Age of Ambition; The New Emperors reviews – two studies of modern China

In the far distant days when Beijing correspondents and general books on China were both in short supply, the departing journalist's hardcover take on his or her years in the People's Republic of China was keenly received, assuming always that the correspondent had earned his stripes in his time in the country. Today, with the shelves groaning with China books, the reader is entitled to discriminate.

Evan Osnos, who covered China for seven years, first for the Chicago Tribune and then reporting for the New Yorker, certainly counts as correspondent royalty. The prestige of his current employer helps, of course, but perhaps more important, the generous space the magazine allows celebrates the stuff that the constraints of daily journalism tend to filter out: the quirky, the colourful, the sideways look, the illumination of the general through a detailed journey around a small particular.

It is in this that Osnos excels. Observing China's passage through a revolution as profound as Mao Zedong's upheavals, one that has overturned everything from attachment to place to family structures, from the shackles of the collective to the prison of material shortages, Osnos gently documents the dizzying effects on ordinary citizens, many of whom seem to be trying to navigate a tempest without a compass, or even a tiller.

Osnos quietly accompanies and befriends, probing to understand the world as these storm-battered travellers see it. He joins a Chinese tour group, for instance, on a bizarre high-speed bus trip that covers five European countries in 10 days, beginning with 11 minutes in front of Karl Marx's former home in Trier. To join the tour, his travelling companions had each posted a bond of $7,600, a hedge against defections, and the eccentric route – through Germany, Luxembourg, Paris and Italy, hectored all the way by their indefatigable guide – was dictated by the availability of cheap flights.

They were pioneers in their way: the newly prosperous middle class, curious about the world but not yet ready to tackle it alone. Back home, others struggled to earn more than a precarious day-to-day living: in Osnos's traditional Beijing neighbourhood, one of the few to survive the redevelopers' zeal, micro-businesses selling snacks, fast food or forlorn sex opened and closed with bewildering speed. Ideas and skills were chased down and consumed with equal frenzy; how-to-succeed advice flew off the bookshelves, eye-watering fortunes were made in record time, and suddenly-rich heroes crash-landed with equal force. Welcome to the rising China.

The fever to learn English, gateway to business success, made a national celebrity out of 38-year-old Li Yang, whose "Crazy English" courses resembled frenzied cult assemblies. One of Li's many followers, Michael Zhang, a 23-year-old small town boy, dreamed forlornly of emulating his success.

Osnos probes the waves of anxiety and national self-examination provoked by such episodes as the high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in 2011 or the terrible death of the toddler YueYue, hit by a van, left to suffer unattended in the road and run over by another vehicle, to the general indifference of multiple witnesses. Osnos's China is caught between high assertiveness and persistent doubt, groping for something to believe in beyond money.

For readers who have not experienced the drama and confusions of China's last three decades, there is much to learn and marvel at here. For those who have followed China more closely, many of the portraits will seem like a more familiar reworking of episodes from a reporter's notebook, without a great effort to shape them into something larger.

The story of Ai Weiwei at this point, for instance, can yield few surprises. The Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, the celebrity blogger Han Han, the editor Hu Shuli and the economist Lin Yifu are, by now, close to stock characters in the contemporary Chinese landscape. On the other hand, there are some surprising gaps, perhaps reflecting moments when the reporter's attention was elsewhere. Osnos mentions, for instance, a protest against a proposed chemical plant in the southern city of Xiamen in 2007, dismissing it with the suggestion that the dispute lasted only a few days: in fact it lasted at least six months in various forms, before the authorities finally caved in, and the success of the Xiamen protest stimulated a continuing wave of large public protests across China that have forced the cancellation of major projects worth billions of pounds and become an important preoccupation for Beijing.

Also puzzling is the short shrift accorded to one of the most dramatic, colourful and illuminating recent episodes in China: the murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood by the wife of Chongqing's party secretary and Politburo member Bo Xilai, and the subsequent disgrace and trials of both. The story had everything: elite politicians behaving like mafiosi, a police chief in a high-speed dash for asylum in the US consulate, and, most important, the background to the episode – the savage struggle for a place in the leadership group that finally came to power in 2013. It would have been good to read Osnos at some length on all this, but he devotes barely three pages to the whole episode.

For a better understanding of China's elite politics – how power is won and exercised – Kerry Brown's The New Emperors is a rare example of informed, forensic inquiry. Explaining China's power structures is not easy: a combination of obsessive secrecy and misleading symbolic politics masks the relationships, processes and personalities at the heart of China's governing machine. When the leadership changes, commentators tend to inspect their sparse tealeaves, conjuring responses to questions routinely asked in democratic politics: who are the new leaders? What do they think? What do they plan to do? Are they any different from those they displace? In the absence of evidence, many misleading claims are made, false expectations raised, and theories of factional relationships built on fragile foundations.

Kerry Brown offers a sober and well-informed antidote to the overdose of repeated non-truths and half-truths that often pass for analysis of Chinese politics. He methodically maps what is known about the seven member of the current Politburo Standing Committee, and seeks to understand how they – and not any number of contending candidates – emerged as the supreme power holders in a country of 1.4bn. Along the way we learn of the staggering fortunes, colourful mistresses and family traumas that populate China's power map. Brown unpicks the mind-numbing complexity of China's power game, riven as it is by competing interests, regional and factional loyalties, and the pursuit of the pharaonic wealth that is the prize for the few who make it. He makes no claim to offer a definitive account, but any understanding must begin with acknowledging what is not known. For what we can know, The New Emperors is an essential read.