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Step aside, American Dream. Here's China's. amarcnn | July 14, 2011 at 3:52 pm | Tags: Anand Giridharadas | Categories: China | URL: http://wp.me/p1bJgh-28Z

Editor's Note: Anand Giridharadas is the author of India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking and of Chinese Dreams. This is an excerpt from the latter work.

By Anand Giridharadas - Special to CNN

Eric X. Li is a successful and well-connected venture capitalist in Shanghai. He was once a believer in the American Dream; he now wants to help create a Chinese Dream all its own.

He grew up in one of the city's communal lanes and did well enough to study, at his parents' insistence, in America. He went on to work there, acquiring along the way a Texan accent and a love of American democracy. The only time he thought of returning to China in his first years away was in 1989, to stand with the students in Tiananmen Square.

In the 1992 American presidential race, Li found his way onto the campaign of Ross Perot,
for whom he had earlier worked in private industry. When Perot lost, Li returned to China in something of a funk. He had come to believe, like Jin and Rao, that the modernity practiced in the West was the holy grail and that China had merely to mimic it. Read more of this post

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