He negotiates these issues by employing the techniques of the assiduous reporter, meticulously following leads and allowing subjects and situations to speak for themselves. How does one criticise China without appearing to have a liberal pro-western agenda, and how does one write positively about China without sounding like a naive apologist? Is it even possible to write convincingly about a country of China's size and history without condensing its complexities into a single version of the truth? These are questions faced by the many journalists, writers and artists whom Osnos profiles, but they are also questions that Osnos himself has to confront from the outset of his project. But when, idealistically, he began to take on official Chinese media, his site was blocked by censors. 'But when you are in a so-called free system you never think whether you are brainwashed.' Tang Jie went on to live in Beijing and Berlin, and runs a successful startup generating online material to combat the western media. 'Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,' he tells Osnos in conversations that stretch over several years. His patriotism was not just a sign of an incipient superpower beginning to flex its muscles and define its cultural identity, but a glimpse into the clash of competing influences in the swirling changes in contemporary China: the battleground of the internet, the changing priorities of the educated urban middle class and the uneasy way in which China is positioning itself in the world. Deeply hurt by international criticism of China and incensed by images of western pro-Tibet protesters trying to douse the Olympic flame as it made its way through Europe, Tang was motivated to act by what he, like many of his generation, saw as deep-seated and unfair suspicion of China, and by America's 'strategic containment' of its rising enemy.

O f the many detailed portraits of politicians, dissidents and strivers that make up Evan Osnos's lively panorama of evolving contemporary China, perhaps the most intriguing is that of Tang Jie, the young Fudan University scholar whose six-minute YouTube video entitled 'China Stand Up!' drew more than a million hits and tens of thousands of positive comments in little more than a week.

Age of ambition