The Chinese Dream: a Society Under Construction

Thoughts on a book, or China in the mirror

Alessandra Paracchi

The West doesn’t know, or knows little, about China, and what it knows is often paradoxical: intrigues in cement, oriental reproductions of an ultramodern vision of Blade Runner; or the sweat of some remote village on the banks of the Yangtze, where what emerges, in these wild, melancholy landscapes, is human behaviour, rural and extreme in extreme circumstances, like a scene from “Still Life” by Jia Zhang-ke (Leone d’Oro at the Venice Film Festival in 2006), perhaps one of the portraits that best reflects life in China today.

And it is true, China is all of this: a country where the human cost of progress is often frightening, a country implementing a brutal process of modernization that is giving rise to a fleet of men and women in constant movement, drifting rootless from job to job in immense empty landscapes and then abruptly hurled into non-stop building sites.

It is a dream of individual prosperity, the greatest motivation that exists. And when multiplied by a billion people, this is the best fuel in circulation

But China, beyond the paradoxical descriptions attributed by the west, is more than this.
It is a dream: a dream under construction, in progress, but nonetheless a dream.

An entirely plausible dream that will probably be completed by 2020.

It is a dream of individual prosperity, the greatest motivation that exists. And when multiplied by a billion people, this is the best fuel in circulation.

Because dreams are not a luxury, they are something that everyone can have; and they are the only thing that allows us to look to the future when we are crushed by the hard reality of the present.

China is racing towards the future, creating its dream and offering an alternative to the middle class that aspires to become a mass of consumers inhabiting densely populated modern cities.

In a way this book presents the hopes which lie within a profile characterized by shady areas masking the dark sides of the Chinese giant.

The book gives its a story a specific face, and this face, though maybe not that of any individual Chinese person, is that of the spaces the Chinese inhabit, the spaces they dream of and the spaces they alone will possess.

Packed with images, these pages offer a real but two-dimensional vision, weaving together stories of people and architecture in urban China, the volume of which is constantly expanding. It also brings together theories and planning, and sketches out new social models and architectural types, though the most unsettling questions appear to be left hanging, in some far-off dimension, in unique, entirely new conditions.

It is impossible not to wonder what kind of new human will emerge from such a pressing desire to conquer the moon; it is impossible not to wonder if these unique circumstances are giving rise to new paradigms of development, and whether, in this marathon of a billion people racing towards utopia, anyone will still find time to sleep.

And if so, where will that person dream of living? Somewhere else? As Calvino said, elsewhere is a negative mirror…