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Chasing The Chinese Dream — If You Can Define It

A woman in downtown Beijing walks past a building adorned with a patriotic mural by Chinese graffiti artists on April 22. Stephen Shaver/UPI/Landov hide caption

A woman in downtown Beijing walks past a building adorned with a patriotic mural by Chinese graffiti artists on April 22.

Forget about the American dream. Nowadays, the next big thing is the Chinese dream. In Beijing, it's the latest official slogan, mentioned on the front page of the official People's Daily 24 times in a single week recently.

With this level of publicity from the official propaganda machine, the Chinese dream even looks set to be enshrined as the new official ideology.

But what exactly is it?

According to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Chinese dream is "realizing a prosperous and strong country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the well-being of the people." He first invoked the concept within two weeks of being elevated to party chief in November.

Since then, the Chinese dream has been on everyone's lips, even visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

"I heard today a very specific discussion from the president of China about the China dream," he said after his weekend visit to Beijing earlier this month. "I think that it's fair to say that the United States wants to do its part, if we build the capacity for the people of China to share in that."

Chinese Preisdent Xi Jinping (center) talks with members of the Chinese People's Armed Police Force in Beijing on Jan. 29. Li Gang/Xinhua/Landov hide caption

Chinese Preisdent Xi Jinping (center) talks with members of the Chinese People's Armed Police Force in Beijing on Jan. 29.

The Chinese dream is a handy feel-good slogan, which encompasses national pride, an improvement of the standard of living and military modernization.

Return To A Former Glory

But it's notable that Xi first brought it up at a National Museum of China exhibition devoted to China's recovery from more than a century of humiliation at the hands of Western powers.

The man who first made the phrase famous, Senior Col. Liu Mingfu of the People's Liberation Army, is uncompromising about what he sees as the main planks of the Chinese dream.

"One, it means to be No. 1 in the world. Secondly, it's the rejuvenation of the nation," he says.

Liu wrote a book called The China Dream three years ago, which is now taught in Chinese military schools alongside the work of Carl von Clausewitz. To Liu's great delight, it's also mentioned in former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's book On China .

In the book, Liu argues that China needs to return to its former glory — as the world's top superpower. He is sure that President Xi's version of the China dream is the same as his.

"I'm [just] a scholar at [China's] National Defense University, but when I talked about China wanting to be No. 1 in the world, Americans were very unhappy. If China's president talked about being No. 1 in the world, Americans would be unable to bear it," he says. "We can't use the same language. But my Chinese dream and the president's Chinese dream are in essence the same."

That's what he believes, but the official interpretation doesn't seem to bear that up. A commentary published in the state-run Global Times newspaper says foreign media defame the Chinese dream as "new nationalism."

A crowd strolls on a pedestrian street during a recent holiday in Shanghai. Eugene Hoshiko/AP hide caption

A crowd strolls on a pedestrian street during a recent holiday in Shanghai.

The piece goes on to spell out all the things the Chinese dream is not — it's not just about China's rise; it's a misconception to believe it's just a dream of human rights and democracy — without explicitly spelling out what the Chinese dream actually is.

But the ambiguity is proving useful. For instance, in his version of the Chinese dream, Xi refers to the restoration of China's golden age. But exactly which golden age is left unclear.

Writing in the South China Morning Post , Lanxin Xiang, a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, says he believes this is in line with Xi's reputation as a "super-balancer."

"This is a very smart political move, for a Chinese golden age could be interpreted as a civilizational legacy as well as modern revolutionary heritage," Xiang wrote. "Thus, we have a one-size-fits-all dream that can attract a maximum number of people."

Whose Dream Is It Anyway?

Despite any convenient ambiguity, the Chinese dream will soon be on all school curricula: It must go "into students' brains," according to propaganda boss Liu Yunshan.

At one of the country's top universities, Peking University, students are enthusiastic about the concept of a Chinese dream, which they see as a unifying force, offering a better common future.

When asked about their own Chinese dreams, however, they respond with answers that are far more specific, more personal and — by insinuation — more critical of China's developmental path.

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"The air can be more clean and the environment can be better," says Zhang Yiying.

Fellow student Cun Rui's dream is "to find a good job and to realize my value."

"Previously Chinese don't have dreams, I think. For example, for students, they just follow their parents," Cun says.

Online, some have blasted the very idea of a Chinese dream as paternalistic.

"The power of defining this dream is in the hands of the government, the rulers," says independent commentator Zhao Chu. "So this dream itself is a very extreme form of nationalism and statism."

Dreams, Deleted

In his sharply worded essay online, Zhao compares the Chinese dream to the American dream, which focuses on the power of the individual. Zhao believes the top-down nature of the Chinese dream deprives ordinary people of the right to dream their own dreams.

His proof? The fate of his critique of the Chinese dream.

"It was deleted," Zhao says. "This is good evidence to show that the dream that unites the people is such a hypocritical concept. When this dream cannot be discussed, how can it be a real dream?"

It's not the only Chinese dream censors have deleted. So, too, have they deleted a song posted online by former factory worker Li Lei.

"The Chinese dream is not a dream of dictatorship," he sings. "The Chinese dream is not a dream of authoritarianism."

Nor, he sings, is it a dream of censorship or corrupt officials. His Chinese dream is one of the people, of democracy and freedom and the constitution.

Apparently, the authorities don't agree with his view. His Chinese dream is yet another one that's deemed unsuitable for the public.

Here’s Why Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese Dream’ Differs Radically From the American Dream

W hen China’s leader, Xi Jinping, visited the U.S. in late September, he gave a speech to a VIP business crowd in Seattle in which he repeated his favorite trope, the “Chinese Dream,” and claimed that it paralleled the American Dream. That may have helped his audience identify with him. But the truth is that the Chinese Dream, in Xi’s conceptualization, differs from many others, including the American one.

Xi’s Chinese Dream is protean. He associates it with different things at different times in different places. At its core, though, is a vision of national rejuvenation. Xi makes no secret of wanting to see China assume a position of international centrality, as well as to see it modernize while revering its classical traditions.

He is deeply concerned with presenting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as completing, under his watch, a surge to global prominence and strength that had its roots in the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 under Mao Zedong, then stalled, only to undergo a rebirth 30 years later under Deng Xiaoping. In the story the CCP tells, which is partly rooted in facts but given hyperbolic and nationalistic twists, from the 1840s to the 1940s China experienced a century of humiliation, the memory of which still stings and should serve as a reminder to all of what should never happen again. As textbooks, newscasts, speeches and documentary films reiterate, in those decades, China was laid low. Once independent, it was bullied by other countries. Once rich, it became poor. Once a place that Western thinkers like Voltaire admired for its inventions and ideas, it became a place that forgot its traditions and only sought answers in foreign creeds.

Mao, in this tale, made China independent again. Deng oversaw an economic recovery. His successors kept improving living conditions and rekindled a sense of pride in China’s ancient thinkers and past glories. The opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which began with a quote by Confucius and ended with images of moon shots, provided a powerful visual sense of a national revival. Xi then took charge and summed it up with talk of a dream coming true under a powerful government’s firm guidance. Dream talk is now accompanied by images of a China that is high tech and modern (cue the footage of glistening fast trains), yet in touch with its past (cue the footage of statues of Confucius).

The American Dream, while also far from uniform, has a different center of gravity. At its core are tales of individuals and families bettering their situations through their own efforts. The kind of clinging to traditions and strengthening of the state that Xi extols is sometimes seen as more likely to prevent rather than aid U.S. Dreamers.

True, Xi sometimes refers, as he did in Seattle, to individual and family betterment being part of the Chinese Dream. But he presents the state as a natural ally and a crucial facilitator of this process—something that is reinforced whenever reference is made to the CCP lifting millions out of poverty, rather than emphasizing that poor people worked to pull themselves out of it. In contrast, for Americans to pursue their dream, the government may need to get out of their way.

Then, too, the melting-pot aspect of the standard narrative of the American Dream makes it seem natural to suggest that to move forward will mean questioning the ways of ancestors. The Chinese Dream, however, promotes xiao , the Confucian virtue of filial piety, as an essential element, and Xi stresses reverential study of Chinese classics.

This wasn’t always so. In Diary of a Madman , the acclaimed 1918 short story by Lu Xun, a writer whom Mao insisted was the best that modern China had produced, the fetish for filial respect and memorizing the classics is presented as a deadening thing. Long before zombie attacks became popular in dystopian shows and films, Lu Xun wrote of Confucian obsessions with hierarchies, including men standing above women and the old needing to always be revered by the young, as cannibalistic practices. It was, he asserted in his famous tale, as though the horrific command “people eat people” were secretly inserted between each line of the Confucian classics.

Other progressive intellectuals of the day joined with him in insisting that rigid reverence for elders and adherence to classical precepts meant that there was no room for the creativity the country needed, for the personal fulfillment that individual Chinese desired. The Chinese Dream they embraced, without using that term, was of choosing what was most appealing from all cultures and traditions. They were patriots, in the sense of loving the community of which they were part and wanting to see it flourish, and some took bold actions to express this through protests similar in some ways to those that rocked and excited Hong Kong a year ago .

Mao and other early leaders of the CCP embraced Lu Xun’s critique of reverence for tradition, rallying around a robustly cosmopolitan magazine called New Youth , founded 100 years ago and in which “Diary of a Madman” ran. Once in power, they worked to purge China of the influence of Confucius. Only recently has Beijing diverged from that critical appraisal of the classical legacy, while unfortunately retaining mostly just one key element of an imported creed: the Leninist obsession on the need for a strong and disciplined party to call the shots.

Dreams are often formed in opposition to nightmares. For many in the West, nightmares have often been rooted in the horror of states that have grown too strong, as in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 . In the same mid-century period when those books were written, the most important Chinese counterpart, Lao She’s Cat Country , told of a Martian community, representing China, whose members suffered a declining quality of life and invasions due to government division and weakness.

The Chinese state today is robust, yet the country’s leaders won’t let fears of its being precariously weak die a natural death. If only they would. Then there would be space not just for their dreams but the often different ones of many individual Chinese.

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• The Chinese Dream and Its Appeal

--Keynote Speech at the International Dialogue on the Chinese Dream

By Cai Mingzhao, Minister of the State Council Information Office

(December 7, 2013 Shanghai)

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am very glad to be here with you today in Shanghai to talk about the Chinese Dream. Sitting by the Yangtze River and facing the sea, Shanghai is China's gateway to the world and a window for people to learn about our country. It is therefore of special significance to hold the International Dialogue on the Chinese Dream here, in this wonderful city.

On behalf of the State Council Information Office, I would like to express my cordial welcome to all our guests, and my sincere gratitude to those who have come all the way from other countries!

In November last year, soon after the conclusion of the 18thNational Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), President Xi Jinping put forward, for the first time, the idea of the Chinese Dream on a visit to “The Road towards Renewal” exhibition at the National Museum of China.

In March this year, he further elaborated on the Chinese Dream in his speech at the closing ceremony of the First Session of the 12thNational People's Congress. Since then, he has talked about the concept on a number of occasions.

Xi stressed that   the Chinese Dream means the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It embodies achieving prosperity for the country, renewal of the nation and happiness for the citizens. Only when the country is doing well, can the nation and people do well.

Xi emphasized that   the Chinese Dream in essence means the dream of the people. The Chinese Dream is to let people enjoy better education, more stable employment, higher incomes, a greater degree of social security, better medical and health care, improved housing conditions and a better environment. It is to let our children grow up well, have satisfactory jobs and live better lives.

Xi stressed that   all the Chinese people who live in our great country at this great time have the opportunity to enjoy a successful life, the opportunity to realize one's dream, and the opportunity to grow and progress together with the country.

Xi also emphasized   that the Chinese Dream is a dream for peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit for all. It is connected to the beautiful dreams of the people in other countries. The Chinese Dream will not only benefit the Chinese people, but also people of all countries in the world.

Xi's statements have thus explained the meanings of the Chinese Dream.

Eight days ago, we hosted a forum in Beijing, and invited ordinary citizens to talk freely about their understanding of the Chinese Dream.

Mr. He, an interior decoration worker from Changzhou City, Jiangsu Province, said, "After President Xi Jinping put forward the Chinese Dream, we feel that we have something to look forward to. We can bravely design our own dreams. The dream is for China, as well as for every one of us."

Mr. Tao, a migrant worker, said, "The Chinese Dream is within our reach. We can expect better education for our children, and feel reassured of proper support for our elders. The Chinese Dream is very close to us."

A postgraduate student from the China University of Political Science and Law said, "The Chinese Dream sends to the world a message that China is rising. We are very proud, and are more motivated in learning. The future will certainly belong to us young people."

A student with Tsinghua University said, "The Chinese Dream gives us a clear direction as to what to do and why doing it. We can avoid blind actions. We feel relieved because President Xi has explained how to strive after the Dream."

I believe that every person in China has his or her own understanding of the Chinese Dream, just as these migrant workers and college students do. Searching for Chinese Dream on search portal Baidu, one can get more than 100 million relevant articles.

The above reactions from the public suggest that President Xi's proposal of a Chinese Dream has resonated among the Chinese people and become a favored topic. Why?

The Chinese Dream has a strong appeal because it reflects the wishes of hundreds of millions of Chinese for a beautiful future.   The Chinese nation is a great nation. It has created a splendid civilization. Yet it has also weathered many vicissitudes. In the 100 years from the 1840s to the 1940s, China was repeatedly invaded. The Chinese people suffered extreme hardships and incurred huge sacrifices rarely seen elsewhere.

These tribulations taught the Chinese people a lesson: "Lagging behind leaves one vulnerable to attacks." Thus they derived at a common ideal, that is, to rejuvenate the Chinese nation. From then on, the Chinese people began to pursue this dream.

With the Communist Party of China in the lead, the Chinese people struggled arduously and worked assiduously, and finally in 1949 founded the People's Republic of China. The Chinese people finally stood up.

In the 60 years since then, China has engaged in socialist construction and implemented the reform and opening-up policy. Now the country is at a historical turning point.

By putting forward the Chinese Dream, President Xi opened a new chapter for the Chinese nation in the new century and has inspired the Chinese people to aspire for a beautiful life and the renewal of the nation.

The Chinese Dream has a strong appeal because our people are confident that it can come true.   A survey conducted June this year by the Guangdong Provincial Survey and Research Center revealed that most respondents endorsed the Chinese Dream and were optimistic about its realization. Specifically, 89.4 percent believed that the Chinese Dream could be realized.

People are confident in the Chinese Dream because we have found the correct road to realize it. That road is socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is built on experiences accumulated in the three decades of the reform and opening-up drive, in the more than 60 years of consistent refinement after the founding of the People's Republic of China, in the more than 170 years since the Opium War in 1840, and in the 5,000-year-long civilization of the Chinese nation. This road is based on both historical factors and existing realities.

Along this road, we have implemented the reform and opening-up policy for 35 years. During this period, China’s GDP has increased 142 folds and urban residents' income 71 folds. People's living standards have been drastically improved, and so has our comprehensive national strength.

Now, we are closer to our dream and goals than ever. This makes people believe that as long as we follow the road of Chinese socialism, and expand and extend the road timely, the Chinese Dream can certainly be realized, and China's future will certainly be more beautiful.

The Chinese Dream has a strong appeal because our people support and trust the new central collective leadership.   In the past year since the convening of the 18th CPC National Congress, the CPC Central Committee led by General Secretary Xi Jinping has broken new ground, introduced new work styles and made fresh progress in various fields.

The CPC Central Committee has adopted eight measures to combat corruption and launched "mass line" educational activities for the Party, so as to make sure that officials are honest, the government is clean and political affairs are handled with integrity.

The new central collective leadership's efforts to improve the governance system and enhance governing ability have brought profound changes to social life in China and further boosted the Chinese people's confidence in the realization of the Chinese Dream.

The Chinese Dream is immensely popular and inspiring among the Chinese people, because they are looking forward to our national rejuvenation, and to a beautiful and successful life. In the one year since the Chinese Dream was put forward, it has emitted great positive energy in the country.

The Chinese Dream has motivated the Chinese people.   It lays a blueprint for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and evokes people's unprecedented confidence and pride in our nation. It inspires people to work hard for a beautiful life.

Inspired by the Chinese Dream, more and more people have begun to chase their own dreams, including dreams to receive better education, start businesses, purchase homes and get rich. People firmly believe that as long as they work hard, their dreams would come true.

The Chinese Dream has become a driving force behind the deepening of the reforms. At the Third Plenary Session of the 18thCPC Central Committee that concluded not long ago, the Decision on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reforms was adopted.

It has responded to people's concerns and requests and has covered unprecedented reform issues, winning strong public support.

The Decision requires that the tasks to comprehensively deepen the reforms should be completed by 2020. The deadline is the same as that of building China into a moderately prosperous society in comprehensive aspects.

Such broad consensus on comprehensively deepening the reforms has been reached because the reform measures will contribute to the realization of the Chinese Dream.

We can say that deepening the reforms will achieve the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Following this road, we can, step by step, reach our goal and realize our dreams.

The Chinese Dream gives CPC members a clearer understanding of their historical responsibilities.   The CPC's fundamental mission is to serve the people. Its major goals are the prosperity of the country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the happiness of the people.

The Chinese Dream proposed by President Xi has closely linked the CPC's policies and practices with the basic interests of the Chinese people, and tightly connected its destiny with the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.

To strengthen Party building, the CPC has launched "mass line" education activities. This is to fight against formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance in the Party, and remove the dangers confronting the Party, such as a lack of drive, incompetence, being out of touch with the people, corruption and other misconducts.

Through a series of actions to rectify work styles and tighten disciplines, CPC members are more conscientious in upholding people's interests; and the CPC's appeal to the people and its governing ability have also increased measurably.

The Chinese dream proposed by President Xi has also caught international attention. I hope, through today's dialogue, more friends across the world will be able to understand the Chinese people's dreams, how they have chased the Chinese Dream and the profound changes brought about by the Chinese Dream.

I believe that the realization of a dream for 1.3 billion people will be a major event in the history of mankind. China will take on a new form and will make greater contribution to the world.

I wish the dialogue a great success. I wish you all a pleasant time in Shanghai. Thank you.

(Source: China.org.cn )

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My Chinese dream

I want to tell you about my unforgettable experience in China and the first encounter with the Chinese culture.

I am a Finnish student and I got a five months internship in a company based in central Shanghai. I was very excited about the trip and had no idea that the trip would affect me so much and change the direction of my life.

On the arrival day in the end of May 2012, the company had arranged airport pick-up for me. This was very convenient and it made me feel very welcome, being in a new country. On the same day I visited the office briefly to introduce myself and to meet all of the other employees. I got to spend the first day just resting, settling down and getting to know the neighborhood around me.

Before my trip I did a lot of research and study about China. Like I always do before I leave for a destination that is unknown for me. Still under the first weeks of my stay, I was little confused about everything. I had expected people to speak better English in this multi-cultural city, so the first problems I ran into were language barriers. Luckily I had studied a little Chinese before my trip. At least it made some things easier, for example getting around or ordering food in a restaurant. Anyhow my Chinese skills were not great but I managed surprisingly well to make myself understood and to understand the people around me.

There were many things in China that I could not understand, even if I understood that they were a part of the Chinese people’s lives and their daily routines. Things like people taking a nap in public places and that they actually were able to get some sleep amazed me every day. I saw people napping in the strangest places, curled up in weird body positions and having a rest without being bothered about things going on around them.

The way people move in the city was also strange to me in the beginning. The people in China take their time and they do not rush in the same way when comparing to other big cities I have visited. There are so many people in Shanghai and the city can be very crowded, so it is only understandable that it takes time to get to your destination. The best way was to go with the flow, that was what everybody else did!

In Finland I live in a town of 180 000 people and let me tell you something: We stress all the time, mostly even for things that are not so important. Traffic jams back home are nothing compared to the ones in Shanghai and still we get mad and frustrated if we have to wait a while in the rush hours, which normally last only for 90 minutes. Same goes for people in the supermarket in my home town. People hurry their way through the aisles and if there are a few people in the cashier line before you, people get impatient and look at the cashier with a face that tells her to hurry up. In the end most of us just go home to sit on the couch in front of the TV. So I have to ask, why the rush for nothing?

Now let me tell you about my free time activities in Shanghai. As I enjoy sports and the Chinese people love badminton, I got the opportunity to participate in playing twice a week. A chance to play Badminton weekly was offered by my employer and we were usually 3-4 girls playing for one hour. It was a great way to spend time with my colleagues outside the office. During the game nights we spoke about the differences in our cultures and our countries. Every time we were mutually amazed about the big differences.

In the mornings I went running by the river Suzhou Creek, which was located near my apartment. There was a nice park by the river where I loved to spend time in the mornings. The park was full of life and for a moment it felt like I had stepped outside from the big city life. It made me forget about the everyday routines, work and made me appreciate life and the way people took their time to get outside early in the mornings. It was like a big social happening with many sports being performed. People singing and playing nice tunes with the flute made the experience even better and I thought that there could not be a better way to star your day. I saw a group of women dancing to Chinese music and it looked like so much fun that I wanted to join them. I was intrigued by the dancing so I had to ask my colleagues at the office, if it was allowed just to join them dancing or would I be intrusive. They told me that it was perfectly okay to join them. Next morning I ran to the park again and joined the group. I took a place in the back corner just to stay somewhat invisible. I had a lot of fun and I could tell about the smiles around me, that I was accepted in the group. So I started to run to the park almost every morning and joined the dancing group and after a while the women did not let me stay in my corner, they took my hand and led me to the center of the formation. I appreciated the gesture deeply, because it made me feel even more welcome and as a part of the group.

I also tried to get around the town as much as possible during the weekends. Sometimes I also went on trips outside Shanghai. Mostly I spent my free time with the new friends I met. We used to go out for dinner and drinks or just enjoy time together. I also wanted to explore other parts of China, so I visited Beijing and Xiamen. It did not matter if I travelled north or south, the charm that China had, seemed to be around me where ever I was.

When I started to adapt to the way of living here, I really started to like it very much. I started to like it so much, that I have now dedicated my free time in Finland to studying Chinese and searching for suitable work opportunities that would make my permanent move to China possible. My expectations about China were totally over exceeded. Never in a million years had I thought that I would fit in there so well, that my biggest dream at the moment is a life in China. I will finish my studies in the end of 2013 and then I will finally be free to fulfill my Chinese dream.

After an amazing time in China, came the hard re-entry to Finland. I did miss my family and all of my friends. In Finland I live near the ocean and I definitely missed the fresh air and the smell of the ocean while staying in Shanghai. When I got back home, I took a long walk on the beach, sat on the rocks, just enjoyed the fresh air and looked at the dark blue waves rolling in from the ocean. Sitting by the ocean made me realize that I had now got the best of both worlds.

I can honestly say that the time in China was one of the happiest times in my life. I learned a lot about life, different cultures and I learned to appreciate some things that many people take for granted. I enjoyed everything China had to offer me. I miss all the people I met there and mostly one special person who made my stay in Shanghai unforgettable.

For people going to China for the first time I can say: Go with an open mind! If you are open minded you will fit in anywhere and make the most of your time in China. The local people are very warm and welcoming, cherish that and show them your appreciation. A good advice is to do some reading about the China before your trip. It would be a complete waste of going to China without having any idea about what the country has to offer you, because there are many extraordinary things to discover in this amazing country.

By Karolina Kolehmainen

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Interpreting and Understanding “The Chinese Dream” in a Holistic Nexus

• Original Paper
• Published: 29 August 2015
• Volume 8 , pages 505–520, ( 2015 )

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• Xing Li 1  

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The paper intends to provide a framework for bringing about and understanding the most important and key dimensions of the Chinese Dream in a historical, sociocultural, sociopolitical and global nexus. It represents a part of global efforts to describe and interpret the holistic nature of the Chinese Dream concept both as an internal and external policy statement and as a new vocabulary in international relations lexicon. The paper seeks to deconstruct and demystify the implicit and explicit essence of the Chinese Dream concept in enlightening and critical ways at the time when China’s developments and transformations are still undergoing and moving forward.

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The Power of Language: Globalizing “The Chinese Dream”

Introduction: China’s Many Dreams

The chinese dream: imagining china.

The notion of “century of humiliation” refers to the period between the first Sino-British Opium War (1839) and the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949), during which the political incursion, economic exploitation and military aggression by foreign imperialist countries are regarded as the key extern factors that undermined the historical glory of the Chinese civilization and humiliated the Chinese nation.

The notion of “victim mentality” is connected with China’s painful experience of the “century of humiliation” (see note 1 above) during which China had to endure more than 100 years of humiliation at the hands of Western powers and Japan. Ever since then, the Chinese nation continuously feels burdened by this tragic history, which has dominated the Chinese consciousness of its relations with the Western world. It is one of the central factors that instigated Chinese revolutions in the twentieth century, including the communist revolution, and has shaped China’s foreign policy and international relations since the founding the People’s Republic in 1949.

The concept of “passive revolution” is derived from Gramsci ( 1971 ). It implies the self-reorganization and self-adjustment capacities of the elite classes, who are able to respond to socioeconomic and sociopolitical crises by making necessary reforms and modifications in order to retain hegemony.

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Li, X. Interpreting and Understanding “The Chinese Dream” in a Holistic Nexus. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 8 , 505–520 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-015-0098-3

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Home » Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream: introducing a project

Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream: introducing a project

As of January 2016, the Thinking China section of The China Story has introduced several aspects of contemporary Chinese thought and debate under three headings:  key intellectuals ,  key articles  and currents of thought . We have been particularly interested in the interplay of intellectual and official perspectives on a range of pressing social and political questions.

Thinking China forms part of the overall approach of the Australian Centre on China in the World which we call New Sinology , first articulated in a short essay a decade ago, in May 2005. Since then, we have expanded our work in this area and founded a major research centre which attempts to put some of its motivating ideas into practice. We have been fortunate in that we launched The China Story in 2012 only some months before China’s new party-state-army leader, Xi Jinping, declared how important it was for China to ‘tell The China Story well’ 讲好中国的故事, and before it became evident that Xi himself was an unwitting advocate of the New Sinological approach to engaging with modern China.

In our work, be it through the research work at CIW, our China Story Yearbook , via this website, or in our public activities, we emphasise the importance of engaging with the broadest spectrum of Chinese ideas and concerns. In the digital age, officials, state propagandists, academics, journalists, people of conscience, and members of the general populace are co-creators of Chinese thought and public discourse. To better understand how ‘China’ thinks, we must heed those ideas and writings that have attracted significant interest among Sinophone readers, incited controversy or that, over time, have proved to be influential.

We are delighted to introduce a major new undertaking by colleagues in Canada, China, Australia and England to read, understand and translate key texts produced by leading Chinese thinkers.

The China Dream Project, the full title of which is ‘Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream: A Collaborative Research, Reading and Translation Project’, was initiated by Timothy Cheek ,  David Ownby  and Joshua Fogel in Canada. The three project directors are joined by collaborators at other institutions. They are: Liu Qing 刘擎, Gloria Davies, Michel Hockx, Liu Jing, and Jonathan Sullivan. Due to illness in 2014-2015, Geremie R Barmé was unable to participate formally in the project, but through his work for The China Story he is helping to introduce some of the work generated by The Chinese Dream.

To date, Thinking China in The China Story has featured the following work from or related to The Chinese Dream Project:

The Practice of History and China Today The Last Refuge of the Patriot Everything Old is New Again Hong Kong: China’s Other Carl Schmitt in China Wang Gungwu on Living Chinese History

The following project description was provided by Timothy Cheek. — The Editors

________________

This is a collaborative project that examines the published work of reform-era Chinese intellectuals (1995-2015) who are re-reading the past and re-writing the future in light of China’s emergence as a great power. The project is based at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and is funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It is built on collaborations between a number of Canadian scholars, Chinese scholars and colleagues in Australia and the UK and is led by the project directors and project collaborators named above. This five-year project began in 2014 and will continue until 2019. Two meetings in 2015, one in Shanghai in May and one in Vancouver in August, have set the collaborative work in motion.

The public conversations and debates in China that we study range over many topics but they reflect a common aspiration to secure China’s future through interrogating the status quo and asking what lessons the past has to offer. This intellectual discourse is distinct from yet intimately related to the official China Story presented by the Communist Party state. The fact that senior Party officials and the state media have frequently reiterated the importance of ‘telling China’s story well’ 讲好中国的故事, since Party General Secretary Xi Jinping first issued this directive at the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference in August 2013, makes the alternative stories being told in the Sinophone public sphere all the more important. We propose to analyse the efforts of China’s public intellectuals over the past twenty years to fashion a livable, marketable Chinese dream.

Our subjects are academic public intellectuals — scholars who have chosen to use their specialised knowledge and status to engage with the public conversation on the Chinese Dream. The historians among them are re-examining China’s past to uncover themes, practices, forgotten traditions and missed opportunities that might fill the void at the core of China’s current political/ cultural identity and help to create China’s future. These debates are subtle, varied and wide-ranging, and they suggest a breadth and sophistication rarely hinted at in media discussions of China’s intellectual world.

The goals of our project are:

• to analyse and make available the knowledge production of these Chinese intellectuals who debate China’s history, future, and place in the world, for the benefit of Canadian/ Western scholars, policy-makers and citizens; and,
• to build a style of academic work and training to produce transnational knowledge about China through collaboration with Chinese academic partners with the goal of training a generation of ‘new-style scholars’ who work with Chinese and non-Chinese colleagues to study China and the world. Thus, the ‘product’ of this project is both a process of scholarly knowledge production (that also provides graduate training) and the resulting texts (scholarly articles and translations) created by it.

The initial meetings have addressed some of the following questions:

• What are the basic contours of intellectual agency for university professors and public intellectuals in China? What can they argue about with impunity, and in what settings? • To what extent does politics remain at the forefront of intellectual life in China, and how should we understand the content of intellectual politics ? The main textbook division of reform-era Chinese intellectuals has been into the categories of Liberals, New Confucians and the New Left. Are these categories adequate? • What ‘ public ‘ do China’s ‘public intellectuals’ address? How should we understand the ‘directed public sphere’ of post-Mao China? Why, for example, is Liu Xiaobo in prison and Han Han still on Weibo? • What are the economics of intellectual life in today’s China? Does an intellectual get rich from a best-seller? What are the economics of a successful web site and Weibo following? • How do China’s public intellectuals understand the life of ideas in contemporary China? What are the most prestigious journals? Publishing houses? Web platforms? What are the strategies employed by intellectuals who want to get ahead? Have an impact? Stay safe? • How do political pressures make themselves felt within the worlds of public and less public intellectuals?

We have chosen collaborative translation as the method to achieve these goals. Pairs of Chinese/ non-Chinese young scholars collaborate in selecting and translating texts from notable intellectuals under the supervision of the project directors and collaborators. These seminars are text-focused and led by senior scholars. They serve the dual purpose of producing both readable (and annotated) translations and training ‘new-style scholars’ among young Chinese and non-Chinese academics through their working together to address the particularities (linguistic, historical, contextual) of Chinese texts that make translation and understanding difficult yet enriching. The project will also involve graduate students in Translation Studies who will contribute both to the work of translation and to our understanding of translation techniques and key differences between English and Chinese styles of writing and argumentation.

We began with a schema outlining public intellectual life, based on the changes we have seen in Chinese discourse over the past fifty years and with a preliminary ‘intellectual topographical map’ produced by Chinese intellectuals themselves. Chinese intellectuals under Mao resembled Chinese scholar-bureaucrats during the dynastic era in that they served at the state’s pleasure and defined themselves and their roles accordingly. Literati in dynastic China and intellectuals in the Mao era served as moral and professional exemplars: their technical knowledge and their intellectual mastery were seen as being secondary to their roles as exegetes of classical Confucian or Marxist-Maoist knowledge and administrators of a society in constant directed transformation ( jiaohua  教化 under the dynasties; xuanjiao  宣教 under Mao).

All of this began to change in a fundamental way in the 1990s, after Deng Xiaoping’s reaffirmation of reform in his ‘Southern Tour’ of 1992. Although the post-Mao regime maintained its commitment to basic socialist principles, ideology lost its preeminent role under Deng and his successors (Xi Jinping may be changing this…); the ‘Four Cardinal Principles’ and similar ideological underpinnings often played a secondary role to pragmatism, economic growth and market forces. At the same time, China opened up to the international world in ways unseen since the 1920s and 1930s. ‘Knowledge’ became multiple rather than unitary, secular rather than sacred; it included scientific and technical discourses as well as a wide range of social science and other theories Chinese scholars were quick to explore and import from the 1980s.

The impact of these changes on Chinese intellectuals has been profound. Although the state has hardly disappeared — instead it has erected a ‘directed public sphere’ with significant rules and protocols — reform-era China has developed markets for books, ideas and intelligence that could not have existed under Mao. In addition, the state has invested significantly in education, and in the process it has given considerable status to those who have studied and worked in the West. As a result, Western (and neoliberal) university models of professionalism and career management have come to compete with older Chinese modes of loyalty and factionalism, and Chinese scholarly life has developed its own dynamics which are, to some degree (but only to some degree), independent of party-state control. The Internet added important new facets to the scene beginning in the 1990s, allowing writers, scholars and other intellectuals to reach a large public particularly through social media (the present favoured medium being weixin 微信/WeChat) without having to deal with the complexities, and political dimensions, of the book and journal publishing industries.

We began our effort to map this intellectual public sphere by adopting a widely accepted Chinese division of the world of public intellectuals into three ‘lineages’ or ‘clusters’ (see Gan Yang’s Tong san tong 《通三统》, 2007): Liberals, the New Left and New Confucians. Our use of this Chinese taxonomy of intellectual ‘lineages’, ‘clusters’ or ‘types’ is, however, critically motivated. We see it as a useful classificatory scheme but we are more interested in exploring the politics that have informed (and continue to inform) its production. We ask if this current taxonomy has created or exacerbated divisions within mainland intellectual circles. Does the taxonomy have the effect of excluding intellectual positions that fail to accord with one or another designated ‘type’? We are also interested to see the extent to which texts labeled as ‘Liberal’, ‘New Left’ or ‘New Confucian’ do or do not conform to the prescribed attributes.

We naturally draw on the work of international scholars, for instance, from Merle Goldman and Joseph Fewsmith to Geremie Barmé, Gloria Davies and William Callahan. New work on knowledge production in Republican China (up to 1950) led by Robert Culp and Eddy U provides one useful baseline as many Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were similarly engaged and independent.[1] We embrace this historical-comparative perspective. In addition, a project led by Leigh Jenco looks at Chinese thought for what it can contribute to general social theory, and provides a vocabulary for comparing Chinese knowledge production with Western examples, particularly in the context of political philosophy.[2]

Our approach builds upon this research by giving priority to Chinese voices over Western frameworks and by working with Chinese scholars in collaborative translations and interpretations of these vital contemporary debates over the Chinese dream. We take as our inspiration  New Sinology , an approach advocated by Geremie R Barmé of The Australian National University, and which combines both theory and method.[3] New Sinology is grounded in respect for Sinophone discourse, and insists that research on China be based on a deep knowledge of Chinese sources, both literary 文言 and vernacular 白话 texts. Classical Sinology focused largely on the formative texts of China’s traditional civilisation, while the New Sinology extends its focus to modern and contemporary Chinese discourse and their political and social contexts. This theoretical/ methodological perspective in no way excludes mainstream historical and social science approaches, but it demands that scholarship on China be grounded in Chinese-language sources and that today’s New Sinologists work ‘with Chinese’ rather than simply ‘on China’. What this means is that we are engaged in collaborative research with Chinese colleagues to investigate problems of shared concern while coming to appreciate more fully our differing standpoints and interests.

The collaborative translation seminars are running in 2015 and 2016 with preliminary reports being posted here or on our project webpage.

For further information, contact the project directors:

Tim Cheek: [email protected] Josh Fogel: [email protected] David Ownby: [email protected]

_______________

[1] Robert Culp, Eddy U and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds, Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions and Identities , Berkely: University of California Institute of East Asian Studies, 2016.

[2] Leigh Jenco, ed., Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanitie s, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016; and, Michaelle L Browers, Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities , Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.

[3] Geremie R Barmé, ‘On New Sinology’, 2005; and, ‘Worrying About China and New Sinology’, 2008. For these essays, and related material, see the New Sinology section of The China Story website.

International Students' Chinese Dreams

Every year, I assign a speech to the newly enrolled international students, entitled "My Chinese Dream". Speaking in either rusty or skilled Chinese, they talk passionately and sincerely about their Chinese dreams: Fidele from Rwanda says the dream that brought him to China was to learn kung fu and become a kung fu superstar like Jet Li, but now he's determined to be a pilot soaring in the blue sky; Marwa from Egypt wants to "work for the freedom and equality of women", and her dream is to be an English teacher; Yonas from Ethiopia used to dream of being an oil painter, but after becoming a master's student in civil engineering, he now aspires to be a bridge expert like Mao Yisheng; Nazif from Turkey would like to be a trade agent of intraocular lens made in China; Nizi from Pakistan hopes to do business in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Hearing their pursuits, I wrote them a song called We International Students' Chinese Dreams .

"Living in China, I hear all of my classmates talking about Chinese dream

I ask my teacher what Chinese dream is about, she says

The Chinese dream is about rejuvenation of the nation

The Chinese dream is about protecting the civilization with solidarity

The Chinese dream is about building a democratic, free and harmonious society

The Chinese dream is about giving people a secure, and happy life

And the Chinese dream is about carrying out the ecological conservation

Ah, my teacher mama, I also have a Chinese dream

Here in China I wanna learn how to fly a plane

I wanna learn how to build bridges

I wanna learn how to impart knowledge to others

I wanna learn how to practice Chinese medicine

I wanna learn how to build 5G networks

I wanna learn how to be a businessman"

Fidele—my dream is up in the sky

There are two famous quotes from The Analects—Isn't it a pleasure to learn and apply what one has learned? Isn't it a pleasure to greet friends from afar? After I finished explaining their meanings in a Chinese class during Fidele's first year as a graduate student, he came to me and asked what if he changed the last character of his Chinese given name  勒(le)  to  乐(le) , since the latter one means pleasure and happiness in Chinese. I told him it would be a great new name and taught him another Chinese ancient classic De Le Tian Shu (" Receiving a letter from Letian ") written by Yuan Zhen in Tang dynasty, whose title also contains the character  乐 . This poem depicts the true friendship between the two great scholars, Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi. By chatting with him about this book, I expressed my wish for him to be always happy and make best friends here in China.

Fidele is a master's student of NCHU in aeronautical engineering. As a child, he watched many Chinese kung fu movies such as " Shaolin Temple ", " Fist of Fury ", " New Dragon Inn ", " Once upon a Time in China ", etc. Amazed by the martial skills of Jet Li and Jackie Chan, he dreamed of going to China one day to learn Shaolin kung fu. His family rejoiced when he was admitted to the School of Medicine at the University of Rwanda, the best university in his country, with top results of his university entrance exams. When he was still a freshman, Fidele met a martial arts teacher from China. The teacher told Fidele that if he could master martial arts well, he would get the opportunity to learn more at Shaolin Temple in China. So Fidele studied hard and practiced with the teacher every day. Finally all his hard work paid off, as he was selected to study at Shaolin Temple. He told his family the good news, but his mother had some concerns. She wanted Fidele to pursue a career in medicine after graduation, after all it is a well-paid and decent job. But Fidele felt that it would be a unique opportunity to not only learn martial arts and Chinese at Shaolin Temple, but also to pursue his medical studies or other more interesting professions in China.

Fidele has finally arrived in China. To his surprise, there were many more fresh experiences waiting for him, besides the opportunity of learning Shaolin kung fu.

Coming from the tropical Rwanda straight to the freezingly cold Beijing, and then from Beijing International Airport to Songshan Shaolin Temple, Fidele was completely unaware of and unprepared for the extreme coldness. He still remembers the excitement of seeing the snow-capped mountains for the first time in his life when he was on the airplane and the double-decker bus.

The Shaolin Kung Fu program is no joke. Every apprentice has to wake up at 5 am every day and go through a series of training such as leg press, leg planking, staking and gymnastics. On top of that, they have to run between the Daxiong Grand Hall and the Dharma Cave, go over the mountains, carry water buckets and chop wood to build up their muscles and stamina. Exactly at 8 o'clock, they will have breakfast, and then continue to practice until noon, with no rest in the afternoon.

A year later, as the representative of foreign apprentices in the Shaolin Temple, Fidele participated in the 2014 CCTV4 Spring Festival Gala, and toured all over the country with the monks of the Shaolin Temple to do martial performances. During those tours, what stroke him the most is to know that anyone in China can fulfill their dreams as long as they work hard, and that one will also gain respect if one respects others.

Fidele wins the team champion of the First International Shaolin Wushu Festival in Kaifeng, Henan (the first from left).

Fidele fell in love with Chinese culture. He began to know more about China's developed aviation industry in the two-year nationwide tour, which made him believe that the aircraft manufacturing is one of the fields Rwanda should learn from China. He then decided to choose aviation manufacturing to continue his study. That's why he came to study at NCHU.

Fidele is fluent in English, French and Chinese. He studied professional courses with Chinese students, and his grades were the top among his peers. Therefore, he received the CSC National Full Scholarship, and became the only international student who won the Tellhow Scholarship Nomination Award. What he enjoys most is to do internship at Hainan Airlines where he could learn how to maintain large planes and fly one in a simulated cockpit at the aviation base. Flying in the sky is his biggest dream.

Fidele learns to maintain aircrafts at Guanyi Aviation.

Fidele strives his best at learning Chinese. I often say that Chinese characters are the essence of Chinese culture, however, some of the international students are only willing to learn pinyin (the pronunciation of the characters). Different from others, Fidele would memorize all the texts in both Pinyin and Chinese characters, among which "Sun Tzu's Art of War " and " Thirty-six Strategies " are his favorites. He would often ask me to share more stories in these two classics. Through him and other international students, I also learned what kind of Chinese culture foreigners may be interested. He repeated several times to me that his greatest achievement in China is becoming a person who is self-disciplined and not afraid of difficulties, just like an old Chinese saying goes, "there is no insurmountable mountain in the world, as long as you are willing to climb it".

Marwa and her dream of being a university teacher

The beautiful Arabian girl Marwa in the photo, who comes from Egypt, is a master's student majoring in English. She once told me that in Egypt, there's a saying "Seek knowledge even if it's in places as far as China".

Before coming to China, Marwa was a student majoring in English at Misr International University. One year, Mr. Huang, a visiting scholar at Cairo University from China, moved in next door to her house. She asked Mr. Huang why he had chosen Egypt as his destination. He told her that both Egypt and China boast the same cultural foundation and thousands-year storied history, so he decided to learn everything about Egypt and experience the land where the pharaohs had once lived. Huang introduced China and Chinese culture to her, and the two would often talk and compare the similarities and differences between their own cultures. Since then, Marwa has been deeply attracted by the mysterious Chinese culture.

In 2017, Marwa got a job as an assistant at Misr Internatioal University. In the summer vacation of her junior year, she applied for a one-month student volunteer exchange program in Hangzhou, out of her interest in China. After a 12-hour flight, she traveled from Cairo to Beijing, then took another 2.5-hour flight to Hangzhou. Getting off the plane, she saw a group of Chinese classmates who looked, dressed, spoke and did things in a different way from hers, but were highly hospitable and treated her nicely. The Chinese classmates took her and 5 other Egyptian students to the hotel, helped them get a quick check-in, carried their luggage to the rooms, and told them how to use the TV, WiFi, air conditioning, shower and other appliances. On top of those, they also invited these newly arrived international students to taste local cuisines and took them to appreciate the views in Hangzhou, which swept away all of Marwa's previous worries and nervousness before landing in China. During their talks, the confidence and pride of Chinese youth in the country's system and culture made her more excited about what she might experience next in China.

As a volunteer Marwa became an English teacher in a middle school in Shaoxing City, Zhejiang province, and has since been in love with the hard-working, brave, and warm-hearted Chinese.

In 2018, Marwa graduated with a bachelor's degree and tried hard to find opportunities to study for a master's degree in China. That's why she submitted her resume to Nanchang Hangkong University. I was touched by her love for Chinese culture in her personal statement and enrolled her as a master's student. Marwa is very smart and arduous. From classic masterpieces such as " Book of Changes ", " Tao Te Ching ", " Analects ", " Zhuangzi ", " Mencius " and " Records of the Grand Historian ", to Tang poetry, Song poetry and Yuan music, as well as other aspects of Chinese culture, I have tried my best to introduce the grand and sophisticated system of Chinese culture bit by bit to her. Watching her progress every day gives me a sense of pride and satisfaction. It's also because of my conversations with her that I completed the book "Key to Chinese Culture".

She once discussed with me the meaning of "the benevolent loves others", and I told her that by observing the Chinese character 仁( pinyin ren , which means benevolence), one can see that it emphasizes the relationship between people. In Chinese culture, “people” refers to the sum of social relations. Everyone has many of their own social roles, like a parent, a child, a partner, a teacher, a student, or a colleague, etc. Then she would still have more questions to ask, "Why do Chinese women have such a high status?" -"Because in China, 'women hold up half the sky'." "Why are most Chinese people born with a relatively good overall thinking?" -"Because in the eyes of Chinese people, humans, Nature and the society, the three form a whole, hence the long-held philosophy in China that 'heaven and humans are a harmonious one'." I would always patiently answer her questions.

Since her postgraduate studies, Marwa has taught the course of English Academic Paper Writing to undergraduate students. Now she's officially one of the foreign teachers working full-time at NCHU. Her classes are enthralling and very popular among the students. She is an excellent English user with an easily-understood accent, a grammatically high-standard writing style and a well-formed logic. During her teaching, she focuses on training her students' critical thinking. Interestingly, because of the lovely, beautiful and patient Marwa, this once-least-welcomed writing course among the boy students, became so popular that the guys would rush to the classroom just to secure a seat and compete to answer questions during her class.

Marwa with her Chinese student.

Nazif—China is where my dream life comes true

Nazif is a tall and handsome Turkish student of Indo-European descent who used to study at NCHU. Proficient in both English and Chinese, he was selected by his Chinese classmates as the best English male host in the International College. They invited him to be the host at various celebration occasions, which he quite enjoyed and would appear on one stage after another with a well-groomed hairstyle and decent formal attire.

Nazif likes Chinese a lot. He says that whenever he listens to people speaking Chinese, it's as if they were singing a beautiful song, which makes him enchanted. At a very young age, he longed to master Chinese so that one day he could go to China to study. In high school, there was an international Chinese teacher who taught him Chinese attentively and constantly encouraged him, which in the end helped him realize his dream.

At the end of August 2015, Nazif, having graduated from high school, flew from Istanbul to Beijing. Before departure, he asked a Turkish friend living there to pick him up at the airport at 5:00 am. However, after landing at the airport, his friend was nowhere to be found. Just when he was anxious and feeling helpless, a decent-looking airport policeman walked up to him and handed his own mobile phone to Nazif, telling him to call the friend. But the line was always busy. The policeman bought Nazif bottled water, bread and instant noodles for breakfast, and comforted him in English: "Don't worry, you can wait at the airport and come to me if you have any difficulties." Before Nazif could thank him, the police officer left and continued to work on duty. Wandering aimlessly at the airport for more than two hours, Nazif saw the police officer running to him, sweating heavily. He told Nazif that his friend had called and the reason he was late was because he thought the arrival time was 5:00 in the afternoon instead of 5:00 in the morning. He then told Nazif to go to Gate 4 and wait for his friend who would arrive soon. As a newcomer in China, Nazif immediately felt the warmth and kindness of the Chinese people.

After coming to China, he first studied Chinese at Tianjin University for a year, and was later admitted to NCHU. As a star of extracurricular activities on campus, he participated in the Jiangxi Provincial Chinese Language Competition for International Students and won the third place. He hosted the campus welcome party and the CPC history knowledge competition for Chinese/foreign faculty and students, and participated in the promo video shooting of the second "Poyang Lake International Bird Watching" organized by Jiangxi Jingshi TV. He also did dubbing work in a large number of the University's promo videos. In his senior year, considering his major was business administration and that he is good at English, Chinese, and Turkey, I put him on an internship at an  intraocular lens trading company to learn how to do foreign trade. There, Nazif took to the job like a duck to water and met many young, promising colleagues. He said that he saw the spirit of the Chinese people in them.

After graduation, he was recommended to continue his studies at NCHU for master's degree in business administration. During this period, Nazif not only studied each course diligently, but also actively communicated with teachers and classmates to better his scientific research thinking and teamwork ability. He said in his graduation speech: "During the past 7 years in China, I have been completely in love with this secure, peaceful and lovely country. The most precious years of my youth are spent in China, and my friends are all Chinese. So I no longer consider myself as a foreigner. If possible, I'm willing to be a bridge of friendship between China and Turkey. I really want to stay in China and use what I have to contribute to China. This land has shaped me, and given me a lot of opportunities. This is the place that allows me to live my dream life.”

Nazif learns to make ceramics in Jingdezhen.

Yonas—the young man who dreams to be a bridge expert

Yonas is from Shashamane, Ethiopia, a city rich in coffee and roses. This tall, handsome, gentle, and sympathetic man is interested in drawing and table tennis. The figures and scenery he paints are vivid and appealing. His oil paintings are bold and passionate in colors, completed with delicate brushstrokes and has a strong effect in terms of the depth of fields, which fully demonstrate the artistic conception and style represented by the objects in his works.

This year marks Yonas' fourth year in China. He is currently a master's student in civil engineering at NCHU. Due to his excellent expression skills, he was recommended by me to take part in a TV program made by Jiangxi Jingshi TV. Yonas made a feature film introducing Poyang Lake and migratory birds in fluent Chinese and English, which got viewed by people across the globe through social media platforms Facebook and YouTube. Because of Yonas, more people in the world have learned about Poyang Lake and the migratory birds. His parents, teachers and classmates in his hometown also saw the program and praised him, saying he looked so cool on TV, and that he did a good job introducing the beautiful Jiangxi to the world.

On weekends, Yonas likes to carry a drawing board to sketch in the old town of Nanchang, enjoy the lively streets and draw people passing by. He draws old ladies dancing square dances, sweet young couples holding hands, and kids capering about, all wearing a smiling face. The locals in Nanchang are very welcoming. When he's painting, many strangers chat with him, which makes him feel as if he were with his family; in the evening, he stands on the platform of Tengwang Pavilion watching the sunset and catching the gentle river breeze, knowing that Nanchang has become his second hometown.

All the teachers and classmates love to ask Yonas to paint them portraits, to which he always happily accepts the invitations. His works are true to life. One day, he wanted to paint a portrait of me, but I didn't have time to model for him. Therefore, I gave him a photo of me. A few days later, he came to me with a painting. The short-haired woman in the painting looks exactly like me. However, as the painting was completed based on a photo, there were no highlights on my eyes and face. What's more, he carefully put the painting in a black frame with no blank space left at all and gave it to me in a solemn manner. I told him that the lady in the painting was more beautiful than me, while secretly thinking how I should explain to him the different customs of people from different cultures framing their portraits.

A few days later, I replaced the black frame with a wooden colored one and left some blank areas around the painting to be seen. I told him that when Chinese people paint living ones, there are several rituals to follow. There should be light on the face and sparkles in the eyes, the four sides of the painting should be left seen, the painting needs to be framed with light-colored wooden frames, and the black frame is only suitable for people who have passed away. At first he was a little embarrassed, then we looked at each other and laughed. "The differences between Chinese and Western cultures are really huge. Thank you, my teacher, for teaching me so much." He said. He picked up the brush again and added highlights to my eyes and face, and the portrait came to life instantly. I laid this portrait on my desk with alacrity.

Because of his love for painting, Yonas wanted to switch his major for his master's degree from civil engineering to art design. I took a few photos of his works and sent them to my painter friends for professional comments. They said in a sincere and straightforward way that as an amateur, he had quite a good painting skill, but if he wanted to make painting a career, there was still a long way to go. I couldn't tell him face to face the disappointing news that might curb his enthusiasm in painting.

Instead, I came up with an alternative idea. I took him to Bada Shanren Memorial Hall, where he got to understand the principles held by Zhu Da (aka Bada Shanren), one of the most famous ink wash painters in China, that “the artists should not rigidly follow the rules, but seek to innovate. In addition to pursuing the beauty of appearances such as shapes, lines, and colors, it is also necessary to convey the spirit and inner beauty of the characters and things in the paintings.” Zhu's works manifest the idea of “less is more”. Some of his paintings depict just one single bird or rock in a couple of brushstrokes on a large piece of paper, yet they are extremely lifelike and appealing; we then visited Cai Chao's Traditional Chinese Painting Studio, where he saw a variety of Chinese paintings, completed in different styles and skills, portraying the depth, broadness and the vicissitude of our life; next we had an enlightening trip to the lacquer art studio showcasing the works of Mr. Xiong Jianxin, a master of arts and crafts in China, where he witnessed how lacquer art integrates traditional techniques of carving, stacking, engraving, inlaying, painting and grinding with the art of modern oil painting; in the end, I showed him around the Ceramics Studio of Wu Tianlin, a luminary in the Chinese porcelain art, where he appreciated those exquisite ceramic works, on which beautiful patterns of landscape, flowers, birds and figures, together with famous lines from poems and essays complement each other harmoniously.

Clever as he is, Yonas quickly understood what I was trying to tell him through these tours. He told me he would continue to use his painting skills in bridge design, and that one day he would be Ethiopia's Mao Yisheng, a highly prestigious Chinese bridge designer. Once he made up his mind, his grades improved by leaps and bounds, thus winning a scholarship as a freshman in the graduate school. When Jiangxi International Company came to our campus to hire new blood, Yonas was the only student who received a job offer.

Yonas visits Jingdezhen Ceramics Biennale (the first from left).

Yonas participates in the soiree of Porcelain's Journey Along the Silk Road.

Yonas learns to make ceramics in Jingdezhen (the second from left).

Nizi—the dream seeker travelling in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

Nizi experiences skating at Mingyue Mountain in Yichun.

The fine-looking and eloquent Pakistani student Nizi is one of NCHU's first graduates majoring in aerospace engineering. Whenever he meets people for the first time, he likes to introduce himself in a passionate way: "My name is Zhuang Yili. Zhuang is from Zhuangzi, a respectful ancient Chinese philosopher. Yi comes from the word yili, which means perseverance. And li is in the Chinese word lirang, meaning politeness." He's very satisfied with his self-introduction, thinking it's kind of a special one. When he was studying at NCHU, he would always ask me, "Ms Xie, do you think I'm like a real Chinese now?"

Born in 1990, Nizi is a witty, sincere, funny and very communicative young man. He has a very high level of English listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation. He is also proficient in Chinese with a HSK level-5 certificate. In addition, he can speak Urdu, Pashto and Hindi.

After graduation, Nizi was disappointed and frustrated by not being able to find a suitable job. He felt that the future was bleak, thus consulting me on WeChat from time to time. I suggested he use his advantage in mastering multiple languages and broaden the channels and fields when looking for a job. He followed my advice and became an IELTS tutor. Since 2014, he had worked as an ESL teacher at Webi, an English training institution, and concurrently as an overseas project manager of MAP Engineering Co., Ltd. Due to his outstanding performance in the team of the training school, he was then in charge of the Webi online platform team since 2016, responsible for developing course materials. He successfully built an IELTS course system suitable for part-time English learners, and managed a team of 6 teachers. By actively promoting the online learning platform, he had built a large client base of foreign language learning for the institution.

In December 2020, Nizi started an import and export trade company in Xi'an, whose business scope covers food sales, knitted textiles and raw material sales, metal material sales, technical services, technical development, consultation and exchanges, and etc. Thanks to China's national strategy "Belt and Road Initiative" and the ironclad relation between China and Pakistan, countless Pakistani like Nizi have been bringing Made-in-China products back to their home country.

Although his work is getting busier, he still misses his alma mater. Those wonderful tours he had when he was living in Jiangxi are still mentioned by him every now and then: going to Fuzhou to follow the footsteps of the playwright Tang Xianzu, known as the Oriental Shakespeare; visiting Jingdezhen, the thousand-year-old porcelain capital, to appreciate ceramics; traveling to Ganzhou to learn about China's revolutionary history; climbing up Mount Lu, described by numerous ancient poets, where Li Bai wrote down “its torrent dashes down three thousand feet from high” and Su Shi said one will never tell the true face of Mount Lu; and spending time on Sanqing Mountain, a famous Taoist mountain covered by clouds and fog. Of all the trips, the one that excites him the most is going to the Ski Resort on Mingyue Mountain in winter because it hardly snows in his home country. To him, snow is like a carpet of cotton batting, a bright moon in the sky and a crispy meringue tipped with yellow and pink. The buckwheat flowers scent the cold air, as if the snowflakes are fragrant as well. What a gorgeous view!

Nizi says Nanchang is his second hometown. The locals in Nanchang start a fresh new day with a bowl of Nanchang stir-fried rice noodles and some soup stewed in a pottery pot. When he first came to Nanchang, Nizi followed the local customs and quickly fell in love with the noodles and soup here. With a cost of only 5 yuan, one could get to taste a mouthful of smooth and fragrant rice noodles and the soup made with a secret recipe that has been passed down for thousands of years, one will enjoy the feeling of delicacies dancing on the tip of the taste buds. Besides the gourmet foods, Nizi still remembers the shock that Wugong Mountain brought him: when he reached the top of the mountain, he saw an endless lush prairie. White fluffy clouds and a seemingly endless grassland can make all troubles and worries disappear. At night, he and his friends lie in the tent, watching the starry sky, as if they were taken right back to their carefree childhood. His friends took him to eat Lianhua (lotus) braised duck cutlets in blood sauce. He thought it was too spicy yet tasty. He asked, "Doesn't the name of this dish contain lotus? Why are there only duck cutlets but no lotus?" Everyone at the table laughed.

International students have a more objective understanding of the richness and diversity of different civilizations. An unimpeded two-way exchange between countries enables the students to have an international perspective and philosophies, thus helping them form an ever-growing endogenous strength for the development of their own countries, the common well-being of mankind and the sustainable development of the world. Studying overseas is not only a good choice for young people from different countries to travel and communicate, but also a good opportunity to share global talents and resources for all countries. In the new era, China will cultivate more international talents in a further open and inclusive manner. (written by Yiqing)

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My Chinese dream—to become a Mr China

[The United States] Paul McLellan Alexander Ⅲ, Shenyang University

After I came to China, completed my university studies, got married and had children, I knew that I must have saved the Galaxy in my last life. I feel so lucky to choose to live in China and gradually realize my Chinese dream - to become a "Mr China."

In the summer of 2005, I first came to China at the age of 18. I remember clearly that my uncle and I arrived at the hotel in Hong Kong in the small hours of the morning. Although the long journey made me very tired, I did not feel drowsy but excited and curious. For me, unlike the United States, everything in China is brand new! So I begged my uncle to take me around the hotel. My uncle ordered me a plate of smelly black fried tofu on the Snack Street.

He told me it was a super delicious gift from God! It doesn't look delicious and smells bad, but my uncle gave me the first lesson about China. "Don't judge from the appearance and rush to conclusions, taste it first, then say how you feel," he said. I pinched my nose and ate a mouthful. Although not so good-looking, it tastes delicious after eating more. I almost ate a plate of stinky tofu. I seem to understand my uncle’s words, and from then on, my Chinese dream kicked off.

I chose to study Chinese language at East China Normal University and to learn about this mysterious country and culture.Time passed quickly, and the year of study language came to an end. During this period, I fell in love with the people of China, the food, and the comfortable and harmonious atmosphere I couldn't experience in the US. Everything makes me feel so pleasant and unforgettable.

Back in the United States, I can't stop my longing for China. Whenever someone asks me about my life in Shanghai, my memories revived. I tried to continue my studies of Chinese and in the US made a lot of friends from China. They gave me a Chinese nickname, "Egg Zhang." The reason is that I am like the structure of an egg, the outside is protein (white people), but the core is egg yolks (yellow people). I like this nickname very much – this is me, there is a passion of China under the white skin. However, without the environment of Chinese language, I still can neither master this language nor know China better.

Three years ago, things I never dared to think about happened. With the strong support of my family and my own efforts, I got the chance to study in China again. To better understand Chinese and learn Chinese culture in different regions, I chose Shenyang, a northern city with a long history. It turns out this is a most intelligent decision I have made in my life. While studying at Shenyang University, I fell in love and met my beautiful and charming wife. She took me to many places of interest, taught me to speak a lot of Northeast dialect and let me experience the warm affection between her family and relatives.

And my command of Chinese has improved unknowingly. I still remember a very interesting episode. When I first met my wife's grandfather's brother, he asked me in Northeast dialect, "How many brothers do you have? " I was in a fog; I never sang a single song, why did he ask me how many songs? I didn't understand until my wife explained it to me. What an interesting language Northeast dialect is, what a kind relative he is! I really love this big family so much.

After holding a traditional Chinese wedding, my wife and I lived a real Chinese life in Shenyang. My Chinese dream has been fulfilled so far. In May 2020, our son came into this world, which is a precious gift to me once again.

One night, I chatted with my wife about my life in China and said, "I must have saved the Galaxy in my previous life, so I can come to China in this life to have such a wonderful wife and such a handsome son."

China is becoming stronger. I will continue my study of Chinese language and culture, so as to realize my Chinese dream – to become a "Mr China". I want to tell more foreigners what I have seen and heard in China, so that they can learn about and fall in love with the real China as I do.

The story is from "My Beautiful Encounter with China" Essay Competition organized by the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchanges (CSCSE).

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The Chinese Dream vs. The American Dream

Qin Xiaoying

The current Chinese generation’s knowledge and understanding of the American dream is neither abundant nor far-reaching. Younger generations have a sense of the American dream from Pretty Woman , a popular film starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere. For the middle-aged, William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream provides a four-decade insight into the American dream. And, for many older generations in China, their limited understanding of the American dream likely came from Martin Luther King’s famous I Have a Dream speech. 

The American dream and its influence in the world is an objective reality. Since the founding of the United States of America, with unique natural resources and geographical environment, creative transplantation of progressive European ideas of equality and liberty and a powerful union of individualist values, many people have made or are making their dreams come true. Even in today’s information age, successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft have offered great examples of how one can achieve the American dream. Therefore, it begs the question:  How is the Chinese dream, as proposed by President Xi Jinping, different from the American dream? 

Xi’s Chinese dream incorporates a dream that has been cherished by the Chinese people for over a century. The desire to do better and break out of the protracted state of poverty and weakness has become China’s national dream. In other words, the so-called Chinese dream actually represents a desire to be free of suffering and misfortune. 

Such a mentality first appeared 170 years ago out of the Opium Wars. When Japan launched massive aggression, it soon developed into a strong awareness to save the nation and ensure its survival. For a civilization of several millennia and with high self-esteem, the bullying and humiliation suffered in the 19 th and 20 th centuries has become an internal wound suffered by the whole nation. In this way, the Chinese dream is first of all a collective concept where a rich country and strong army are paramount. Such a collective appeal and vision is quite different from the individualist values of the American dream. 

As the Chinese dream is distinctly collective and involves the nation as a whole, it naturally embodies bolder and clearer moves in diplomatic and military fields as well as in overall national strength. The dream may be disaggregated into a diplomatic dream, a strong army dream and a (growing) national strength dream. In his frequent diplomatic activities this year, Xi stressed again and again that China and the world were interrelated and interdependent, demonstrating an apparent hope for changing the irrational international economic order. His warning against disturbance in regional situations and world peace out of “selfish interest” shows China’s increasing sense of responsibility in international affairs and can be seen as an expression of the diplomatic dream. Furthermore, the announcement that over 40 military exercises of various kinds will be held this year is the most direct proof of the military or strong army dream. 

Some people may wonder whether the endeavor to realize the Chinese dream with a strong collective characteristic of the whole nation would turn into a threat to the outside world. This may be an unarticulated doubt haunting many Western analysts and media. However, Xi has actually given his answer to it. According to him, the Chinese dream can only be realized by seeking China’s own path. Where is this path? It has been trodden with over 30 years of reform and opening up, through profound lessons from the past 170 years and on the basis of the five millennia of Chinese civilization. Just as a person’s DNA does not change over a lifespan, the nation’s code of survival does not easily alter. For China, a country that has traditionally found self-restraint a virtue and never engaged in expansion or pursued hegemony, the historical trajectory cannot be changed. 

The Chinese dream is neither Bismarck’s blood and iron policy, nor the Yamato nation’s greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, nor “the sun never sets on the British Empire” type. The dream for a reinvigorated stronger nation is ultimately a dream in pursuit of happiness . In this sense, the Chinese dream and the American dream indeed have similar objectives achieved by different paths.

Qin Xiaoying is a Research Scholar with the China Foundation for International and Strategic Studies.

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Realize Youthful Dreams

Realize Youthful Dreams*

May 4, 2013

The 18th CPC National Congress put forward a master blueprint for completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects and accelerating socialist modernization, and it issued a call for achieving the Two Centenary Goals. We made clear our desire to realize the Chinese Dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation in accordance with the guiding principles of the Congress. At present, all are discussing the Chinese Dream and thinking about how it relates to them and what they need to do to realize it.

– The Chinese Dream pertains to the past and the present, but also the future. It is the crystallization of the tireless efforts of countless people with lofty ideals, embraces the yearnings of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, and reveals the prospect of a bright future, when our country will be prosperous and strong, the nation will be rejuvenated, and the people will enjoy a happy life.

– The Chinese Dream is the dream of the country and the nation, but also of every ordinary Chinese. One can do well only when one’s country and nation do well. Only if everyone strives for a better tomorrow can our efforts be aggregated into a powerful force to realize the Chinese Dream.

– The Chinese Dream is ours, but also yours, the younger generation. The great renewal of the Chinese nation will eventually become a reality in the course of the successive efforts of the youth.

During all periods of revolution, construction and reform, the Party has always valued, cared about and trusted young people, and placed great expectations on the younger generations. The Party believes that young people represent the future of our country and the hope of our nation, regards them as a vital contingent for the cause of the Party and the people, and always encourages them to realize their ideals in the great struggle of the people.

Today, we are closer than at any time in history to attaining the goal of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and we have greater confidence in and capability for achieving this goal than ever before. "The last one tenth of the journey demands half the effort." The closer we are to achieving the goal of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the more we should redouble our efforts and not slacken our pace, and the more we must mobilize all young people to this end.

Looking ahead, we can see that our younger generation has a promising future, and will accomplish much. It is a law of history that "the waves of the Yangtze River from behind drive on those ahead," and it is the responsibility of young people to surpass their elders. Young people need to boldly assume the heavy responsibilities that the times impose on you, aim high, be practical and realistic, and put your youthful dreams into action in the course of realizing the Chinese Dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

First, young people must be firm in your ideals and convictions. "One must both have great ambition and make tireless efforts to achieve great exploits." Ideals provide direction in life, and convictions determine the success of a cause. Without ideals and convictions one's spirit becomes weak. The Chinese Dream is the common ideal of the people of all ethnic groups, and a lofty ideal that young people should harbor. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the correct path for leading the people in realizing the Chinese Dream that the Party articulated after untold hardships, and all young people should firmly adopt it as a guideline for your lives.

Young people should guide your actions with Deng Xiaoping Theory, the important thought of the Three Represents and the Scientific Outlook on Development; base your ideals and convictions on the rational recognition and acceptance of scientific theories, on a correct understanding of the laws of history, and on an accurate understanding of the basic national conditions; keep enhancing your confidence in the Chinese path, theories and system; have more faith in the Party's leadership; and always follow the Party in upholding Chinese socialism.

Second, young people must have professional competence. Learning is necessary for growth and progress, while practice is the way to improve competence. The qualities and competence of young people will have a direct influence on the course of realizing the Chinese Dream. There is an ancient Chinese saying, "Learning is the bow, while competence is the arrow." This means that the foundation of learning is like a bow, while competence is like an arrow; only with rich knowledge can one give full play to one’s competence. Young people are in the prime time of learning. You should regard learning as a top priority, a responsibility, a moral support and a lifestyle. You should establish a conviction that dreams start from learning and career success depends on competence. You should make assiduous learning a driving force and competence building a resource for your youthful endeavors.

Young people must orient yourselves to modernization, the world and the future, have a sense of urgency in updating your knowledge, study with great eagerness, lay a good foundation of basic knowledge while updating it promptly, assiduously study theories while enthusiastically developing skills, and constantly enhance your competence and capabilities to meet the development needs of our times and the requirements of our undertaking. Young people must apply what you have learned, stay close to the grassroots and the populace, and, in the great furnace of the reform and opening up and socialist modernization, and in the great school of society, acquire true skills and genuine knowledge, improve competence, and make yourselves capable personnel who can shoulder important social responsibilities.

Third, young people must dare to innovate and create. Innovation is the soul driving a nation's progress and an inexhaustible source of a country's prosperity. It is also an essential part of the Chinese national character. This is what Confucius meant when he said, "If you can in one day renovate yourself, do so from day to day. Yea, let there be daily renovation." Life never favors those who follow the beaten track and are satisfied with the status quo, and it never waits for the unambitious and those who sit idle and enjoy the fruits of others' work. Instead, it provides more opportunities for those who have the ability and courage to innovate. Young people are the most dynamic and most creative group of our society, and should stand in the forefront of innovation and creation.

Young people should dare to be the first, boldly free their minds and progress with the times, dare to seek high and low for a way to forge ahead, and be ambitious to learn from and then surpass the older generation. With your youthful energy, you can create a country of youth and a nation of youth. Young people should have the willpower to cut paths through mountains and build bridges over rivers, and be indomitable and advance bravely in bringing forth new ideas. You should have a pragmatic attitude that pursues truth, so you can constantly accumulate experience and achieve results in the course of bringing forth new ideas in your chosen occupations.

Fourth, young people must be devoted to hard work. "The sharpness of a sword results from repeated grinding, while the fragrance of plum blossoms comes from frigid weather." Human ideals are not easy to achieve, but need hard work. From poverty to prosperity, and from weakness to strength, China has been able to progress step by step over centuries thanks to the tenacity of one generation after another, and to the nation's spirit of constant self-improvement through hard work. Currently we are facing important opportunities for development, but we are also facing unprecedented difficulties and challenges. The dream stretches out before us and the road lies at our feet. Those who overcome their weaknesses are powerful, and those who keep improving themselves come out victors. If we are to achieve our development goals, young people must work long and hard without letup.

Young people must bear in mind that "empty talk harms the country, while hard work makes it flourish" and put this into practice. You must work hard at your own posts, start from trivial things, and create your own splendid life with hard work, outstanding performances and remarkable achievements. Young people must never fear difficulties, but try to overcome them; you should go to the grassroots with tough conditions and the frontline for national construction and project development to temper yourselves and enhance your capabilities. Young people must have the courage and determination to start up businesses and do pioneering work, try to blaze new trails and start new endeavors in reform and opening up, and constantly create new prospects for their career development.

Fifth, young people must temper your character. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is a form of socialism in which material and cultural progresses go hand in hand. It is difficult for a nation without inner strength to be self-reliant, and a cause that lacks a cultural buttress cannot be sustained for long. Young people are a social force that leads the social ethos. The cultural attainment of a nation is represented mostly by the morality and mental outlook of the younger generation.

Young people must integrate correct moral cognition, conscious moral development and active moral practice, conscientiously establish and practice the core socialist values, and take the lead in advocating good social conduct. Young people must strengthen theoretical improvement and moral cultivation, take the initiative to carry forward patriotism, collectivism and socialism, and actively advocate social and professional ethics, and family virtues. Young people should bear in mind that "virtue uplifts, while vice debases" and always be optimists and persons of integrity who have a healthy lifestyle. Young people should advocate new social trends, be the first in learning from Lei Feng, take an active part in voluntary work, shoulder social responsibilities, care for others, help the poor, the weak and the disabled, and do other good and practical deeds, so as to promote social progress with their actions.

The theme of the Chinese youth movement today is to strive to realize the Chinese Dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The Chinese Communist Youth League should carry out extensive educational and practical activities with the theme of "My Chinese Dream" for young Chinese. It should sow the seeds of and ignite the dreams of each youth so that more young people dare to dream and pursue their dreams. In this way all young people can increase their youthful energy to realize the Chinese Dream. The League should lay a solid intellectual basis for all young Chinese with the Chinese Dream, and educate and help them to establish a correct world view, outlook on life and sense of values, always love our country, our people and our nation, and firmly follow the Party along the Chinese path. The League should inspire young people's sense of historical responsibility through the Chinese Dream, carry forward the fine tradition of "the League taking action upon the Party's call," combine its work with Party and government work, and organize and mobilize young people to support reform, promote development and maintain stability. The League must actively offer services for young people in pursuing their dreams, effectively improve its practice, get close to young people at the primary level, address their concerns and pressing needs, represent and protect the common interests and needs of the young people, and try to build a favorable environment for their growth and development.

Role models from among the youngsters are good examples for young people to learn from; they shoulder more social responsibilities and public expectations, and play a strong exemplary and leading role among young people, and even in society as a whole. I hope these role models will make persistent efforts, be strict with themselves, be determined to go ahead, and set a good example to all young people with their personal development, moral pursuit and exemplary action.

A country prospers if its youth is thriving; a country is strong if its youth is robust. Ever since its founding in 1921 the Party has represented, drawn over and relied on young Chinese people. Party committees and governments at all levels must fully trust in, care for and be strict with young people; give a wider scope for their thoughts, build a larger stage for their practice and innovation, provide more opportunities for the pursuit of their life goals, and create more favorable conditions for their career development. Officials at all levels must pay attention to young people's aspirations, help them to grow, support them to start their own businesses, become their bosom friends, and show enthusiasm for youth work.

Everybody is young once in their life. Now is the time for you to make the most of your youth; and the future is a time for you to look back on it. The path of life is sometimes level, sometimes steep; sometimes smooth, sometimes rough; sometimes straight, sometimes crooked. Young people are faced with a wide range of choices. But what is important for you is to be guided by a correct world view, outlook on life and sense of values when you are making your choices. The life experiences of countless successful people suggest that young people who choose to endure hardships will be duly rewarded, and those who make contributions to society are the ones who deserve respect. Tribulations, setbacks and tests have proved to be good for young people in their later life. You need to have strength of character to be undaunted when confronting good or bad fortune, have a firm will to keep pressing forward in spite of repeated setbacks, remain optimistic in all circumstances, turn your failures into a driving force, and learn from your experiences, so that your life is raised to a higher plane. In short, the only way you can have fond memories of a well-spent, warm and lasting youth with no regrets is to work enthusiastically and energetically, tenaciously overcome all obstacles, and make a contribution to the people while you are still young.

I firmly believe that if the people of all ethnic groups unite under the Party's leadership, stand on solid ground and forge ahead with a pioneering spirit, we can certainly build a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious modern socialist country by the middle of this century. And all our young people will surely witness and share in the realization of the Chinese Dream along with the people of all ethnic groups.

* Part of the speech to outstanding young representatives from all walks of life.

 (Not to be republished for any commercial or other purposes.)

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My Chinese Dream

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: Dream

Since used by incumbent Chinese president Xi Jinping on November 29, 2012, the term meaning to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, Chinese dream, has been a catchword. Every Chinese is talking about it. “My Chinese dream is to get a stable job”, a laid-off worker said when investigated. “Mine is to give birth to lovely twin brother and sister”, a pregnant woman claimed. If asked, as a grassroots undergraduate, my Chinese dream is that we young people have confidence in and hope for a bright future.

Many cases of college students killing their schoolmates draw people’s attention. To name a few, this April, a junior undergraduate Jiang in Fudan University was poisoned by his roommate Huang to death just because of a small quarrel. In 2010, one was killed and two were wounded by student Zeng of Sichuan University only for mocking his plain appearance. A versatile student Zhu from Tsinghua University was poisoned by an intimate of her according to the police in 1994. How ridiculous these top students’ behaviors are!

They are smart and hard-working enough to enter college, but they are stupid and diffident enough to give up their years of hard work and decades of bright future in the blink of an eye just for an ill-considered impulse. They may be top students, but definitely not excellent students. As the old saying goes, man proposes, God disposes. We students should strive for a bright future through our competence, rather than turning to some evil deeds or impractical shortcuts.

The Essay on Challenges Face by First Year Students at University

Education can be referring as the pathway of success for students striving in the learning process of education system. However on the other hand this seems not true and easy for students that are beginning their first year of study at university level, as often there are several factors relating to the life at the university. These generally become a great deal of challenges especially for first ...

No one is perfect, so what’s important is to correct your own demerits, not to bear a grudge on others’ merits. “I worked hard for 18 years, only to have a cup of coffee with you. ” This phenomenon is getting more and more pervasive. Nowadays, the gap between the rich and the poor is so big that those born poor are likely to toil all their lives to catch up with the rich second generation. As a result, many young people become cynical and begin to lose heart on their comparatively slim chance of success.

Of course they have good reason to think that way. It’s proved that the better family background one has, the easier he gets a job and the higher his initial salary is. There is no doubt that students by no means start from the same point and rich students are easier to achieve success. However, should we grassroots students give up our dreams just because some stupid gaps? Should we lose hope on our future just because we’ve seen through the merciless reality? Should we let down our loved ones and ourselves just because of our own cowardice?

No! As young and energetic college students, we must be confident and hopeful that a bright future is beckoning to us somewhere. We just need to stay hungry for knowledge and stay foolish about the cruelty of life. We don’t love life for its perfection; we love life because of its authenticity. Realizing its flaws and still love it, that is real love. Let’s unload unnecessary items, take our Chinese dreams, embark on a raft and start our wonderful journey. Thank you!

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• The Comparison of the American Dream and the Chinese Dream

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Sichuan University, Chengdu, China.

*Corresponding author: Xuan Pan

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This essay focuses on the widely used phrases “the American Dream” and “the Chinese Dream”. In this essay, the author traces the origins and developments of the American Dream and the Chinese Dream and finds that they were both pro-duced by specific social environment and changes. Then by comparing these two terms, the author finds that there are both relevance and differences between them. In Chinese history, the introduction of American Dream once made effects on Chinese views of America, and the way Chinese people understand the Amer-ican Dream reflects how Chinese view themselves from time to time. The idea that using Chinese Dream to construct the national image of China came from the widespread of the American Dream, as a response to the prevalence of the China Threat Theory. The difference is mainly in their different ways of getting wide-spread that the American Dream developed from bottom to top while the Chinese Dream develop conversely; and in their definition emphases that the American Dream refers more to individual success while the Chinese Dream give priority to the revitalization of Chinese nation. Admittedly, there are natural dif-ference between the American Dream and Chinese Dreams they emerged from very different cultural, but regardless of differences, these Dream shares an essen-tial vision that is to create a better world in which people can live a high-quality life.

Adams, J. (1931). The Epic of America. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Chang, X. (2013, March 17). Xi Jinping Delivered an Important Speech at the Closing Meeting on the first session of the 12th National People’s Congress. Retrieved August 18, 2020 from http://jhsjk.people.cn/article/20816352.

Cheng, H. (2012, Novermber 30). Xi Jinping: Build on the Past: Forge Ahead Toward the Great Goal of Revitalizing the Chinese Nation. Retrieved August 18, 2020 from http://jhsjk.people.cn/article/19746089.

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Ho, W. C. (2018). Power, Public Diplomacy, and Cultural Diplomacy in China’s Education: From Soft Power to the Chinese Dream. In: Culture, Music Education, and the Chinese Dream in Mainland China. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 7. Springer, Singapore.

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Shi, Y. (2013). Seven Differences Between the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. People's Tribune, 2013(15), 46-47.

Stout, K. (2013). Is Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” a fantasy? Retrieved August 18, 2020 from https://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/26/world/asia/chinese-dream-xi-jinping/index.html.

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Zhai, T. (2017). “The Chinese American Dream” Narrative and the Construction of American National Image: also about the Propaganda Policy of US Government Towards the Overseas Chinese in the 1950s-60s. The Chinese Journal of American Studies, 2017, 31(02): 119-141+7.

Zhang, X. and Hong, Y. (2017). A correlative Study of the Internet Trends between the Chinese Dream and the American Dream: Empirical Test Based on the Baidu Index and the Goole Index. Journal of Xiamen University (Arts & Social Sciences), 2017(5). 

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Zhou, C. (2019). Xi Jinping: The Chinese Dream is not a dream of hegemony. Retrieved October 18, 2020 from http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/leaders/2019-11/22/c_1125264137.htm.

How to cite this paper

How to cite this paper: Xuan Pan. (2020) The Comparison of the American Dream and the Chinese Dream. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science , 4 ( 2 ), 159-164.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2020.07.010

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My Chinese Dream Essay Essay Summary

I believe that everyone will have their own dreams. Sometimes, dreams come true easily. But there are also times when a dream is a seemingly impossible goal.

Time is such an elusive and eccentric guy. Of course, I also have my own dreams.

My dream is to be a Chinese teacher. "Spread" the "seeds of language knowledge" to children so that they can learn knowledge. When you grow up, you have to fulfill your dreams and goals.

My dream is to be a member of the national table tennis team. The goal is to win the World Championship. Bring the golden gold medal, stand on the highest podium, and sing the national anthem of the People's Republic of China. Then, go and hand in the new, young players.

My dream is that everyone has a grateful heart. Because, many people nowadays have ruthlessly abandoned their parents and learned to be ungrateful.

My dream is for all the children in the world to become more sensible and obedient. Don't be a "little emperor" anymore, Mom and Dad should also rest!

I have dreams, and everyone has dreams. China and other countries also have their own dreams.

China has the dream of becoming a strong country: In the past, China was a weak country. As a result, many of China's talents (those talents are science and technology development type) have joined forces to prepare to accelerate the speed of China's scientific and technological development.

With the cooperation of the ** and the common people (of course, including those talents), China finally became a great power!

My dream. Chinese Dream! Because the speed of economic development is not the same all over the world, the "genes" of the "dream seed" are also different (in the children's world).

Some children dream of becoming billionaires; Some children dream of meeting Santa Claus, Transformers, Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and Snow White; Some children are eager for a book to read outside of class, such as "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales"; Some children's dreams are even just to eat a full meal; ......Dreams and questions can turn an ordinary person into a world-famous person. But the premise is that you must work hard, struggle, and strive for this dream and goal. My dream.

The Chinese dream, let us "spread" the "dream seeds" and "realization flowers" to every country and every corner!

Everyone has their own dreams. Me too, I also have a lot of dreams.

I dream that in 20 years, China's greening will be better. There are many trees and flowers growing in gardens, communities, and highways, and when spring comes, the land of China is fragrant.

I dream that China will be richer and stronger in 20 years. Now many Chinese go to foreign countries, and in the future, Chinese will not go to foreign countries, but many foreigners come to China. Japan did not dare to mention the Diaoyu Islands anymore.

Foreigners are vying to learn Chinese, and then we will be able to use Chinese to travel all over the world!

I dreamed of being a scientist 20 years from now, and I invented the solar-powered car, which had a solar panel that could be driven whenever there was sunlight. What to do at night? Ha, I've also thought about this problem, and I invented the sunlight absorber, and at night I can use the sunlight in the absorber to continue driving.

What if someone steals a car? As long as someone steals a car, I will let him go and never return: if the thief's fingerprint is not correct, the car will suck the thief and make a noise, and the owner can send him to the police station when he comes.

Although this is all 20 years later, I firmly believe that he will make it happen! Let us work hard for the prosperity and strength of the motherland!

Let's say, I went to visit a lot of places of interest. That night, when I was sleeping and dreaming, I dreamed that I had a pair of big white wings. I was so happy that I immediately opened the window and flapped my two big wings and flew towards the sky.

I have seen the magnificent sea and enjoyed the calm West Lake, but I have never seen the beauty of the Li River in Guilin. I flew to Guilin.

It's so quiet, so quiet that you feel it's flowing; It's so clear, you can see the sand and gravel at the bottom of the river.

See the sand and gravel at the bottom of the river; It's so green, green as if it were a flawless piece of jade. It's so beautiful.

I have seen the mountains in this area of Guilin, it is strange, it is beautiful, it is dangerous. It was as if sitting on the ground like an iron giant.

I'm flying, flying. Flew to Beijing and came to the underwater world. Left, right, top.

All of them are animals of the sea. There are extremely fierce large sandfish, small and delicate tropical fish, and baby fish. There are so many underwater animals, I am dazzled to watch.

They come in all shapes and sizes, and I even took a commemorative photo with them.

I also arrived at the majestic, spectacular Pearl of the Orient. I climbed the Oriental Pearl, went up to the room 300 meters, stood next to the window, and saw the outside, and even the whole of Beijing, which was very beautiful.

As soon as I looked at my watch, I felt that the time was almost up, so I flapped my two big wings vigorously and accelerated forward to go home. Suddenly, I felt my wings shortening, I looked behind me, and I couldn't help but break out in a cold sweat, it turned out that the wings were almost gone. I hurried to fly forward.

Finally, the wings were gone, and I fell hard, and I woke up, and guess what? I fell to the ground.

This dream really made me grow a lot of "knowledge".

Beginning: The bits and pieces of history are like sandstone shells scattered on the huge beach, I quietly walked by, greedily looking at these crystal precious treasures, sometimes picking up one or two shells that touched my heart, sending a dream, squatting down to put it. The Chinese dream flows through the years.

Ending: The tide rises and falls, I sit on the huge beach, looking at the rich and powerful China in front of me, and the sun shines on me through the clouds. I stood up, the corners of my mouth grinned slightly, with a strong, a glory, a memory, gently picked up a few shells, treasured them, and encouraged myself, my heart is ready, plant the Chinese dream, and create a better future.

Yesterday, there was another person who brought up the essay on this topic for everyone to correct! Since it's a competition, why don't you write it yourself?

The Chinese Dream. My dream.

The Chinese dream is also my dream. >>> More

Dreams are flying at the foot of the Great Wall, and hope is ignited in our minds. A light in the darkness guides us wherever we go. Remember what Socrates said: >>> More

The Chinese dream, my dream.

I live because of a heart, my heart is persistent because it has a direction, and the direction is flying because of me. I am—a dream. >>> More

The third year of junior high school is a noun that makes people annoy; The third year of junior high school is a verb that makes people nervous, an adjective that makes people full of dreams, and an adverb that makes people strive for the top. >>> More

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While some companies market ‘natural’ MSG, my restaurant will stick with the original

Chinese restaurants are my family’s thing. It’s a very common immigrant story; it was the starter kit for Ronald Reagan’s American dream.

Though it’s long gone, I can remember my family’s second restaurant near perfectly: two guardian lion statues with obvious signs of weathering flanked the door, there was a green makeshift cabinet for the valet’s car keys propped against the one on the right, and a small patch of flowers adorned their feet. The flowers could have used more love. They were perhaps symbolic of the push and pull between my parents, one invested in design touches, the other spartan with the finances.

Shining blue fluorescence over all this frontage was a big neon sign: “We Do Not Use MSG.”

The monosodium glutamate scare felt rather fervent in the ’90s, and I had a front row seat as I played with action figures at the bar. Long Islanders wanted assurance from my mother that we didn’t have MSG in the building. It would make them feel terrible later, they said. Headache, tachycardia, sweating, bloating, fatigue, diarrhea: a dismal grocery list of possible side effects. Most of the time it was an awkward, polite interaction. Sometimes, it turned hostile.

Given how many polysyllabic additives existed on the back of a box of cereal, I had a hard time believing monosodium glutamate was any more lethal than any branded-mascot kibble we ate. And science proved my hypothesis correct: There is no verifiable, peer-reviewed, reproducible research that can link MSG to the amorphous amalgamation of symptoms known as “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.”

On the one hand, speaking as a lifetime member of the service industry, I respect your choices. You don’t have to put anything in your body you don’t want to, you shouldn’t have to explain yourself, and you should trust that a restaurant will honor that.

However, as a minority in the U.S. who went to enough of his college classes to know who Edward Said is, it’s hard not to see this whole thing as reeking of yellow perilism and Orientalism.

It’s a pervasive and sticky myth that was used to torment me throughout my childhood. Along with the implication that our restaurant served alley cats and netted ducks at the local pond because our food was so cheap, my classmates parroted their parents and accused us of serving poison. So, my mother put up a sign .

This childhood experience serves as context for a recent triggering episode. While scrolling Instagram, I saw Noma Projects (the food lab off-shoot of the fine-dining restaurant in Denmark) going on about the “ naturally occurring ” MSG it harvests in its mushroom garum ($25 for 250 milliliters). My eye twitched. Now that I own my own restaurant, I simply tell people “too bad” when they protest the flavor enhancement . But this sight brought back old feelings of being othered and shamed.

I respect the work Noma Projects does in Copenhagen. Regardless of your feelings about fine dining and 5,000 kroner, six-hour meals, Noma is an undeniable paradigm shifter of gastronomy.

It has inspired generations of chefs and trained some of the industry’s most influential visionaries, and that cultural runoff hits you in your grocery store shelves whether you realize it or not — and, perhaps more importantly, whether you like it or not.

But this was a level of disingenuousness I could not abide.

It’s subtle, but using the term “naturally occurring” implies there is some cheap, synthetic, abundant alternative. It insinuates Noma’s MSG is different, better. It suggests its version won’t make you feel bad the way MSG is positioned to. It evokes buzzwords like organic, free-range, biodynamic and cruelty-free (if you don’t consider a world-famous restaurant brand built off unpaid labor as a form of cruelty ).

Monosodium glutamate was originally discovered by boiling down vast quantities of kelp to create a savory extract. Modern MSG production uses a far more efficient process of harnessing bacteria that produce glutamic acid from digesting the glucose in fast-growing crops such as corn, sugar cane or cassava. The glutamic acid is then neutralized to create water and monosodium glutamate. It’s the same idea of utilizing bacteria to our benefit to make yogurt, and the same principle by which Noma Project’s mushroom garum is made. They use some sort of fermentation, whether it be bacterial or yeast-driven, to digest the glucose in mushrooms. Glucose and glutamic acid are in all living things. Your body is utilizing glutamic acid to read this essay.

Due to a global pandemic, millions of Asian American business owners suffered greatly in December 2019 and in the months — and years — following. My own family’s restaurant lost half its business in the month that matters most to us, the month that makes or breaks the fiscal year for many operators. It was a devastating blow to a business run by a single mother who still works seven days a week in her 70s. And why did this happen? Not because we all huddled inside to keep each other safe — at least not yet. This happened because of xenophobia, racism and prejudice. No one dared to eat at a Chinese restaurant . The reservation book emptied.

New York’s Chinatown was devastated by 9/11 and it never recovered . The neighborhood receded to the east while Italian restaurants and New American bistros claimed the west.

Then, during COVID, restaurant operators who were aging out but still selling six dumplings for $3 couldn’t match rent hikes thanks to real estate developers and rampant inflation. Many didn’t survive a bad December. Those that did didn’t survive the disastrous spring that followed. Chinatown is now a disjointed collection of businesses and grandmas that go unrepresented in zoning law discussions . The sexy newcomer microneighborhood “ Dimes Square ” has shoved Chinatown out of the Lower East Side.

And this is in no small part due to the misinformation and fear coloring the Chinese American diaspora since we were building your railroads . (Though you abandoned all that hard-wrought infrastructure, America — no backsies.)

There isn’t enough space on the page to go through the history of it all, but misinformation regarding MSG is closely related. It sounds like something trivial but it affects real people’s lives. It impacts our livelihoods. So when I read about Noma Projects’ “naturally occurring” MSG, it was hard not to raise my hackles.

It is furthering misinformation and profiting off a depressingly low level of scientific literacy. It is hurting Chinese restaurateurs across the globe by adding fuel to the flames of fear and ignorance. It is contributing to pushing an entire people — and the cuisine we are so heavily identified by — down into the realm of lunch specials: $8.99, choice of egg roll or wonton soup. It is differentiating, otherizing and gatekeeping us, given its platform as an authoritative voice on food science.

We’ve had a challenging few decades; we don’t need any more saboteurs. So, if Noma claims to be an ally to the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, it must do better.

But we have grown cynical about expecting anyone from outside the community to advocate for us. So I’ll just say, at my restaurant, we buy MSG by the 50-pound barrel — and that’s never going to change.

Editor’s note: Noma Projects declined to comment when reached by TODAY.com, but a representative did wish to clarify that any mention of naturally occurring MSG in relation to the brand’s Mushroom Garum refers to the naturally occurring level of glutamate in the product. The brand does not intend to criticize the use of MSG in other products or kitchens. They say they are sorry to learn that the work they have shared from the Noma Projects lab has been interpreted in some way other than as a source of inspiration.

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How This Chinese Immigrant Became One Of America’s Most Successful Self-Made Women

Shuo wang moved to the u.s. as a teenager and sold scooters at flea markets on weekends. now the cofounder and chief revenue officer of human resources software unicorn deel is worth an estimated $850 million., by phoebe liu and kenrick cai, forbes staff.

S tanding center stage in a lime dress and white sneakers, Shuo Wang presses a microphone to her mouth with one hand and gestures assuredly with the other. Speaking at a conference in San Francisco, the Deel cofounder and chief revenue officer is chronicling the growth of her HR software company in an unconventional way: by taking the audience through what she sees as the list of failures in Deel’s history, starting with its earliest days as part of startup incubator Y Combinator 2019.

In Wang’s 2022 talk, titled “How Everything Breaks in Hypergrowth,” she listed all the places where things went awry—scaling the wrong parts of the company at the wrong times, burnout, lags in features and missing out on sales opportunities—and how she helped Deel change course to address them. “I tend to look forward instead of sideways.”

The company had challenges from the outset that she and her cofounder tackled. “During our time at Y Combinator, everyone loved the idea, but everyone hated the product,” Wang, 35, said at the conference. Their idea was software to make it easier to pay international workers, but what they were proposing was too complicated, people told them. So she and Deel cofounder and CEO Alex Bouaziz went back to the drawing board, and spent the next six weeks interviewing almost all 200 companies also at YC at the time to get feedback on how to improve their product.

Wang’s adaptability, along with her relentless execution and extreme focus, has helped catapult Deel past $500 million in annual recurring revenue, it announced this March, less than five years after its founding. Deel says it has been profitable since September 2022; it wrapped up its last fundraising in April 2022 at a valuation of $12 billion . Based on more recent secondary market transactions, Forbes now estimates it to be worth $7 billion. That’s still more than enough for Wang to debut on Forbes’ list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women , with a stake estimated to be worth $850 million. Wang, through a Deel spokesperson, declined to comment for this story. But Forbes spoke to business partners, investors and mentors to piece together the story of Wang, who’s raced ten-plus-mile Tough Mudder obstacle courses and whose social media bio reads “emotionally stable, mentally healthy, physically active” followed by a winking emoji.

“I’m super competitive, and everything needs to be perfect,” Wang said at the 2022 conference . Some of that attitude comes from being a chief revenue officer with a technical background. A mechanical engineer by training, she sees sales as “a science, not an art. … We should run the sales team as an engineering project,” she explained. Still, Wang, who works from 8:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. most days, with a gym break before dinner, told Forbes in 2023 that her most defining trait is how she approaches everything with optimism. “I think everything will be good.”

A fter moving from Northeast China to Baltimore at age 16, Wang’s first sales job was selling scooters at flea markets on weekends, helping with her single mother’s motorcycle and scooter import-export business—and driving the occasional forklift to transport the vehicles.

“That was my first sales experience,” Wang told Forbes in 2023. “I [needed] to be able to learn how to sell so that I [could] help my mom.” She says her mom’s experience as an entrepreneur inspired her to build her own company. Selling something without being able to speak English well at that point taught her that having a unique product matters a lot. If “all the other people are selling fruits, vegetables or food,” she told Forbes , “and then we sell … golf carts and ATVs,” then that seller would have the advantage.

She went on to study mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009, focusing on robotics design. Wang’s senior thesis, funded by DARPA (a unit of the U.S. Dept. of Defense), used robotic devices to study ankle muscle fatigue. Her advisor, Hyunglae Lee, lauded Wang as “exceptionally hard-working,” able to “quickly master new skills and knowledge” and “always ready to assist her fellow lab members.”

Wang ended up staying another year at MIT for the master’s program. That’s when she met two of her future cofounders: first Pierre Bi and then later Bouaziz. Around that time, she also worked at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

While her big success comes from working with Bouaziz, it was actually Bi and Wang who “hit it off instantly, discussing our backgrounds.” Both were international students who had a parent who started their own business, Bi recalls. “Her mom, bringing her to the States, then fighting through making a living starting and building their life in the U.S., really resonated with me.”

In 2015, Wang dropped out of graduate school and applied her robotics expertise to air purification company Aeris, which she cofounded with Bi, who was CEO. In Aeris’ early days, Wang helped the founding team connect with investors, including Tencent cofounder Vic Lee, according to Bi. “She's had this very good grasp of presenting her deep technical knowledge to less tech-savvy people and getting them excited to help them connect with this world,” Bi said. “She has the knowledge and network to get access to the right people at the right time.”

Wang ended up moving back to China for three years to be chief technology officer of Aeris, which had locations in Beijing and Zurich. As 2019 approached, Bi started to feel that Aeris’ company potential was limited. Somewhere along the way, Bi says he ended up reconnecting Bouaziz with Wang when Bouaziz, who had invested in Aeris, visited its Beijing branch. In 2019, Wang left and moved back to the U.S. to start Deel with Bouaziz; Bi was an anchor investor in Deel. Two years later, Aeris sold itself to iRobot for approximately $100 million.

B ouaziz and Wang frequently cite their international backgrounds as key to Deel’s success. Bouaziz grew up in Paris and went to college in Tel Aviv before heading to MIT for graduate school. He was back in Tel Aviv when starting Deel. After their own frustrations at their previous companies, they wanted to build something to make it easier to hire and pay employees in other countries without having to worry about each country’s individual compliance regulations.

“The future of work is remote,” Wang said at a fintech conference in 2019, right after Deel launched and a year before the pandemic mainstreamed remote work. She went on to describe the problem that led to Deel with an analogy comparing language barriers to cross-border payments. “You’re trying to order dinner but you look at the menu, and you have to order in a different language, but no one will help you. Then the food is late and cold.”

By the time Deel had completed the YC program in 2019, it had landed on a product that resonated with customers and quickly became known for prioritizing speed.

Indeed, the company frequently invokes the notion of “Deel speed,” or building and executing faster than others, including pre-existing competitors like Papaya Global (last valued at $3.7 billion), founded in 2016 with a playbook Deel initially sought to emulate. Deel says it now has more than 25,000 customers, from small startups that it met at YC to large enterprises like Boston Consulting Group. All of this has led to its blistering growth: $4 million in annual recurring revenues in 2020, $54 million in 2021, $100 million in 2022 and $500 million as of March 2024.

Throughout Deel’s existence, Wang also wasn’t afraid of “working smaller jobs,” which helped keep the company running as it adjusted to rapid growth, according to investor Brianne Kimmel who invested in Deel through her firm Worklife and says Wang is the founder who most inspires her.

“I would be on Intercom 24/7, even during the night time when I was asleep, I would dream about Intercom,” Wang said at the 2022 conference of her earlier days at Deel, referring to the software Deel used for customer support requests. She also personally interviewed the first 400 Deel employees, “just to make sure the culture is aligned.”

“A lot of investors have previously thought that Covid really accelerated their business, or that there was a bit of timing and a bit of luck,” says Kimmel. “I've actually seen behind the scenes, there’s also just raw execution and very much brute force to get the company where it is today.”

One byproduct of Deel’s growth-at-all-costs mindset: regulatory issues, including an open letter from Rep. Adam Schiff (D., California) and five other House members alleging that Deel was “misclassifying employees as independent contractors on purpose to increase their profitability and growth – at the expense of workers’ pay, benefits, and their right to organize.” CEO Bouzaziz’s trip to Washington D.C. last fall, packed with meetings to change regulators’ minds , seems to have helped. “Our team had very productive staff-level meetings with Deel. Separately, the Congressman had a good meeting with the CEO when he visited DC that helped clear up the issues we raised in our letter,” a Schiff spokesperson wrote at the time in an email to Forbes .

As Deel continues to grow, it’s aiming to crack a broader and more global segment of the HR software market , especially with recent acquisitions. In 2022, Deel bought Asia-Pacific-based payroll firm PayGroup for an estimated $80 million. In March, Deel announced its purchase of payroll company PaySpace—which operates across Africa and the Middle East, areas in which Deel hopes to expand further.

Aaron Harris, a former YC partner and cofounder of financial advisory firm Magid & Company, cited the trust between the founders, and the way they are able to work mostly independently, as the reason Deel has grown so quickly and sustainably: “There's just this great back-and-forth ping-ponging energy between them. They feed off each other's ideas and trust each other to a degree that is unusual, even between the best founders.”

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