Speaker

Evan Osnos

Evan Osnos

Staff writer at The New Yorker and one of the most widely read American chroniclers of contemporary China, who now writes about the United States with the same reporter’s eye he trained on Beijing.

Osnos was in Beijing from 2005 to 2013, first as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and from 2008 for The New Yorker. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China came out of those years, won the National Book Award in 2014, and was a Pulitzer finalist the following year. Since returning to the United States he has written Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts, alongside long political profiles — a run of them, as Kaiser Kuo notes, of men named Joe. He is based in Washington, and returns to China every couple of years to take stock.

His method is the long-form reporter’s rather than the analyst’s: he refuses to enter a piece with a hypothesis and fortify it, and writes up to the point of a conclusion without stating one, on the view that a reader should arrive at their own. He accepts that this leaves readers of the same essay drawing opposite lessons, and regards that as the honest cost.

Core positions

The United States and China are doomed to coexist. Osnos rejects strategies built on the expectation that either will fail, and treats the alternating predictions of Chinese collapse and American withdrawal as self-punishing — each produces overreach, underestimation, and then recalibration.

The real contest is humanism against scientism, not democracy against authoritarianism. He arrived at this in the reporting: the sensibility he encountered in Zhongguancun resembled Silicon Valley’s, and the question of how much faith to place in machines against minds is being contested inside both societies. See Scientism.

Both countries are converging on oligarchic control of technology by different routes — China’s legible and surveillance-based, America’s through insurers denying treatment by algorithm, surveillance pricing, and security contractors — while remaining genuinely different in whether public will can reach the front page.

Hype and substance coexist, and the single verdict is the error. A staged factory tour and a car every seventy-six seconds are both true. His historical corrective is Musk laughing at BYD in 2011.

Knowability is the binding constraint. Access has narrowed, numbers have grown less reliable, and sources vanish into unexplained investigations, so the honest analyst states the limits of what can be seen and expects to be surprised.

Journalism is adversarial by design and is the answer to the aperture problem. He defends nettlesome questions against both the party’s preference for telling its own story and a younger audience’s confidence that scrolling curated feeds constitutes research.

In the wiki