Writer Evan Osnos answers questions about his New Yorker article “Angry Youth”:

“You’ve identified an important disconnect between Tang’s appetite for Western ideas and his own hypotheses for the roots of Western attitudes toward China. As he sees it, Westerners are brainwashed through education and media on issues such as Tibet and China’s human-rights record. Intellectually, he admires the skepticism of Western thinkers; it is one of the elements that attracted him to study them. But he gives less attention to dissident voices because, from where he sits, he doesn’t see the impact of their views on foreign attitudes toward China. His understanding of the mechanisms of Western public opinion is comparatively weak. When presented with a range of articles and photos that were, to his mind, flawed in similar ways, he imagined an unseen hand, an editorial conspiracy. (I spent much of our first conversations answering questions about the basic workings of a free press: the origin of story ideas, the role of editors, etc.)”