Former US president Richard Nixon, who resigned in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, was born to a poor family and made it to his country’s top office, having trained as a lawyer, largely by dint of his own hard work.
In his address accepting his first presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 28, 1960, having already served for eight years as vice president, he said: “I believe in the American dream because I’ve seen it come true in my own life.”
There is no specific definition of what the “American dream” actually is, but over the years it has come to be understood as the aspirations of the ordinary person, wherever they are from, to get ahead in the US armed only with freedom, opportunities and their achievements. Anybody in the US, so the idea goes, has the opportunity to develop as they please, to establish their own family from modest beginnings, and to move from rags to riches within three generations.
Meanwhile, new Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has recently burst onto the scene, with Beijing’s propaganda machine taking out adverts in the Washington Post proclaiming Xi’s concept of the “Chinese dream.” This new construct, purporting to place the people and the country at its very core, is the work of dictators sitting in China’s capital, forcing their own conception of a dream onto the public.
The Chinese dream of the princelings political elite is but a rehash of the motto of modernizers in the late Qing Dynasty — “make the country wealthy and the military powerful” (富國強兵) — albeit without explicitly using the word “military.” Xi’s “resurgence of the Chinese people” (中華民族的復興) retains traces of Republic of China (ROC) founder Sun Yat-sen’s (孫中山) motto “expel the foreigners [referring to the Manchu Qing rulers] and resurrect the Chinese nation” (驅逐韃虜，恢復中華): It is just that now the Manchu are no longer the foreigners in question, and Han Chinese ethnic chauvinism is now aimed at suppressing Tibetans and Uighurs instead.
The Chinese dream is also about “benefiting the people, although the people themselves were clearly an afterthought, an appendage to, not of, the main corpus. Nowhere in Xi’s dream suite will you find anything approaching freedom or democracy. The realization of Xi’s dream lies down the road of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Indeed, it is reminiscent of the controlled reform advocated by the late Qing politician Zhang Zhidong (張之洞), with his concept of “Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application.”
The rich and powerful revel in plenty, while saying that they will create a dream for the masses. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Chinese elite, the business magnates and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who have sent their families abroad are competing with each other in search of their own American dream. The 1.3 billion people living in China are having their life spans shortened because of the polluted air they breathe; Tibetans are resorting to self-immolations to draw attention to the plight they suffer because of Beijing’s policies; the Huangpu River is clogged with tens of thousands of pig corpses; and Chinese are obliged to cross the border into Hong Kong to buy baby milk powder they can trust not to poison their children.
One Chinese netizen has said that their own dream is quite simple, and different from that being offered. They just want blue skies, clean water, food that is safe to eat, milk that is safe to drink and for their children to grow up in a fair and just society.
James Wang is a political commentator.
Translated by Paul Cooper
On Sept. 3 in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rolled out a parade of new weapons in PLA service that threaten Taiwan — some of that Taiwan is addressing with added and new military investments and some of which it cannot, having to rely on the initiative of allies like the United States. The CCP’s goal of replacing US leadership on the global stage was advanced by the military parade, but also by China hosting in Tianjin an August 31-Sept. 1 summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which since 2001 has specialized
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
RSS