ordinary people.....................

     Against this inequality, however, there is a Chinese dream, shared by people all over the country.  Chinese governments have always trafficked in the rhetoric of national greatness, even when weak.  (The name of the country is often translated as "Middle Kingdom", but "Central Kingdom" is closer to its sense in English, the country at the center of the world.)  What makes the contemporary Chinese dream unusual is that it is also an individual one, shared by hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens.  It started in the 1970s as the dream that maybe hard times were over, that the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward and the madness of the Cultural Revolution could be set aside, and that ordinary people could not only get on with their lives, but that those lives might become easier.  This personal part of the Chinese Dream is very much like the American one, down to the obsession with housing, and tied to the aspirations of anyone in a market economy:  If you work hard, your life will improve, and that improvement will include material comfort and ownership of a home and a car.

-Clay Shirky,  Little Rice:  Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream