One man's meat is another man's poison – so goes the old adage. For much of the twentieth-century the American Dream was a Chinese nightmare, an ugly, illusory offshoot of capitalist greed, cruelly tricking the oppressed into believing that they could ever shake off their chains. All this has changed. The American Dream is alive and well in China; individual success is now a model used to inspire other individuals and to promote the country in general.

The individual versus socialism

Rags-to-riches stories are a central part of the American Dream, expressing success through the intensely personal highs and lows lived by a single individual. They foster a widespread conviction that anyone, even those from the most ragged of backgrounds, can achieve greatness. American business owes much to this ideal, which penetrates into the heart of a country that has consistently sought to elevate the personal. China's relationship with individualism is immensely more troubled; the tenets of socialism and other, older cultural traditions of modesty restrict it to, at most, an awkward and mildly embarrassing affair. Yet as China continues to surf an ever-larger tidal wave of economic success, it is beginning to zoom in on the irresistible allure of the individual. The language of the American Dream is becoming more and more relevant to a more economically free but still deeply unequal 21st century China, as the following three success stories show.

1) Gong Haiyan: a female entrepreneur who harnessed the power of the internet
A female entrepreneur who founded a dating platform in China, Gong Haiyan symbolises the extent to which capitalist market freedoms in China have allowed women to liberate themselves.  A quarter of China's entrepreneurs are women, according to recent estimates, and last year Forbes' List showed how seven of the world's fourteen self-made female billionaires struck gold in China. It will not do to simply attribute this to China's experiments with market freedoms, however. Japan, a country whose free-market economy is one of the strongest in the world, still sees some of the worst entrepreneurial gender imbalances in the world, on a level with openly misogynistic states such as Iran. In the case of Gong, the temptation to go into personal detail, to associate the success of a gender with the success of an individual, is part of the story.

At 27, relatively poor and still single, Gong Haiyan created a dating site. A year later she married a man she met through her own website. This is a story millions of Chinese can relate to. More and more young people are resorting to online matchmaking in a bid to find a partner. In a busy, enclosed urban world where 'real' romantic encounters are suffocated by the rat-race, life is increasingly being lived out on the internet. The narrative of this company and its entrepreneur captures the popular imagination. Gong Haiyan may be an individual with a story of her own, but her own perspective still incorporates the wider social picture. Speaking to China Daily last year, she said, “I have helped people who want to get married by establishing this website. I feel lucky because this is a thing I'd like to do and it is meaningful to society”. It seems the old socialist 'collective good' is not dead after all.

2) Wang Baoqiang: the country boy and the silver screen
How often have we heard of the archetypal poor American, brought up on an isolated and hopelessly depressing farm in the rural mid-west, triumphantly making it in Hollywood? Now, it's happening in China too. Born and bred in the Chinese country-side, Wang's career as a film star took off in 2002. At the age of eight, Wang left his parents' farming community to train in the arts of Kungfu at Henan's Shaolin temple. For two years, Wang languished unsuccessfully in Beijing trying to pick up odd parts. His big break came when he was asked to act in Li Yang's first film, playing the part of a naïve village boy. This, one suspects, was not too difficult for the ever-cheerful Wang, being from a village, and being, by certain standards, 'naive' to the vicissitudes of urban life.

Again, this story, and this personality, satisfy the classic 'rags-to-riches' ingredients: the poor background, the almost-stereotypical martial arts background, the rural simplicity. Wang's success is closely tied to shifting attitudes towards rural communities in an increasingly urban China; his cheerful naivety conjuring up a powerful nostalgia for those halcyon days when nine in ten worked the fields till sundown, exhausted but untroubled by the neurotic anxieties of big city life. This view has almost nothing to do with the realities of what it is (or was) like in rural communities and everything to do with the way China now looks at things. If an individual success story can be attached to a national narrative then it takes on a value in itself.

Wang famously carried around a dictionary with him, laboriously working out the pinyin of each unknown character so that he could actually read his lines. Wang's success spits in the face of the now-prevalent mantra that currently preaches that success without education is impossible. It is the deeply personal nature of this story, though, and the eagerness to dwell on personal detail, that marks a shift in attitudes to success and wealth. We sense China taking a quiet joy in a relatively uneducated young man carving out a successful life where many children of privilege and wealth fail. Rags-to-riches stories break the mould: success without education suggests a world full of unexpected possibility, rather than the bleak image of a factory-line churning out citizens educated in the same way, each apportioned to a particular role in society's machine.

3) Shi Zhengrong: China, technology and the environment
Shi Zhengrong became rich through placing his solar energy company on the New York Stock Exchange. Most of what is written about this middle-aged physicist, who now acts as a spokesman for the need for renewable energy (and so, like Gong Haiyan, relates his individual success to the good of society) uses the word 'inspiration'. It is this word that marks the most prominent shift in attitude since China has adopted looser economic regulation.

Since its beginning, the US has held up self-made millionaires as exemplars of success. Most popular have been those introducing new technology. The most recent in this long-line is surely Steve Jobs, who, unsurprisingly, is also insatiably popular in China, a society now crying out for inspirational narratives telling a story that can be transposed onto ordinary lives.

Shi Zhengrong is one of China's many technological gurus whose innovations have changed perceptions of China. Born in 1963, a year most will associate with the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward, Shi began life as the child of poor farmers. Throughout school his determination bred results, leading to a college scholarship in Manchuria. When the opportunity came to place the Suntech Power Holdings Company on the New York Stock Exchange, Shi, 'The Sun King', did not flinch. This success story clearly holds up China as a model for renewable energy (Shi's company is now the second-largest of its kind globally). The personal narrative, China is beginning to learn, can easily become a powerful trigger for public feeling and national pride, as well as an incentive to invest and create.

The social value of rags-to-riches

Twenty years ago, deeply personalised narratives such as these would have been unimaginable. These kinds of narratives are now encouraged because of their social value. In each case, the individual stories relate to the grander picture of a changing China: to the liberation of women; the rise of the internet; the rural exodus; the importance of renewable energy. This is precisely the power of a good rags-to-riches story. There are now countless sources of inspiration for Chinese people seeking to strip themselves of their relative obscurity and clothe themselves in wealth and fame. What's more, the very notion of a personal rags-to-riches story in itself echoes the trajectory of China: a nation repeatedly shattered by war, political upheaval and famine is now celebrating its own newfound riches.

What next?

The act of using a rags-to-riches story, or a personalised account of a life, as a launch pad for other topics is a relatively new phenomenon in China. By contrast, American media, literature and cinema throughout the 20th century have shown a clear tendency to mediate their message through the lens of deeply personalised experience. Comparisons with the American Dream should be treated carefully, but it seems that, in its capitalist infancy, China is yet to reach that stage where the glory of wealth is saddled by the kind of soul-wrenching loneliness at the heart of The Great Gatsby and other exposés of capitalist excess. For the time being, China's rags-to-riches stories show a sudden burst in opportunity, and a sudden intrigue for the cult of the individual. It remains to be seen how a socialist nation will eventually reconcile its political model with an increasingly individualistic society. One suspects that eventually, widespread disillusionment with riches, as well as rags, will begin to write itself into these narratives. 

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Keywords: success stories China rags to riches stories China getting rich in China famous Chinese billionaires American Dream in China