china dream

The coexistence of multiple historical narratives and the use of history as a tool for political legitimation are widespread and perhaps even universal phenomena. In today’s China, however, they assume a particular salience because of the importance attached to particular historical narratives by the ruling party‐state and the extraordinary effectiveness of propaganda and educational systems that promote this story in that country.At least three distinct though interconnected historical narrative strands circulate in China in the early twenty‐first century. The first is the dominant narrative, ‘Official China”—official because it is both sanctioned by and in part funded and produced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The second narrative, which we can label “Other China,” consists of the multiple, often contending, stories told by academics, media writers, cultural producers and online commentators. These create an intellectually ebullient and diverse narrative, one charac-terized by publishing efflorescence, disputation and academic contention. The Other China coexists with or is at times also in the unsteady embrace of Official China. Somewhat embattled in recent times, this Other China has evolved over the past decades and has reconnected China and its narratives with global trends in thought and scholar-ship. Third, there is “Personal China.” Like “Other China” this is not a single unified narrative but is made up of the countless individual narratives that Chinese people use to make sense of their own history in relation to larger forces.“Official China,” the main focus of this chapter, is a crucial part of what has emerged as the leitmotif of the Xi Jinping era (2012–), the “China Dream” (Zhongguo meng). Theexpression “China Dream” is not new, it was referred to as part of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and a book by that title written by a PLA Colonel appeared in 2010. A New York Times column by Thomas Friedman entitled “China needs its own dream” may have had something to do with the term’s popularization, though this is steadfastly denied within China.1 Xi first used the slogan publicly when he came to power as Party General Secretary in November 2012; since then it has become omnipresent in the Chinese History intheEra oftheChinaDreamGEREMIER. BARMÉANDMICHAEL SZONYI ERAOFTHECHINADREAM65media and especially state propaganda, the subject of popular songs, academic conferences and detailed explication in CCP ideological organs like Qiushi (Seeking Truth).Xi elaborated on the content of the China Dream in a speech in March 2013 shortly after taking office as President. The China Dream means the creation of “a moderately prosperous society, a prosperous, democratic, civilized and harmonious modern socialist country.” Achieving the dream means “achieving national prosperity and revitalization of the happiness of the people, which deeply reflects the Chinese people’s dream today and is consistent with our glorious tradition ... The realization of the China Dream must rely on a Chinese way which is socialism with Chinese characteristics ... The China Dream is the dream of a people, and it is also the dream of each Chinese person.” In April 2014 Qiushi magazine amplified this definition and stressed the link between the nation and the individual: the China Dream is the “means for bringing together the state, the nation and individuals as an organic whole.” The China Dream can do this, the article said, because it “accentuates the intimate bond between the future and destiny of each and every person with that of the state and nation” (Davies 2014, 146).The China Dream is thus a dream of national wealth and power. In the Official China narrative it can be achieved only by following the path of socialism with Chinese charac-teristics under the leadership of the party‐state. It is a dream that is also supposed to be consistent with Chinese tradition, as determined by the CCP. Chinese people can realize their individual dreams only if they also accept the common goals of the national China Dream. Thus, unlike the American dream, which was an obvious source of inspiration, the China Dream is a collective dream rather than an individual one. This of course conveniently makes it possible for those in power to determine whose wishes are consistent with the China Dream and whose are not (for more on the China Dream, see Cheek’s chapter in this volume).History is implicated in and is indeed central to the China Dream in at least three ways. First, history matters to the China Dream because Xi has said so. “Only by bearing history in mind,” he told leading cadres at the Central Party School in 2011, even before promoting the China Dream formula, “especially the history of the Chinese revolution carried out by the people under the leadership of our party, will we be able to understand the past profoundly, grasp the present in an all‐round way, and create the future correctly” (Xi 2011).Second, history matters to the China Dream because it has been constructed in oppo-sition and repudiation to other historical dreams. As another article in Qiushi puts it, China has experimented with several dreams in the last two centuries, including “dreams of foreign matters/self‐strengthening,” “constitutionalist dreams,” “scientific democracy dreams.” All of these dreams eventually turned into nightmares. Other dreams, of univer-sal modernity and of Enlightenment, do not even bear mentioning in the official narratives and are therefore repudiated only implicitly. “Only Marxism‐Leninism and socialism, like a beam of sunlight from history, illuminated China’s stage and illuminated the road by which Chinese people would advance” (Qiushi 2013). The China Dream is thus constructed in implicit contrast to the dream of revolution and liberation that dominated China in the decades after 1949. This is fundamentally important political work, as this version of history serves to justify the Chinese government’s turn away from revolutionary goals while maintaining the revolution’s monopoly on power. As we will show below, the repudiation of the dream of revolution and liberation is more artful than just this: it depends on redefining the earlier dream in such a way that it prefigures or lays the groundwork for the real China Dream. 66GEREMIER. BARMÉANDMICHAELSZONYIThird, history matters to the China Dream because at its core this story is a historical narrative. That is, the dream is explicitly conceived in relation to and as the culmination of a long‐term historical process, “the great revival of the Chinese people” (Zhonghua minzu weidade fuxing). The dream of a “strong China” (qiangguo meng) has animated Chinese thinkers and leaders for over a century, since the dark days of the failing Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century (Zhao Suisheng 1997, 726; Schell and Delury 2013). Mao put the CCP at the center of the story in his 1940 essay “On New Democracy,” and the CCP has long claimed the leadership of China’s revival. In recent years, this idea of national revival seems to have been first mooted in 2001 by then Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin. His successor Hu Jintao picked up on this formulation and referred to “revival” (fuxing) more than 20 times in a single speech on the hundredth anniversary of the 1911 revolution. Usage of the term has since proliferated (Elliott 2011a).The narrative of the China Dream interprets modern history as a two‐part story of China’s century of humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialism and its subsequent rise and return to greatness. The second part focuses on revival: it tells how the sagacious leadership of the CCP has enabled China to recover from the effects of humiliation, andof how China continues to progress under Party leadership towards its current glorious goals.The most prominent and immediate institutional expression of this narrative at the time of Xi Jinping’s rise to power in 2012 was the “Road to Revival” exhibition at the National History Museum on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The exhibition received its most prominent visitors in November 2012 when Xi Jinping, newly appointed to the position of Party General Secretary, led the new Politburo Standing Committee on a tour to see it. It is no coincidence that it was during this visit that Xi gave what would become known as the “China Dream” speech, establishing the Dream as the core of his ideological agenda (“Xi Jinping” 2012).The Road to Revival exhibition covers the history of China from the First Opium War (1839–42) to the present. It highlights, according to the plaque at the entrance “theexplorations made by the Chinese people from all walks of life who, after being reduced to a semi‐colonial, semi‐feudal society since the Opium War of 1840, rose in resistance against humiliation and misery, and tried in every way possible to rejuvenate the nation.” Its five sections detail imperialist subjugation, the 1911 revolution, the establishment of the PRC in 1949, the construction of the “new socialist China” in the Maoist era, and the period of reform and opening up beginning under Deng Xiaoping and continuing to the present (the 1978 plenum at which the reform agenda was endorsed is described as “epoch‐making,” the first use of the term in the exhibition) (Denton 2014).While the story of imperialist humiliation is a familiar one, the treatment of the Maoist era marks the key distinctive feature of the new official narrative. Echoing the Resolution on Party History of 1981 (see Cheek’s chapter in this volume), Qiushi also gestured obliquely to the ill‐conceived and implemented policies of the Maoist period while insisting that they have bequeathed a positive legacy to contemporary China:The road of socialism indeed was not all smooth sailing. After the establishment of New China, due to a lack of experience, we also took a not‐so‐small detour. For a while indiscriminately imitating the model of the Soviet Union, we experienced the “left” error in terms of the party’s guiding thinking, and even saw the tragedy of the “Cultural Revolution” ERAOFTHECHINADREAM67giving us an incredibly profound experience and lessons. However, despite the arduous and bumpy exploration, this winding process also provided valuable experience, theoretical preparation, and a material foundation for initiating socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new period. (Qiushi 2013)The reform era is thus made possible thanks only to the foundation established in the Maoist period, the policies of which are thereby transformed into historical necessities and fundamentally continuous with the reform era policies that replaced them.A number of aspects of the official story are especially controversial or particularly at odds with academic and other histories. Here we single out just a few for further discussion.The first is the positive assessment of elements of China’s distant and recent past in the official story. In contrast to narratives that prevailed in the Maoist period, the new Official China Story implies a conciliation of history, an embrace of traditional Chinese culture and of the dynastic and Republican pasts. In what must be an unconscious mirroring of developments in the field of economic history (see the chapter by von Glahn), traditional value systems captured by the umbrella term “Confucianism” are now seen as positive, progressive, and useful to China’s continued success. Filial piety is even being reconstructed as a possible solution to the challenges of a rapidly aging population at a time when public welfare services remain underdeveloped.In the new official narrative, even the long‐defeated archenemy Chiang Kai‐shek and the Guomindang can be celebrated for their efforts in fighting the Japanese. It is not hard to see this aspect of the official story as intended both to encourage positive atti-tudes towards Taiwan and enhance national unity by pointing to a shared history of opposition to the nation’s enemies. As Xi Jinping put it in a speech marking the anniversary of the formal outbreak of hostilities with Japan, that war “awakened the Chinese nation and enhanced its unity to [an] unprecedented height” (Xi Jinping 2014c).A second theme is the relationship of modern China to the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). This issue took on a colorful new dimension in April 2015 with the publication of an attack on the historians of the so‐called New Qing history (see the discussion in the chapters by Biran and Guy) that appeared on the website of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Targeting the argument of New Qing historians that the Qing was estab-lished by the Manchus after their invasion of China, and that subsequent Qing expan-sionism was thus imperialism rather than national unification, the author of the article accused these historians of being “pseudo‐academics” driven by “imperialist arrogance” (no fewer than 88 exclamation marks drive the point home) (Li Zhiting 2015). It is not clear what has motivated this attack at this time. But its vitriol certainly does show the salience of history today as well as reflecting the fervor with which “historical nihilism” (lishi xuwuzhuyi), that is, any views that depart from Party orthodoxy, is denounced. To take only the most obvious implication of the debate, if the Qing was an empire created by imperial expansion, then the current territorial boundaries of China, largely inherited from the Qing, are not inherently Chinese but simply an imperialist legacy, and therefore potentially open to change. This challenges the assumption that the boundaries of China are “sacred” and historically inviolate. This challenge is relevant not only to regions like Xinjiang, Tibet, or Taiwan, but also to recent tensions in the South and East China Seas.The issue of border tensions raises the theme of China’s historical international rela-tions. In 2007, Party leaders introduced the formulation of the community of shared destiny (mingyun gongtongti) to describe the relationship between the mainland and Taiwan. In 2013, that formulation was expanded to describe China’s relations with its 68GEREMIER. BARMÉANDMICHAELSZONYIneighbors. This approach, coupled with calls for the United States and China to develop a “new model of great power relations” that accommodates both parties so-called core interests, might simply be interpreted as a rhetorical justification for China’s assertion for regional hegemony, were it not that some of its proponents also argue that regional international relations should be based on Confucian‐style principles such as amity, mutual benefit, and inclusiveness rather than the principle of sovereign equality alone. It is thus also a call for a distinctively Sinocentric East Asian approach to international rela-tions, one with links to the traditional model of tributary relations in which China sup-posedly exercises benevolent and mutually beneficial oversight over the region. In other words, this might be interpreted as a way to operationalize a modern version of the Tianxia (All under Heaven) tradition of international relations. This approach is also linked to scholarly efforts to generate a distinctively Chinese international relations theory (to the historically minded, it cannot but resonate with a previous effort to reor-ganize regional relations: the Greater East Asia Co‐Prosperity Sphere of militarist Japan). Zhao Tingyang, an establishment scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in particular has been promoting the “Tianxia system” both as a new model of the interna-tional system that is explicitly inclusive and implicitly puts China at its center, and as a way of recovering China’s own ability to think, reconstructing its world views, values and methodologies, and thinking about China’s future, Chinese concepts about the future and China’s role and responsibilities in the world (cited in Zhang 2009).The official narrative is about both the past and the future. Many discussions about the China Dream situate the present day in relation to two historical periods. The shorter historical period is the “Former and Latter Thirty Years” (qianhou sanshi nian), that is, the Maoist era from 1949 to 1978 and the reform era from 1978 to 2008. We have already seen efforts by proponents of the official narrative to establish continuity between these two periods, celebrating the achievements of both and minimizing the challenges that the change in direction poses for political legitimacy. Xi Jinping has particularly laid down the law on this theme: no criticism of either the Mao period (the first 30 years) or of the reform period (the second 30 years) is to be tolerated. Both have contributed to his “China Story” (Zhongguode gushi) and the unfolding of the China Dream.The longer‐term period is the “Two Centuries” (liangge yibai nian). Less confusing in Chinese than it is in English, this formulation refers not to a period of 200 years but to two overlapping periods of 100 years each. The first century refers to the 100 years since the foundation of the CCP in 1921, the second to the 100 years since the establishment of the PRC in 1949. Both of these periods will soon come to an end. China’s goal for the first centenary (in 2021) should be “moderate prosperity” (xiaokang), another term with rich historical allusions, for the whole nation. By the second centenary in 2049, China should enjoy “democracy, harmony, strength and wealth”. In other words, the China Dream has a timetable, one dictated by history. By 2049, the national rejuvenation that became neces-sary due to imperialist pressure some two centuries ago is to be accomplished.The official narrative has implications for what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. It involves the creation of new collective rituals, such as the recent effort to mark the 1937 Nanjing Massacre with a national Day of Collective Mourning (December 12). The term for the military conflict of which the massacre is part is itself the subject of discrimination in the official narrative, with the neutral but Western‐inflected term “World War II” rejected in favor of the Sino‐centric “War of Resistance to Japan” (Kangri zhanzheng). Other anniversaries, most obviously the anniversary of June 4, 1989, are necessarily ignored by the official narrative. ERAOFTHECHINADREAM69So far we have devoted our attention to the Official China story. What can be said of the other two narratives? The official China story is promoted by official institutions: the CCP’s Publicity Department (the Chinese title of the department is unchanged, but its official English translation has recently been changed from the more familiar Propaganda Department) and state regulatory agencies such as the General Administration of Press and Publication and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. State control of mass media ensures that the three narratives are not discrete (Brady 2008). The Official China Story shapes the Other China Story; the stories that make up the Private China Story are reworked by scholars and journalists to produce the Other China Story, and narratives in the Official mode presented in mass media shape people’s own under-standings. There is no way to summarize or systematize the countless narratives that make up Other China and Personal China; though a taste of ordinary lives is given in the profiles given in Chinese Characters and the efforts of intellectuals high and low to make sense of these narratives are introduced in William Callahan’s Chinese Dreams (Shah and Wasserstrom 2012; Callahan 2013). Here we only point out some interesting points of intersection between the stories.Beginning with the “scar literature” (shanghen wenxue) of the late 1970s, narratives of personal suffering have been an implicit challenge to the official narrative. The Internet has meant a proliferation of such narratives, and created new possibilities for the sharing of these stories (Yang Guobin 2009). A powerful impression one gets from these stories is that they can simultaneously undermine, reinforce, or reduce to irrele-vance the official narrative. Oral histories of the Great Leap Forward famine were an important source for Yang Jisheng’s influential Tombstone, which sharply contradicts the Official China interpretation of the political movements of the 1950s and 1960s as mere twists and turns on the road to today’s successful policies (Yang Jisheng 2012). Elderly rural women interviewed by Gail Hershatter sometimes invoke “the old society” to describe the bitterness of the past. But whereas in the official China narrative “theold society” refers to the period before Liberation in 1949, these women often used it to describe the Maoist period. Since the valence of the term “the old society” is utterly negative, this is an unsubtle critique of the state and of its version of history (Hershatter 2011, 25).The Personal China Story is not easily susceptible to shifting political winds. The same is not true of the Other China Story, which has come under attack as part of a larger movement of controlling ideas in contemporary China. A confidential but widely circu-lated document issued by the General Office of the CCP in 2013 provides guidance to Party cadres on the control and suppression of ideas. Entitled “Concerning the Situation in the Ideological Sphere,” and known popularly as Document 9, these instructions identify seven dangerous “Western” values that need to be controlled. Teaching of these subjects is reportedly forbidden. Among the dangerous values is “historical nihilism.” This is a catchphrase for criticism of the history of the Party. Challenging the Official China Story (“rejecting the accepted conclusions on historical events and figures”) is explicitly identified as historical nihilism. Even questioning the current ambiguous judg-ment on Mao Zedong (“denying the scientific and guiding value of Mao Zedong thought”) is to fall into the nihilist trap. The document is remarkably honest about why historical nihilism is so dangerous. Since it rejects the official narrative, it “undermines the CCP’s historical purpose, which is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long‐term political dominance” (Chinafile 2013). One could not ask for a clearer statement of why history matters to the CCP today. 70GEREMIER. BARMÉANDMICHAELSZONYIThe Official China narrative of China’s past is expressed in speeches and other texts, as we would expect. It is also expressed in ritual. In September 2015, a grand collective and invented ritual was performed in Beijing. The Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance to Japan and the Global Anti‐Fascist War saw some twelve thousand troops led by 56 generals parade for inspection by Xi Jinping and a television audience across China and around the world. It was a state ritual that testified to the power of history in contemporary China. The celebration of a struggle that ended before most of the participants were born was clearly intended to convey a message not just about the past but also about the present and future. The display of military prowess and the latest technology sent a message that China has decisively moved past a century of humiliation and is reclaiming its traditional greatness. Under the wise leadership of the CCP, which defeated China’s enemies and oversaw this rejuvenation, China is well along on the road to realizing its dream. With all of its other underpinnings of legitimacy under stress from the many changes to China in recent decades, it is no wonder that broad-casting such messages has become a matter of great concern to the PRC leadership today