Katy Perry may have been banned from China's music websites, but her "Teenage Dream" now has its Asian counterpart. Newly confirmed in office, President Xi Jinping, has chosen "Chinese Dream" as his signature phrase to describe the direction of his administration.
Although it is early, and the phrase could be altered or abandoned, Xi invoked it both on becoming leader of the Communist Party of China and in his final rhetorical salvo as he assumed the presidency. Certainly, as I saw in my recent travels there, no other phrase has been given comparable attention in the state media, a relatively reliable sign that the dream is here to stay.
So what, exactly, is the Chinese dream of which Xi speaks? In a country where policies are expressed obliquely and elaborated cautiously by party elites, this is the $64,000 question. Its answer should tell us much about the future of China — and thus about the future of global geopolitics.