Beyond the Chinese Dream: Hong Kong and the Unbecoming of Chineseness

Abstract

In the last few years, the discourse of the Chinese Dream has gained widespread usage within the People’s Republic of China. The phrase was first popularized by Xi Jinping in 2013 to encourage young Chinese people to “dare to dream, work assiduously to fulfill the dreams, and contribute to the revitalization of the nation.” A more productive approach to dissecting the Chinese Dream would be “to appreciate the plurality of many possible Chinas and the tension between these competing China dreams[,]” as William A. Callahan proposes. Likewise, I suggest a two-pronged approach to both think with and beyond the Chinese Dream, specifically by unpacking what the utopian impulse of the Chinese Dream might mean in a globalizing world where Chineseness is always already decentered and plural in formation. Specifically, my essay disarticulates the seeming opposition between utopia and dystopia, showing how utopianism often emerges from within a haunting dystopian present while dystopia’s futurity often gestures towards a utopian impulse. Thinking through various models of utopianism, I show how Chan Koonchung’s (陳冠中) dystopian novels of his China trilogy, namely 盛世:中國 2013年/The Fat Years (2009), 裸命/Bare Life (2013), and 建豐二年—新中國烏有史/The Second Year of Jianfeng: An Alternative History of New China (2015), recast the binary logics of utopia and dystopia through thinking beyond the Chinese Dream.