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China continues to experience growing pains when it comes to its philosophical and social systems. As the country undergoes a massive clash of forces between authoritarianism and individuality, the people, who are undergoing sweeping changes of personal and national identity, are inevitably affected. Evan Osnos, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with The New Yorker, illustrates these changes in a series of in-depth personal narratives that combine a scholarly treatise and a riveting travel essay. This work is the extraordinary culmination of Osnos' reporting for The Chicago Tribune while living in China between 2005 and 2013. Osnos relates his research, derived from hundreds of in-depth interviews, personal experiences, and documentary analyses (news publications, court reports, and websites), with a candour that transports the reader to the far reaches of China, to meet ordinary citizens, whom he calls “strivers”. Like them, Osnos himself is an unstoppable force when it comes to searching out the truth behind the stories. In many ways, the book is fundamentally about the study of the mind.
As psychoanalysts, we study the unconscious motivations, the identifications with our primary objects and significant others, and the inter-generational transmission of links to understand the life choices of individuals, couples, and families. In the Acknowledgments, Osnos stated that his grandparents (who were not alive long enough to read his book) are