--By Lionel Vairon, CEO, CEC Consulting; former French Diplomat

China and many foreign observers have been discussing for about a year now the concept of “Chinese dream” officialized this year by President Xi Jinping. Most debates raise the issue of what Chinese people dream of and how their dreams could be fulfilled through a new era of reforms that were decided by the last Congress of the Party’s Plenum early November. Yet a focus should be put as well on the “Dream of China”, meaning how do the whole world look at China today and China’s rise and how China could stimulate a Dream of China like so many people around the world have dreamed about the United States despite all its mistakes and shortcomings. All major powers in the past centuries, either colonial France or UK or imperial America, have projected their image through a set of values, that actually at their time they presented as “universal”, which became an inseparable component of the respect and admiration they received from other peoples. Basically, the opposition between traditional societies and industrialized ones relies on the collective interest as opposed to the top priority given to individual interests. This is what is called “freedom” and “democracy” in the West. The Confucian ethos is still very pregnant in China which, with over half of the population living in rural areas, favors the collectivity over the individuals. Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilizations” considered that this Confucian tradition was a main obstacle to democratization and should be replaced by Western social and political values. But when having a look of Western present social challenges in so many aspects, one can only wonder if he “modernization” of these societies haven’t reached a limit where societies can totally dysfunction when the collective is totally absent. China attracts therefore the interest of many people, not only in developing countries but in industrialized countries as well where citizens are looking for more solidarity, more consideration for the human being and less technological and bureaucratic management of the society. Of course, China still has a long way to go before becoming a recognized “model” with an identified system of values that would answer these almost metaphysical concerns of millions of Western citizens. In a development process, the expectations of a population gradually tend to move from the satisfaction of basic needs to more and more sophisticated needs, this is what history of various societies shows. But above all these evolving dreams lies a belief in values that are more spiritual and sometime even utopic. The greatest challenges for a country is to build a set of “national” values which first can be progressively considered as “universal values”, secondly to stand by these values and avoid systematically trample on them when it is in its own selfish interest. For having forgotten this, Western countries have gradually lost their credibility in term of values and give way to radical ideologies – and systems of values – like the radical Islam which contests the right of Western countries to decide what is good or evil.

Therefore, it seems today to be an important issue to raise the issue of Chinese Values, whether traditional ones or more modern ones, which must become at some point a full part of the Chinese Dream. China, at this stage of its rise back in the international order, both at the domestic level and at the international level, needs to clearly define a set of values that will represent its people aspirations, its morality, and draw interest from peoples around the world and start a true process of soft power in order to stir dreams about China.

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