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The Chinese dream
Print Edition
Editor’s Note:
When Chinese President Xi Jinping urged the nation to pursue the “Chinese Dream,” he triggered a public dialogue about people’s expectations and how they are fulfilled. Shanghai Daily is running a weekly series exploring the dream theme.
Dreams inspire and propel us. Philosophers, politicians, writers and musicians have been saying so for centuries.
“Hope is a waking dream,” Aristotle once wrote. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” John Lennon famously sang, and Shakespeare observed that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech became the catchphrase of the American civil rights movement, and Walt Disney built an empire by creating dream worlds.
US presidents are fond of evoking the “American Dream” concept to convince people that they control their own destinies. Last November, Chinese President Xi Jinping sounded a similar theme when he talked about the “Chinese Dream,” or zhongguo meng (ÖйúÃÎ). He said it means pursuing “economic prosperity, national rejuvenation and public well-being.”
“It’s not about a definition, but more about universality,” Thorsten Pattberg, a doctor of letters and research fellow at Peking University, said of Xi’s concept. “You, I and everyone have dreams. The question becomes: Can you fulfill your dreams in China and not elsewhere?”
Yang Guozhu, 47, a migrant construction worker, might not look at his life in quite such lofty terms, but he exemplifies millions of Chinese who dream of a better tomorrow.
Yang and three fellow laborers recently built a backyard house in Shanghai’s downtown Jing’an District for a client in just two days.
“One day, I want to go back to my hometown, open my own construction company and build houses for villagers,” says Yang, who hails from the underdeveloped border area of Jiangsu and Anhui provinces. “I’ve worked in many places in China, and as I started getting more work and more pay, I also started hearing about other construction workers, some from villages close to mine, who had made it. And I realized, I could also dream — in other words, set a goal.”
There’s a downside to dreams, of course. Not all of them come true. Indeed, meng in Chinese doesn’t quite mean the same as “dream” in English. It usually refers to something that can’t actually happen in real life. Ancient Chinese tales often tell the story of someone encountering something unbelievably wonderful and then suddenly awakening to find it was only a dream.
There’s an old story often repeated by Chinese called “Nan Ke Yi Meng.” It tells the tale of a man who gets a plum job as head of a local area, gets married, has children, wins a promotion and lives happily ever after. Then he wakes up to find it was all just a dream.
Chinese, especially the older generations, often prefer to envision their lives in terms of goals, not dreams. That’s the pragmatic views, honed during decades of hard times and little hope.
“You are lucky, young woman, to dream your dreams,” says Zhang Suiqing, 65, a retired engineer. “My generation didn’t have that option. In our day, once you graduated from school, you were assigned a job and expected to stay there your entire life. I really loved painting, but my parents and my teachers told me the country needed engineers, not artists. Dreams were only dreams. Nothing more.”
Zhang does admit that things in China have changed a lot as the country modernized.
“Nowadays, people have all these wild dreams,” he says. “My son graduated with a degree in engineering, but he wanted to be a rocker, so now he is organizing rock concerts. He even met his wife at a concert. How crazy is that!”
Pressed a bit, Zhang does admit he now has dreams. He would like to go on a trip abroad every year and to write a book about his parents before he dies.
“I would have never thought of that before,” he admits. “In my day, only extremely well-established writers could publish books, but an old friend just self-published a memoir, and that inspired me.”
Oscar Hammerstein’s famous lyric — “If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make a dream come true?” — doesn’t make any distinction between dreams that are realistic and dreams that are castles in the sky.
Alan Gao, 26, has discovered how dreams can have hard landings. He quit his job three years ago and borrowed money from his parents to start a business designing T-shirts for sale online. The money evaporated in production and marketing costs, and he has managed to only sell 30 shirts.
Despite debts still owed to his family, Gao refuses to admit defeat.
“I’ve learned from my mistakes,” he says brightly. “It wasn’t the fault of my designs but my lack of business skills. One day, I’ll have my own chain of shops in Shanghai, Beijing, New York, Paris, Tokyo and London — all the most hip places in the world.”
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