--James Peck, Publisher, US-China Book Design Press

Theme: The greatest single difference between the American and the emerging Chinese Dream is that the American speaks of its universal validity as the model for all peoples, while the Chinese Dream suggests that each nation needs to find its own ways of envisioning its future. In an emerging multi-polar world, this Chinese orientation may well prove more suitable than the American. My comments explore aspects of why this is so.

First a comment about the "American Dream."

The phrase "American Dream" is relatively new. It was first popularized in the 1930s during the depths of the Great Depression. What it initially meant is profoundly different from the universalistic vision advocated by Washington since 1945. Its original proponents saw the American Dream as seeking to overcome a "business civilization" that was subordinating everything to the dictates of profit and the marketplace, a rapaciousness that was destroying the environment, and an obsession with bigness that had turned its back on the need for greater equality and basic human needs. To its first exponent (whose ancestors included two U.S. Presidents) the US was becoming "a system that steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich, one that permits the resources of society to be gathered into personal fortunes that afford their owners millions of income a year. This is assuredly a wasteful and unjust system as inimical as anything could be to the American Dream." A higher level of communal life and equality was imperative; wealth had to be more equitably controlled in the interests of society. Incessant invocations of "individual freedom" stripped of nourishing community contexts was producing a rootless, selfish individualism.

This America Dream was not about changing the world into an image of America, but about changing America. The fact that journalists like Edgar Snow came out of this tradition explains much about their empathetic and open attitude to the Chinese revolution in the 1930s and 1940s. The great black American leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have A Dream Speech" offers another later angle into the Dream -- combining as it does a searing critique of the injustices of American society with an impassioned vision of a truly equitable and peaceful America that has yet to emerge.

But this is not the American dream the world largely sees today. America's emergence as a superpower after 1945 required something quite different – a more simplified, distorted, and ideological export product for Washington's "war of ideas." This official American Dream has been part of Washington's ideological arsenal for over six decades. Such an idealized universalism by and large has worked, as it was designed to do by leaders in the national security establishment, to polarize, divide, and turn against each other key aspects of humanity's progressive traditions both within the US and abroad. It has divided needs and rights, individual and collective interests, reform and revolution, equality and freedom. This current Dream is centered on the notions of "individual freedom" and the inalienable right to pursue one's own interests for prosperity and success. There is merit in such notions, of course, but focusing the Dream around them has made it at the core a harsh, highly useful propaganda weapon, as is evident in a 2004 Defense Department study of "strategic communication." To wit, "We must communicate what our definition for the future promises in individual terms, not national or pan-national religious terms. We should personalize the benefits of our defined future. For example, personal control, choice and change, personal mobility, meritocracy, individual rights (and particularly women's rights). And we must draw a stark difference between support and opposition along these personal lines…"

This is far from where the language of the American Dream started in the 1930s, but it is what the world by and large understands the American Dream to be today. Remembering this contrast is suggestive, for the earlier, more vibrant, compassionate, and complex American dream (which was very much what President Roosevelt's New Deal was about) was very much a national, not a universal, one.

So what thoughts does this bring to mind when considering both the Chinese Dream and the current American Dream today?

First, national dreams can indeed reflect a profound need for people struggling to better their society in their own way and within their own particular historical contexts. Dreams of course are not blueprints; but they can offer a sense of direction, hope, a vision amidst the incredibly demanding task of building more just and ecologically viable societies. The discussions about a Chinese Dream are suggestive of such possibilities today.

Second, the universalistic vision of the American Dream offers a stark warning about the corrupting influences of the quest for global supremacy on what is best in a nation's traditions. A nation can become a great power with a central global role without seeking to change others into versions of itself. Even as China's power increases, the Chinese Dream has the opportunity to be open to an evolving multi-cultural world in quite different ways than the current American Dream.

Third, unlike the American Dream, the Chinese underscores the notion that no one country is a model for humanity; none encompasses all of its accomplishments. This, too, if stayed faithful to, would be a valuable contribution to a more dynamic multi-polar world, for there is perhaps no greater human vanity than the belief that one's own values have universal validity – and no greater folly than the attempt to impose the preference of a single society on an unwilling world.

Fourth, discussions surrounding the Chinese Dream suggest the potential for an insightful and empathetic understanding of the unjustness of the global order and the obstacles it poses to humane development. America's great wealth and its particular historical development have allowed for considerable individual freedom while manifesting considerable amnesia about the methods used to achieve and sustain it. "American universalism," the late Senator J. William Fulbright often said, was predicated upon Americans "never remembering what others tend to never forget." The Chinese Dream at its most promising is rooted in not forgetting -- and this can offer a much needed sense of history and proportion.

Fifth, in our emerging multipolar world there remains all too little insight into how to combine economic and political democracy, individualism and collective needs; how to effectively deal with unjust concentrations of wealth and power and rising levels of inequality within and among nations. The American Dream has largely failed to do so, and its current formulation works against others doing so as well. That a Chinese Dream might effectively confront such issues and in so doing offer an alternative vision of a just society is a hope not to be lightly dismissed.

Sixth, though we live in a globalizing world, this does not require a globalized, standardized, and homogenized vision of humanity. The Chinese Dream certainly speaks to this. Here perhaps we touch on what is most enigmatic in man's historical experience – that we can speak of humanity but nowhere, in fact, can we convincingly discover a universal ethos. Humanity has played out its destiny in a diversity of languages, a diversity of moral experiences, and a diversity of spiritualties and religions. Humanity in this sense is irreducibly plural. On the technical and scientific level it is relatively easy to communicate; much about popular culture is easily shared. And certainly the problems we must somehow face together are frighteningly many. But on the deeper level of historical creation, diverse civilizations need to communicate with each other with nuance and an appreciation that cultural differences are a constant source of enrichment for humanity. The model of the translation of one language into another perhaps suggests aspects of what is involved. For the possibility of translation, arduous and complex as it is, both acknowledges the profound plurality which exists while certifying that humanity, in its depth, is one. Given its cultural density and enduring civilization, the Chinese Dream has the opportunity to encompass such an appreciation of humanity's variety more than the homogenizing globalization often seen as central to the American dream of "one world" today.

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