Still dreamin'

Dreams are, as I claimed near the end of last Friday's post, alive and well in China. If we needed any more evidence that dreams hold appeal in China as they do in the U.S., we've got some. First, this piece from Time, about lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who was arrested under false-seeming pretenses, and has just recently been released.

The original Chinese Esquire series referenced in the Time piece seems to be using the power of dreams, along with fashion photography, to narrate a thoroughly modern Chinese man.

This kind of “modernity” highlights the shift, in certain young and “fashionable” circles in China, to a more future-based orientation. Dreams are by definition grounded in the future. The “pragmatic” aspects of Chinese culture in which we find resistance to dreams are, in contrast, based in the past: long and bitter experience has shown that the whims of the world can and do thwart the best of human intention and effort.

In an earlier post I wrote of Hofstede's concept of “time orientation.” I mention it here because the drag of China's deep past upon dreams can be formidable. And still we have the portraits in Chinese Esquire of China's modern dreamers. No wonder so many Westerners return from China scratching their heads at the contradictions and the complexity. And while what I'm about to say is to some degree true of every place, and while I'm not nearly the first to say it, China defies all our efforts to put it into tidy boxes.