Rereading Callahan’s China Dreams in the Era of Xi Jinping
William A. Callahan’s China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future remains one of the most ambitious attempts to take seriously the many competing visions of China’s future circulating in the early twenty-first century. At its heart, the book challenges the assumption that China’s rise can be reduced to a narrow story of GDP growth, military modernization, or diplomatic assertiveness.
Instead, Callahan insists that ideas, narratives, and cultural imaginaries matter deeply. The central thesis is that China’s future cannot be understood without engaging with the diverse “dreams” articulated by party officials, dissidents, citizen intellectuals, artists, and popular culture. These dreams—sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian, often contradictory—constitute the moral and political grammar through which Chinese futures are imagined.
Callahan adopts a cultural-discursive approach rather than a traditional institutional or policy-oriented methodology. Drawing on speeches, manifestos, scholarly debates, novels, films, art exhibitions, and even blogs, he constructs a mosaic of twenty different “dreams.” The book unfolds across chapters that move from the official rhetoric of leaders like Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao, to the dissident interventions of Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, to the intellectual explorations of Pan Wei, Zhang Wei-wei, Zhao Tingyang, and Cui Zhiyuan.
Popular culture is not ignored: Chan Koonchung’s dystopian novel The Golden Age and Du Lala’s Promotion Diary are analyzed alongside the Shanghai Expo and Wolf Totem. The intended audience is broad: students and scholars of international relations, political science, and cultural studies, but also general readers eager to understand how China imagines itself and its role in the world.
The book succeeds in reconstructing what Callahan calls the “millenarian zeitgeist” of early 2010s China, where “everybody knows that something is about to happen, but no one is quite sure what” (p. 40). This was the moment when Xi Jinping first declared his “China dream” to be the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, in which each person’s future and destiny is closely linked with the future and destiny of the country and the nation” (p. 21).
But it was also the moment when Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08 asked: “Will [China] continue with modernization under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system?” (p. 27). Between these poles stretched an extraordinary range of visions: Zhao Tingyang’s Confucian tianxia, Liu Mingfu’s call for a “military rise,” Han Han’s blogging about the “micropolitics of personal finance and personal tragedy” (p. 141), and Lung Ying-tai’s defense of civility as the true measure of national greatness.
In terms of originality, Callahan’s greatest contribution is to broaden the field of China studies by treating literature, art, and satire as central to political discourse. He refuses to limit analysis to elite policy documents or official white papers, instead showing how citizen intellectuals “are growing in influence, due in part to the commercialization of old media and the spread of new media” (p. 46). This insistence on plurality was especially valuable in 2013, when the international debate about China’s rise tended to swing between triumphalist narratives of unstoppable ascent and alarmist warnings of imminent confrontation. China Dreams showed that within China itself, no single narrative dominated.
The book’s comparative move also stands out. By juxtaposing American and Chinese dreams, Callahan argues that “the American dream and the China dream thus are not facts to be proven or disproven, but moral dramas that express a community’s aspirations and fears” (p. 145). Both nations, he notes, “see themselves as uniquely superior moral communities that have something great to offer the world” (p. 159). This insight challenges the comforting Western assumption that exceptionalism is a Chinese pathology, reminding us instead of the structural parallels between American and Chinese self-conceptions.
Dreams and Disillusionment
Yet the book is not without weaknesses. Its emphasis on cultural texts and intellectual debates sometimes comes at the expense of institutional and material analysis. When Callahan introduces Pan Wei’s civilizational model or Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia, the actual channels by which such ideas might shape state policy remain underexplored. Likewise, while his inclusion of marginal voices—such as the racial fundamentalists who proclaim that the Chinese are “the most excellent race, […]even better than the white race” (p. 99)—is important to show the darker currents of discourse, the relative influence of these ideas is sometimes overstated. Readers could come away with the impression that racialist thought is more mainstream than it likely is.
Looking back from 2025, these limitations take on sharper significance. The decade since the book’s publication has seen Xi Jinping consolidate extraordinary power, silencing many of the voices Callahan documented. Dissidents like Liu Xiaobo have been imprisoned and died in custody; Ai Weiwei lives in exile.
Citizen intellectuals who once debated alternative “China models” have been marginalized by intensified censorship, digital surveillance, and ideological campaigns. Far from the cacophony of dreams mapped in 2013, the public sphere in 2025 is dominated by a singular, state-driven narrative of national rejuvenation under Xi. This authoritarian consolidation narrows the relevance of some of Callahan’s scenarios.
The possibility of convergence with liberal international norms, once championed by Liu Xiaobo, has been foreclosed. Hybrid models combining Western and Chinese values are muted. Instead, the state has institutionalized a tightly controlled nationalism that emphasizes discipline, loyalty, and sacrifice. Xi’s invocation of “common prosperity” in 2021 was telling: the China dream is no longer about individual upward mobility, as in the Du Lala narrative, but about collective austerity and national security. The crackdown on tech giants, the disciplining of celebrities, and the drive for “spiritual civilization” all reflect a shift from consumerist aspiration to statist control.
Economic realities have also altered the landscape. In 2013, Callahan analyzed the “China model” against the backdrop of breakneck growth and global confidence. By 2025, growth has slowed to under 4 percent, youth unemployment is high, and demographic decline looms. The dream of a Golden Age (shengshi) looks increasingly fragile.
Citizen frustrations—visible in the 2022 “white paper protests”—suggest that while official narratives dominate, alternative dreams have not disappeared. They persist in whispers, in coded online satire, in the everyday coping strategies that scholars of “infrapolitics” have long tracked. Callahan’s focus on culture equips us to recognize these hidden transcripts, even if his book does not directly anticipate the extent of repression.
Geopolitical rivalry further reshapes the meaning of dreams. Callahan highlighted Liu Mingfu’s vision of a military rise as one possibility among many. By 2025, this vision has gained significant traction. The Taiwan question dominates international headlines, the People’s Liberation Army has expanded rapidly, and the United States has imposed sweeping technology bans on Chinese firms. The Belt and Road Initiative has extended China’s influence but also generated backlash, with projects canceled or renegotiated in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia.
Against this backdrop, the language of “peaceful rise” has all but disappeared from official rhetoric. The “harmonious world” policy Callahan analyzed has given way to talk of “struggle” and “self-reliance.” His insight that “even if such alternative world orders are not realized, they still can serve to delegitimize American-influenced global norms” (p. 46) feels prescient: China’s critiques of Western liberalism resonate in parts of the Global South, even as Beijing builds parallel institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and promotes digital sovereignty as an alternative to the open internet.
The contemporary scene also complicates Callahan’s comparative framework. While he rightly argued that both American and Chinese dreams share exceptionalist logics, by 2025 their trajectories diverge in striking ways. The American dream, fractured but still tied to individual aspiration, contrasts sharply with China’s collectivist and statist vision. Xi’s dream of rejuvenation depends not on unleashing individual freedom but on constraining it for the sake of unity. This divergence underscores one limitation of Callahan’s framework: in stressing the similarities between American and Chinese exceptionalism, he underplayed how different political systems institutionalize dreams.
Nevertheless, China Dreams remains highly relevant. Its greatest value lies not in predictive accuracy but in the way it documents the multiplicity of discourses at a pivotal moment. In 2025, when the official narrative appears hegemonic, the book reminds us that it was not always so. By recovering the cacophony of alternative futures—from Han Han’s sardonic blogs to Lung Ying-tai’s call for civility—it allows us to see what has been suppressed, and to imagine that other futures remain possible.
A Lasting Contribution
For future research, Callahan’s method suggests fruitful directions. Scholars might explore how dreams persist under repression, morphing into coded satire, consumer subcultures, or diasporic narratives. Comparative studies could examine how other rising powers articulate their futures, using cultural texts as archives of aspiration and anxiety. Interdisciplinary work might link the analysis of dreams to studies of digital authoritarianism, asking how new technologies reshape not just censorship but imagination itself.
The impact of China Dreams on the field has been considerable. It expanded the scope of China studies to include novels, films, and art as legitimate sources for political analysis. It encouraged international relations scholars to take culture seriously, inspiring work on discourse, soft power, and the politics of imagination. While subsequent events have rendered some of its scenarios obsolete, the book continues to serve as a touchstone. Its limitations—particularly its relative neglect of the state’s coercive power—invite re-reading in light of Xi’s consolidation, making it both a historical document and a provocation for contemporary scholarship.
Ultimately, China Dreams teaches that futures are always contested, even when they appear monopolized. Xi Jinping’s “China dream” may dominate in 2025, but the memory of multiple dreams lingers, and the seeds of alternative imaginaries remain. By foregrounding the diversity of voices that once flourished, Callahan underscores the enduring truth that China’s future—like that of any nation—remains a matter of contestation, imagination, and struggle. In an era when geopolitical rivalry tempts us toward deterministic narratives, the book’s central message—that dreams matter, and that multiple futures are always in play—retains its critical force.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article/paper are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Paradigm Shift.
Bahram P. Kalviri is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. His research interests focus on the Middle East, particularly the interplay of international relations and public diplomacy within the region.