If that's true – and it probably is – Evan Osnos, a former China correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, has been among those mining precious journalistic metal in recent years.
When Evan Osnos first arrived in Beijing as a college student in 1996, China was a different country. “Cameras had failed to convey how much closer it was, in spirit and geography, to the windswept plains of Mongolia than to the neon lights of Hong Kong,” Osnos writes of that time in , his new book on modern China. Two years later, Osnos returned for a summer to find that a feverish desire to consume—houses, Cokes, meat—had taken hold.
Despite nearly 20 years of economic reforms and opening up to the West, Chinese people still rejected imports like Hollywood and Mc Donald’s.
A new magazine called the published stories with titles like “After the Divorce, Who Gets the House?
” A new Communist Party slogan proclaimed “Borrow Money to Realize Your Dreams.” By the time Osnos relocated to China in 2005, first as a reporter for the How does one tell the story of a place changing so rapidly that the outside observer can hardly keep up?