The Chinese Dream: the re-branding of China--a perspective from Canada
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E-mail China.org.cn, December 5, 2013
--Dr. Howard Aster, Publisher, Mosaic Press, Canada
Every society must have some sustaining myth. Every society must have its own narrative. Every society must have its own story. Every society must have its own culture.
While these statements are in some sense obvious, they are most complicated in the 21st century for a number of reasons. First, our new century exists in the context of globalization. No society is an entity unto itself. Second, in this age of globalized communications is rampant and intensive. What may seem to be local becomes global quite quickly. Third, interconnections exist not just in an economic sense, but also in a deeply personal sense. Social media have connected people in new and potent ways. Fourth, globalization affects culture very deeply. Material reality and globalized communications mean that there is now a dominating global consumer culture. Marx said, we are what we eat. But today, it is not just what we eat that is global, we also dress alike, we tweet alike, we entertain ourselves alike, we may even think alike.
The challenge for any society is how to sustain distinctiveness in the context of such enormous global 'alike-ness'. Every society faces this challenge.
The answer is that we try to sustain distinctiveness by crafting our own social narratives, by our own story-telling. It is the task of great political leaders to provide people with the clues, the language, the images which define their distinctiveness. Political legitimacy and successful authority now are very much tied to our leaders' abilities to craft their own distinctive narratives. Our Canadian Prime Minister tries to do so, President Obama in the U.S., President Putin in Russia, President Hassan Rohani in Iran…everywhere the task of leadership is similar.
The new narrative now being crafted in China - "the Chinese Dream" - must be understood as a contemporary effort by the new Chinese leadership to define and propel a distinctive and convincing narrative so that people will recognize it internally and that it is persuasive internationally.
What makes the new narrative of China so unusual is that over the past six or seven decades, the Chinese narrative has changed quite quickly and profoundly. Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiao Ping, the Chinese economic miracle, have all provided the Chinese people and the world with a succession of different and often, conflicting narratives.
Can this new effort at defining the new Chinese narrative be compelling? How should the world view this narrative? How can we both understand and absorb this new narrative? How to make the "Chinese Dream" convincing?
My paper will attempt to provide a somewhat novel perspective on this question. I will present a thesis which is premised upon a book my colleague and I published recently, also published in China, Affinity – Beyond Branding.
Every person has a personality which is their own. While we all share some human attributes, we are distinctive. That provides people with a way to recognize others. Every successful company not only tries to produce a product, but today, the search for a distinctive personality, a brand, is a major impulse towards success in a competitive marketplace. Leaders in the global marketplace think 'brand' and often continuing success is based upon the ability to 're-brand' themselves. General Motors today is an example. Likewise nations in the 21st century must continuously attempt to 'brand' or 're-brand' themselves.
The "Chinese Dream" is best interpreted as an attempt to 're-brand' China for the 21st century.
My paper will explore the complexity of this statement and assess some of its implications.
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