Chinese dream and China's governance

China's new leadership has sought to inspire the country with its call to realize the "Chinese Dream".

We know some things about the goals of that "dream":

• Overcome the legacies of the "century of humiliation"

• Successfully achieve a wealthy and strong country" (富强国家)

• Rejuvenate the Chinese folk （复兴中华民族）-- something that goes beyond narrow national state boundaries

The "dream" is collective and is responsive to deep historical sentiments in China (as highlighted in the recent volume, Wealth and Power, by Orville Schell and John Delury)

• It is phrased in a way that to a significant extent each citizen can read his/her own deepest aspirations into this "dream" – that is, all may share the goals of the "dream," but there is a wide array of views about specific priorities and about the best path(s) to take to get from here to there.

• Scholars could have made comparable statements about China at almost any time over the past more than 100 years – perhaps the key difference is that the country is now feasibly closer to being able to realize this dream than it has been at any time since the beginning of the "century of humiliation."

While many specifics remain unclear at this point, the new Chinese leadership has provided some broad guidelines to major components of the Chinese Dream. A partial list of these includes:

• Fairer distribution of the benefits of economic development, including reducing urban-rural differences.

• Building an ecological civilization, where greater attention will be paid to addressing the major environmental issues of air pollution, water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.

• Shifting the development model to one that is based more on domestic household consumption, innovation, and efficiency and is less based on exports and investment.

• Creating the institutional capacity to provide the services and related requirements for dealing with a massive demographic transition to an elderly society over the coming two decades.

• Reducing the government's administrative interference in the economy so that by 2020 market forces will play a "decisive" role in the allocation of resources.

• Maintaining social stability in part though upholding the monopoly on political power of the CCP, with measures taken to improve the quality of the CCP itself (such as through fighting corruption) and increasing its skills at social governance.

China's leaders face an extraordinarily complicated set of obstacles in trying to achieve these and related goals that are central components of successfully pursuing the Chinese Dream. Most of these are well known, such as:

• The most rapid demographic transition in peacetime history, and the first that will produce a country whose population is old before the country in per capita terms is rich.

• Resource scarcity – especially the scarcity of usable water in the North China Plain but extending on a per capita basis to most types of natural resources – that is of staggering dimensions.

• A revolution in information technology that is producing rapid changes in society whose repercussions for governance are inevitably uncertain but potentially very consequential.

• The sheer magnitude of the social strains generated by simultaneous massive changes in terms of urbanization, marketization, globalization, growth of the non-state sector, and the information revolution. All are necessary for long-term success as a modern state and society, but each in the short run is a challenge to social stability.

• The particular challenges created when such rapid and multifaceted changes make it difficult to develop a settled sense of social ethics, which has always been a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese civilization. The Chinese political system is highly capable and pragmatic and has managed many major challenges in the past. I raise the above issues not to suggest that pessimism is warranted but rather to indicate the types of objective major obstacles that must be handled in order to satisfy national aspirations to achieve the Chinese Dream. Within this broad space, the specific issue I've been asked to address is "China's governance and the Chinese Dream." The "resolution" adopted by the Third Plenum provides the best vehicle for examining this topic.

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