The phrase "American Dream" is relatively new. It was first popularized in the 1930s during the depths of the Great Depression. What it initially meant is profoundly different from the universalistic vision advocated by Washington since 1945. Its original proponents saw the American Dream as seeking to overcome a "business civilization" that was subordinating everything to the dictates of profit and the marketplace, a rapaciousness that was destroying the environment, and an obsession with bigness that had turned its back on the need for greater equality and basic human needs.

But this is not the American dream the world largely sees today. America's emergence as a superpower after 1945 required something quite different – a more simplified, distorted, and ideological export product for Washington's "war of ideas." This official American Dream has been part of Washington's ideological arsenal for over six decades. Such an idealized universalism by and large has worked, as it was designed to do by leaders in the national security establishment, to polarize, divide, and turn against each other key aspects of humanity's progressive traditions both within the US and abroad. It has divided needs and rights, individual and collective interests, reform and revolution, equality and freedom. This current dream is centered on the notions of "individual freedom" and the inalienable right to pursue one's own interests for prosperity and success. There is merit in such notions, of course, but focusing the Dream around them has made it at the core a harsh, highly useful propaganda weapon. For the earlier, more vibrant, compassionate, and complex American dream (which was very much what President Roosevelt's New Deal was about) was very much a national, not a universal, one.

The universalistic vision of the American Dream offers a stark warning about the corrupting influences of the quest for global supremacy on what is best in a nation's traditions. A nation can become a great power with a central global role without seeking to change others into versions of itself. Even as China's power increases, the Chinese Dream has the opportunity to be open to an evolving multi-cultural world in quite different ways than the current American Dream. Unlike the American Dream, the Chinese version underscores the notion that no one country is a model for humanity; none encompasses all of its accomplishments. This, too, if stayed faithful to, would be a valuable contribution to a more dynamic multi-polar world, for there is perhaps no greater human vanity than the belief that one's own values have universal validity – and no greater folly than the attempt to impose the preference of a single society on an unwilling world.

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

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

Though we live in a globalizing world, this does not require a globalized, standardized, and homogenized vision of humanity. The Chinese Dream certainly speaks to this. Here perhaps we touch on what is most enigmatic in man's historical experience – that we can speak of humanity but nowhere, in fact, can we convincingly discover a universal ethos.  Humanity has played out its destiny in a diversity of languages, a diversity of moral experiences, and a diversity of spiritualities and religions. Humanity in this sense is irreducibly plural.  On the technical and scientific level it is relatively easy to communicate; much about popular culture is easily shared. And certainly the problems we must somehow face together are frighteningly many.  But on the deeper level of historical creation, diverse civilizations need to communicate with each other with nuance and an appreciation that cultural differences are a constant source of enrichment for humanity.

Given its cultural density and enduring civilization, the Chinese Dream has the opportunity to encompass such an appreciation of humanity's variety more than the homogenizing globalization often seen as central to the American dream of "one world" today.

The author is with the History Department, Department of East Asian Studies, New York University

(Source: China Pictorial)