The Chinese dream is not the same for all Chinese
The "Chinese Dream" became a buzzword following Xi Jinping's appointment last November to China's three top positions as head of state, head of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) and head of the military. He will likely lead China for a decade.
“What exactly is the Chinese Dream?” I asked CPC officials when I was in China recently, and they invariably give me the official version. So I decided to ask elsewhere. While in Shenzhen, I asked an undergraduate. “Only the rich and powerful can dream,” she replied candidly.
Like many living in this vibrant showcase of China’s economic miracle carved out of what was previously a poor fishing village of 30,000, she’s not a native but came here with her parents from central China.
The property boom in this city of 10 million just next to Hong Kong has made owning an apartment beyond her wildest dreams. She dreads the prospect of either living with her parents all the time or living in shared rooms or apartments all her life.
“My dream is to do my master’s degree overseas and then emigrate,” she said. “But it’s not easy to get away now,” she added.
Still, Shenzhen is a place for the young to realise their dreams, pointed out a senior CPC official I met. The city is made up of young people like her. Those with the right skills can command salaries much higher than those in Beijing, he said.
In Ba Bao Tang village in Huairou district in Beijing, three hours drive away, I met the local CPC chief, Wang Fengsen.
The village is a success story. Previously they were poor and the area was subject to rock falls and landslides until the local government decided to relocate them and transform it into an eco-tourism project with farmhouse homestay. Wang’s income has doubled from 10,000 yuan (US$1,631) in six years since the project started. His dream is that his tiny village will be rich and perhaps have a five-star hotel.
His neighbour, Xu Zhanzhong, 79, also a farmer, and who runs a farmhouse like him, is better off, earning ten times more than previously. He hopes to move to Beijing to have a taste of city living, but his dream is that there will be harmony in his family of five.
Our proficient interpreter, Stephanie Hu, a graduate from the famed Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, dreams of becoming accomplished in her job and good enough to interpret at the United Nations level. She has not thought of emigrating. Both her parents are college professors in languages.
Back in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Autonomous Region in the south, I tried photographing an old hawker selling lychees, but she scolded me, “No, no, no, we are poor people, don’t photograph me?” I guess the poor want to be left alone.
But can the poor have their Chinese Dream I asked Guo Weimin, director-general of the news department of the State Council Information Office in Beijing
“Of course, the Chinese Dream can be shared by all the Chinese people, no matter who they are,” he replied. “We have created conditions for young people [like the student who is dreaming of emigrating] to realise their dreams,” he added.
But is the Chinese Dream mere political rhetoric? Yang Bao, a professor at the China Centre for Economic Research and National School of Development at the prestigious Peking University, seems to think so. “China is very complex, I don’t see any paradigm shift and I am not sure it [the rhetoric] is going to last,” he said.
But CPC official Gao Yonghong at the party’s History and Research Centre, brushed the professor aside, saying, “That’s his personal opinion. There is freedom of speech in China for him to say that.”
It was triple Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman who coined the term “Chinese Dream” in his article in the New York Times, although he credited Peggy Liu and the environmental NGO JUCCCE’s China Dream project, which defines the Chinese Dream as sustainable development.
Friedman said China needed its own dream and not a dream forced on it by Americans or Europeans.
President Xi Jinping is reported as saying that achieving the great revival of the Chinese nation was the greatest dream of the Chinese people in modern times. In the wake of his recent summit with President Barack Obama in the US, China sent three astronauts operating the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft on a mission which seeks a permanent space station around 2020.
He said at the launch site that the crew carry a “space dream” of the Chinese nation and represent the lofty aspirations of the Chinese people to explore space.
Now that’s matching the American space dream.
