What motivates China in the "Age of Ambition"

I haven't read Evan Osnos' new book yet. In the meantime, I'll take a stab at predicting what he'll call up as some of the motivating forces behind Chinese folks who you don't hear much about in the nightly American news hour. I just had his book zapped to my Kindle today and look forward to seeing how my predictions match up with his observations. After 6 years living in Beijing, my take on what animates the ambitions of Chinese today:

1) One billion customers to serve: I could not initially get my head around the number of different sportswear companies with the exact same logo as Nike operating in Beijing. I then considered the sheer number of people these days looking to buy sportswear, like Mr. Clean and the college kids playing pickup basketball on campuses all around the city. There can exist 4 different stores sitting on the street right next to one another, occupying the same market niche, because if just a fraction of a percent of the hundreds of thousands of passerbys decide to pick up a tanktop or runners at that store, they're set. As James McGregor describes in his book, while the story of the past several decades has been China as a producer, the story of future decades will be that of selling into and inside China--a reality to which the rest of the world is slowly waking up, but of which Chinese are acutely aware and positioned to seize advantage.

2) Adaptability as a way of life: Connected to the phenomenon of having so many potential customers at your doorstep, that businesses seem to pop up (and out) so quickly in Beijing is not surprising. Peter Hessler remarks in one of his books how being handed a business card in China listing 15 different proficiencies is not uncommon. Off the top of my head I can count 3 plumber/electrician/locksmiths within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. On most skybridges arching over the ring roads surrounding Beijing, you can find vendors selling everything from mobile phone stickers to socks. Particularly for the emergent middle class, things change so quickly, one cannot afford to approach making a living by siloing yourself and only doing one thing to get by. Businesses and families in the developed world are concerned that things are changing too quickly to keep up--commercially, psychologically. The level of adaptability displayed particularly by young people in China, is particularly extraordinary.

3) Searching for "something else": Walking to the subway through an affluent Beijing neighborhood a year ago, I heard an electric bike behind me accelerate rapidly and then swung in front of me. The driver was a kind-looking lady with glasses who asked if I would like a teaching job; they needed teachers immediately. I declined, but took her card, which read: "Holy Education." I asked if there was a lot of demand for ESL that mixed in Bible stories with learning about nouns and verbs. She said they couldn't find teachers fast enough. "It must be difficult teaching religious education in China, no?" She said that Bible stories are used as reading material without getting into the intensely religious parts--surprising, given the name of the company. In the past year or two, in conversations with parents and students, I have never heard more mention of Jesus than in any time past. Even those whoa are not expressly Christian had some very pointed questions during this past Easter, which is translated in Mandarin as "resurrection holiday." As affluent Chinese come to see how purely material metrics for success can often prove unfulfilling, and how particularly Christian spirituality can offer some kind of higher purpose, it will be interesting to see if Chinese families continue the search for new ways of living "the good life."

4) Used to the competition: In 2011, Amy Chua's book caused a stir with the suggestion that "Chinese parents" are superior in creating "stereotypically successful kids." I have met enough people here in Beijing to understand that China, like anywhere, seems to have just as many successful or failing people as anywhere else. An interesting learning experience was when I worked at Tsinghua University--one of China's two or three premier universities--and in my spare time helped students prepare applications for graduate schools in the US and UK. These were China's high flyers--students who competed against millions of other applicants to win admission to Tsinghua. When I mentioned the idea of a "safety school" to add to their list of MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Yale, they simply shrugged it off. "I need to get into one of these places," they said. "Otherwise, I'll just stay in China, work and live at home." Why the obsession with only the top tier? "My parents would be disappointed with anything else." Many students had inculcated the desires of their parents and now could not differentiate between those and desires of their own. Regardless, they were--they are--extraordinarily driven and utterly unwilling to settle for anything less than their absolute best--which they are convinced is as good as anyone else's best, not just in China, but in the world.