MCLC: China Dreams and the Road to Revival

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China Dreams and the Road to Revival
I wrote this piece, for a general audience, about Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” and the Road to Revival exhibit at the National Museum of China. Hope it doesn’t insult your collective intelligence too much.
Kirk
Source: Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 8, no. 3 (Dec. 2014)
China Dreams and the “Road to Revival”
By Kirk A. Denton
Editor’s Note:
If the 20th century was “The American Century,” then plenty of commentators have announced that the 21st century will belong to China. And just as the American Century was built around the myth of the “American Dream,” Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has offered Chinese people the “China Dream.” But as China expert Kirk Denton explores this month, the China Dream is not just a vision for the future, but a thorough re-writing of the Chinese past.
The China Dream
On November 29, 2012, newly appointed General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping gave a speech that would become a signature moment in his young leadership.
Later known as his “China Dream” speech, it proposed that the fulfillment of the dreams of individual citizens is bound to China’s development as a nation, and that personal dreams will be realized only through the revival of the Chinese people as a whole.
In an oft-quoted sentence from a later version of the China Dream speech, Xi said: “China Dream means the dream of a people, and it is also the dreams of each Chinese person.”
Although the term had already entered popular use before Xi’s speech, “China Dream” has since become a lynchpin in Xi’s ideological platform. On November 30, the official party organ, People’s Daily, printed a laudatory editorial and excerpts.
One of many China Dream propaganda posters. The text reads: “China Dream, Great Dragon Soars.”
Bit by bit, “China Dream” has come to saturate the mass media in China: propaganda posters like the one pictured here have popped up everywhere on the streets of Chinese cities and on the Internet to echo Xi’s speech; a “My China Dream” university student conference was held in August of 2013; “The Sounds of China Dream,” a new American Idol–style singing competition, can be heard on Dragon TV; and state-sponsored websites devoted to the China Dream litter the Internet. The official Chinese Writers Association sponsors an online collection of songs and poems dedicated to the China Dream.
In later speeches, Xi expounded on what he meant by “China Dream,” and scholars and pundits explicated its finer points in a rash of academic books and in party theoretical journals such as Qiushi.
Xi Jinping has made “China Dream” the ideological core of his administration, just as Mao Zedong had “class struggle,” Deng Xiaoping the “four modernizations” Jiang Zemin the“three represents” and Hu Jintao the “harmonious society.” ”China Dream” both carves out a niche for Xi in the ideological lineage of Communist leadership and defines his image and political program for the Chinese public in today’s capitalist China.
>From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, China has transformed dramatically from a socialist planned economy to an economy that is effectively capitalist, though official rhetoric calls it “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or the “socialist market economy.”
Some have likened the new Chinese economy to Western “neoliberal” economies with their deregulation, free trade, marketization, privatization, free flow of global capital, and commodification. Whatever one labels them, these economic changes have been liberating for some Chinese, traumatic for others.
The China Dream has emerged at a time when, as a consequence of these reforms, the state exerts far less influence on the daily lives of people than at any time in the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Most visibly on the Internet, Chinese now express new forms of social identity and social interaction that would have been unthinkable in the rigid moralistic climate of Mao-era collectivism. They also enunciate a broad range of sentiments toward the government and its economic program—from outright contempt, to cynicism, to gratitude.
To view the full essay, click here.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 17, 2014
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