How Will the Chinese Dream be Reconciled With America’s?

Only when hunger has been defeated, can aspirations become dreams. A country that has known the deprivations of malnutrition cannot allow itself to dream; it must concentrate all its energy on survival. But if it is able to satisfy its citizen’s daily needs and also be a force on the international playing field, it has the chance of a bright future full of ambition and success. This is the case in China, where political debate has been gravitating around the “Chinese Dream,” a pronunciation made last November by the newly elected Secretary of the CCP, Xi Jinping. The prospect of creating a Chinese Dream has been established repeatedly. The propaganda machine has been beating the slogan like a bass drum, and it is now the dominant mantra, appearing in popular songs, student papers, and academic debates. Some have even proposed the Chinese character for “dream” to be the ideogram of the year for 2012. On the contrary, buzzwords used by previous Chinese leaders were full of political implications and used to justify ideological turning points, to guide economic development, and to ensure social cohesion. This time the direction is different, more prosaic and abstract. It speaks to individuals and their families, harking back to the great popular manifestation that was the 2008 Olympics, whose slogan was in fact “One World, One Dream.” Now they can aim for a higher quality of life, along the lines of the post-WWII “American Dream.” Whereas the American Dream was well defined – and distributed widely to the collective imagination of the entire world via thousands of Hollywood films – the Chinese Dream is yet to be defined. Xi did not delineate a roadmap, or the methods or resources to achieve this dream. He has left his vision to be deciphered via a series of speeches and interviews that have as yet failed to become a formal program. The adjectives used to qualify this dream have so far been predictable: strong, free, rich, harmonious, respected. It is likely that a document will soon detail the objectives of a more ambitious society, able to satisfy the shared aspirations of its citizens: a home, education, employment, and rights. To some it may seem like a search for normality, to make amends for the problems that have scarred China’s development: from environmental violations to the rejection of a multi-party political system, from corruption to income inequality. As the country waits for the results, it is the military to welcome the new ideal. For them, the Chinese Dream is identified through nationalism, and therefore a globally respected China. One is immediately reminded of the past, to a time before the Opium War of 1840 and the beginning of the Century of Humiliation. At that time, China had the world’s biggest economy, and only military unpreparedness – according to the hawks in Beijing – allowed the country to be invaded by foreign powers and supremacy to be lost. If this imposition prevails, the Chinese Dream will be set on a collision course with the American one, as it will challenge the Pax Americana that currently rules Eastern Asia. Caution and patience prevail for now, with the hope that tensions will leave room for aspirations. Not by coincidence did US Secretary of State John Kerry affirm that the Chinese and American dreams are universal in his recent speech in Tokyo, and they can both be extended into a more collective and reassuring “Pacific Dream.”