China’s Many Dreams

Since the change at the top level of the Chinese leadership in 2012–13 the idea of a China Dream (Zhongguo Meng) has been strongly promoted in the media, policy and academic commentaries, and in public areas across China in what has become a major ideological campaign.¹ Understanding the China Dream, its components, motivations and consequences has particular importance, of course, because of the relationship between China change and international change —the Dream is not only about the change experienced by Chinese people but the world’s experience of a changing China.² The China Dream idea is not entirely new but the way it has been defined and advanced by the new leadership, headed by General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping, suggests it is more than the desire of an incoming administration to have a strong narrative for its period in office but also a new phase in China’s modernization and internationalization. Since Xi is seen as the principal architect of the official version of the Dream it is worth considering his understanding of the term. On 28 November 2012 Xi and the other members of the standing committee of the Politburo of the CCP visited the Road to Revival exhibition in Beijing.

After he took over as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and as Chairman of the Central Military Commission in November 2012, Xi Jinping articulated for the first time ‘the China dream’ at ‘the road to revival’ exhibition at the National Museum in Beijing. As he did so he stressed that since the start of the reform period China had finally found the way to restore the greatness of the country and it was called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.¹ What Xi has revealed is not a new political system or even a new term to describe it. It is a confidence in the existing political system which, despite all its faults, he now believes is sufficiently strong, effective and robust to deliver the national revival encapsulated in his ‘China dream’. The nature of the system that Xi loosely refers to, in line with the long-standing usage after the end of the Mao Zedong era, as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ gets clearer if it is set within the analytical framework of consultative Leninism.

Chinese society has changed far more radically in the last 30 years than the Chinese system of government. There are many consequences to this lack of correlation between social and political change but one evident outcome is the widening of the governance gap. All political systems must aim to match the capacities and activities of government to the values and expectations of populations, not least because a failure to do so will lead to public alienation and in extreme conditions to public rejection of government. Therefore while all governments may experience a governance gap of some kind one of the main tasks of government is to convince populations that the government is aware of the governance gap, that it is mobilizing to deal with the gap, and that it has a determination not to let the gap widen to the point where it becomes a major issue of competence and legitimacy. Much of the rhetoric and activity of the Hu Jintao—Wen Jiabao administrations in China, 2003–13, showed the Chinese government’s awareness of this politics.¹

President Xi Jinping’s China Dream is the ‘renewal of the Chinese nation’ to become a ‘strong and prosperous nation’ (fuqing daguo).¹ This chapter will analyse China Dreams as acts of identity articulation to chart China’s (inter)national identity. It analyses China’s ethnic minority policy debates which centre on arguments about whether China should be a multi-ethnic state or a mono-ethnic nation-state. The increasingly contested relationship between ethnicity and nation is central to understanding how China’s leading thinkers articulate who is China and how the answer will either propel or bring an end to China’s rise. The chapter then explores how these different ethnic futures are deeply intertwined with predictions about China’s position in international politics. The China Dream thus becomes a way to chart the future of China’s domestic and international politics and a means to narrate who is China at home and abroad. William A. Callahan² has shown how Chinese exceptionalism is increasingly popular amongst political elites and public intellectuals in China. The military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq alongside the 2008 financial crisis have led to a perception amongst Chinese thinkers such as Hu Angang³ and Zhang Weiwei⁴ that the soft power of the United States is declining and China’s is concomitantly rising.

In the economic history literature, there has been a long debate on how to generate and nurture modern growth in a premodern society with a list of influential authors who have devoted their time and energy contemplating ways to conduct social changes to accommodate modern growth in a premodern society.¹ This is because industrialization-cum-modern growth only ever occurred ‘naturally’ once in England during the eighteenth century. In other words, modern growth was historically highly conditional and occasional. For the rest of the world, China included, it was a learning process. If so, it was a matter of (1) how much resistance to change from the Weberian notion of culture and values,² (2) whether the elite wanted to have modern growth and (3) whether the elite were able to create and manipulate indigenous socio-economic conditions to allow modern growth to take root and reach maturity and so on. Empirically, many societies have tried to generate and nurture industrialization through reverse engineering. Good examples are twentieth-century Soviet Union, Japan and the Asian Tigers as well as nineteenth-century United States and Germany. Evidence shows that as early as circa 1800 learning from the outside world—Western Europe, the Soviet Union and the Asian Tigers—become obvious among the Chinese elite.

On 31 December 2013 Xi Jinping made his first New Year speech after becoming the new President of China in March 2013. In the speech he reiterated the importance of the ‘quest for the dream of the road to rejuvenate China’s previous glory’.² While many people may have different interpretations of the exact meaning of the ‘Chinese Dream’, it is undeniable that it will be a tall order for China to realize this dream. Considering the enormous problems China is facing at present, the Olympic Games held in Beijing in 2008 and the Expo held in Shanghai in 2010 can be viewed as more like the preamble of the ‘free association’ for understanding the real messages behind the dream. More importantly, how to reconcile the political notion of the Chinese Dream and the connotation of the new reform momentum is the real test to understand the challenges that China faces and the assessment of Xi’s ability. The enormous personal wealth generated by more than 30 years of economic reform in China and finding ways in which to redistribute this wealth to the weak and needy is one of the areas that have to be resolved.

Despite the fact that the idea of ‘science’ has always been associated with China’s modernization, it was not until 1978 that science was for the first time recognized not as an ideology, but as a ‘production force’ which would lead to a better future.¹ Since then, China’s every stride towards international excellence in science has been supported by at least three key elements: (1) centralized decision-making, (2) generous but selective state investment, and (3) a regulatory ethos of what I term ‘ post-hoc pragmatism’, which underlines both application-oriented agenda setting and permissive regulation.²

One way of considering the stunning transformation China has undergone is to look at the plight of Confucius over the past century. ‘Smash Confucianism’ was a common slogan of the May Fourth Movement, in which Chinese demonstrated against not only foreign powers but also the weakness of its own government which consistently caved in to them. The rationale behind the anti-Confucian movement could be found in the reformers’ iconoclastic drive to rid China from the traditions which were seen as holding it back from modernity. Later, Mao, in his 1940 essay ‘On New Democracy’, made clear his opposition to the ‘worship’ and study of Confucius, a hostility which culminated during the Cultural Revolution in various campaigns to destroy Confucian symbols, criticize ‘old’ cultural institutions, and question figures of authority — a habit forbidden under the Confucian value of filial piety.¹

At all times and in all countries the primary content of politics, or at least the content that has long drawn the most intensive attention from historians and observers of political affairs, is the struggle and conflict for power, with conflicts of interests, wills and passions as its essential driving forces. For this reason, politics often entails violent conflict or its potentiality and because of this critical mechanism embedded in the internal and external affairs of human polities, strategy directly aimed at preparing or conducting organized large-scale violent conflict — that is strategy in its original or narrow sense — has often accompanied national politics. At the same time, the politically organized human community has always been both civil and military in combination, with civil affairs having diplomacy as one of the important components in the conduct of foreign relations. Over time, both the strategy and diplomacy of a country could develop their respective traditions. At a much profounder level, the relationship between the strategic and diplomatic traditions of any country is such that they reflect in a mutually complementary way the characteristics and political culture of a particular people or national state, and together constitute the common foundation of its international relations. In regard to these traditions, the most fundamental questions we should ask are: Whose traditions are these?

China has always been a very special country in international society. It is an old civilization, but it is also a relative newcomer to the Western-dominated international society of sovereign states. China did not enjoy full recognition and membership in the Family of Nations until 1943 when extraterritorial jurisdiction was finally abrogated through its treaties with the US and Great Britain. Therefore, China’s relationship with international society has always been a big issue in Chinese foreign relations ever since the mid-nineteenth century when China was forced by the West to open its doors.¹ The rise of China at the beginning of the twenty-first century is becoming a big story and sometimes a subject of concern in the international society. Thus the relationship between China and the world is one of the key issues of our era.² Some analysts seem worried that rising China might be a challenger, or even an alternative, to the West in international society.³ In this essay, I am not going to elaborate on every aspect of rising China’s relationship with international society, but focus on two related questions, namely: Is the so-called China Dream advocated by the new Chinese leadership of Xi Jinping a new Chinese Way in international society? Will this new Chinese Way seek to alter the norms or institutions of the still Western-dominated international society?

The contours of the China Dream are not that hard to define. The Dream sets objectives and means for China’s revival and provides an interim assessment of where China is in its search for rejuvenation. As to the objectives of the Dream, these are cased within a grand historical narrative. Weida fuxing (great rejuvenation) points to the glory of China’s past but also provides a narrative of how this glory was lost or stolen between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Dream points to China’s trajectory from an undesired and unchosen history in the era of loss to a desired and chosen future that has become possible with the successes of the current Republic. The Dream is therefore about accomplishments gained and accomplishments still to be achieved. As to the means, Xi’s choice of three is notable. In his 38 character statement he defines the essential components of China’s revival:

实现中国梦必须走中国道路

实现中国梦必须弘扬中国精神

实现中国梦必须凝聚中国力量

To realize the China Dream we must keep to the Chinese way

To realize the China Dream we must advance the Chinese spirit

To realize the China Dream we must consolidate Chinese power¹