain an autocratic grip on information in the era of the internet.

It is a terrain where dissidents, artists and intellectuals attempt to preach the gospel of democracy to an audience that is sometimes happy to accept the trade-off of democracy for economic success.

In New Yorker writer Evan Osnos's intriguing new chronicle, his theory is that what really undergirds modern China is personal aspiration.

"I'd rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle," one young woman tells Osnos.

"Do you live in a democracy?" a Chinese student asks Osnos.

"Indian guys have democracy, and some African countries have democracy, but they can't feed their own people."

For every thorn in the Communist Party's side, like dissident artist Ai Weiwei, Osnos finds regular citizens who maintain a deep sense of pride in the story of China's economic growth. Many ordinary Chinese people, Osnos writes, are fed up with the fact that to the West, "the most famous image from China in the past 30 years was not of its economic rise but of the man standing in front of the tank near Tiananmen Square".

Osnos uses the personal stories of Chinese individuals as a lens to explore the wider society. He tells us of Lin Zhengyi, one of Taiwan's most celebrated army officers, who abandoned everything to swim to Communist China at a time when everyone who could was swimming in the opposite direction, and is today a prominent Chinese economist still forbidden to set foot on Taiwanese soil.

Osnos presents Tang Jie, a scholar who became so personally offended by what he saw as anti-China sentiment peddled by the West in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics that he devoted his life to producing pro-Chinese propaganda videos without any assistance from the state. He writes of Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights lawyer who managed to flee to America, and ended up working for conservative anti-abortion thinktanks.

These figures have one thing in common, Osnos writes: "Each of them had considered what destiny ordained, and rejected it."

Osnos does not attempt to gloss over problems. Corruption in China makes South Africa look like a model society. It is estimated that 18 000 corrupt officials fled China with ill-gotten gains exceeding $120-billion between 1990 and 2011.

The offices of the National Development and Reform Commission, China's planning agency, are surrounded by gift shops selling porcelain and alcohol - bribes to be brought in with applicants.

Given South Africa's relationship with China - yet another Dalai Lama visa fracas - it is a pity that Osnos's book does not devote a great deal of attention to China's foreign policy. But Age of Ambition remains a vital read .

• 'Age of Ambition' is published by Farrar Straus Giroux