Free A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu Page B

actually matter what the particulars are or whether there even are any codified particulars. The Chinese Dream is mainly about having a Chinese Dream and being able to announce it.
    It’s also a fairy tale. Or, rather, a fable. This is not to be harsh. Every nation’s story of its own character—and every nation’s story of other nations’ character—begins with a moral and works backwards. That is certainly true of the tale we tell in America of our own can-do, ruggedly individualist character. What’s important is to ask why we tell these stories and why we filter out evidence that contradicts them.
    Two decades before Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream, Lee Kuan Yew, then the benevolent autocrat of Singapore, peddled a morality tale called “Asian Values.” The West, he said, should not harshly judge Asians, and especially the Chinese, for their approach to human rights. Asians have their own values, Lee argued, that prioritize the good of the whole over the good of the individual, the need for stability over the need for freedom. And his kicker was: they work . Asian economic success was proof, he said, that these values were right for Asians. Never mind that the Cambridge-educated “Harry” Lee, running a former British colony, was living testimony to the universalizing power of Western values. Never mind that “Asian” was too soggy a bag for all the cultural traditions he was trying to stuff into it. The Fable of Asian Values was an elegant closed-loop justification for soft authoritarianism.
    As China grew mightier in the ensuing years, Lee became one of the era’s most vocal evangelists of an Overseas Chinese revival. He said that whether they lived in Canada, Australia, the United States, or Europe, ethnic Chinese should see themselves as members of a tribe. They should nurture their ethnic network. They should exploit their guanxi —their connections, to one another, and to their cultural motherland—to generate business and get deals done and further the cause of progress. Now countless others, East and West, have taken up this gospel of co-ethnic networking, of Confucian capitalism. The idea of guanxi as gold, or at least the way to find and mine gold, has yielded a secondary industry in China of cultural brokers who sell nothing more than knowledge of how to get and use guanxi.
    It’s all very convenient. But what if this same story, this same tale of indelible Chineseness that says you can take a Chinese out of China but not the China out of Chinese—what if it were to be deployed not just by China-boosters in search of profits but also by China-bashers in search of scapegoats? What if this spidery web of Chinese ethnic connection was seen not as beneficial to global capital flow and efficient exchange of goods but as a spider’s web, meant to ensnare and incapacitate prey?
    â€”————
    Much of the media coverage of China and its dealings with America can be understood more clearly if you conduct a simple thought experiment: imagine that the reports are describing not people but pathogens. Or parasites.
    Chinese hackers burrowing their way into American bank accounts and into classified US military servers. The rise of Chinese “birth tourism,” in which pregnant Chinese women are flown to the United States so their babies, born on American soil, can claim citizenship here and gain access to all the benefits of that status. Chinese nationals seeking placement in American corporations and research centers, waiting patiently to steal our secrets. Chinese investors using innocuous shell companies buying up distressed properties and businesses across the United States. Chinese international students paying full freight at cash-strapped state universities across the United States, thus taking up slots for deserving in-state residents.
    Now, try to stop the thought experiment.
    Now, look at a Chinese