The Chinese Dream is a term promoted by Xi Jinping since 2013 within Chinese society that describes a set of personal and national ethos and ideals in China. It is used by journalists, government officials, activists to describe the role of the individual in Chinese society as well as the goals of the Chinese nation; the phrase is associated with Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Xi began promoting the phrase as a slogan in a high-profile visit to the National Museum of China in November 2012 after taking the office of general secretary. Since use of the phrase has become widespread in official announcements and the embodiment of the political ideology of the leadership under Xi Jinping. Xi said that young people should "dare to dream, work assiduously to fulfill the dreams and contribute to the revitalization of the nation". According to the party's theoretical journal Qiushi, the Chinese Dream is about Chinese prosperity, collective effort and national glory.

The relationship between the phrase and the American Dream has been debated. The phrase "Chinese Dream" corresponds with the associated idea of a collective hope for restoring China's lost national greatness and has ancient origins in Chinese literary and intellectual history. In the Classic of Poetry, the poem "Flowing Spring" describes a poet waking up in despair after dreaming of the former Western Zhou dynasty. During the troubled Southern Song dynasty, the poet Zheng Sixiao wrote a poem in which he coined the phrase "Heart full of Chinese Dream, the ancient poem'Flowing Spring.'" Moreover, popular patriotic literary and theatrical works in early 20th century China made reference to a "China Dream." In 2008, architect Neville Mars, author Adrian Hornsby, the Dynamic City Foundation published "The Chinese Dream – a society under construction". The book investigates China's initial wave of rapid urbanization as it transitions to a socialist-market economy. Maps of the emerging spatial forms and analysis of the economic development processes that have originated within the extreme conditions of the 1980s and 1990s are combined with progressive planning concepts and personal portraits of a changing society.

As such it synthesizes a body of research to tackle the main paradoxes at the heart of China's struggle for change and a more equitable and sustainable future. According to Mars, "The present is so all-consuming that fast realities threaten to eclipse the slow dream of tomorrow." The overarching premise of the book is that China reveals a direct correlation between its shifting urban forms and its waning societal objectives. In that sense the book has arguably been prophetic. Written eight years ahead of the 12th FYP that holds the same thematic title "The Chinese Dream" it introduces the notion that China's fragmented, sclerotic urban patterns determine a path of increasing inefficiency and energy-dependence. Mars introduces the term "MUD", or Market-driven Unintentional Development to describe this new hybrid urban condition, suggests that planning itself needs to be radically redefined in order to be effective and not contribute to the extreme ex-urbanization; the conclusion of the book is "No New Cities", a call for models of upgrading of existing urban centers and suburbs.

In 2010, author Helen H. Wang published her first book The Chinese Dream; the book is based on over 100 interviews of the new members of the middle class in China. In the book, Wang did not define the Chinese Dream; the Chinese Dream has won Eric Hoffer Book Awards. In 2011, the book was published in China. In 2012, the second edition of The Chinese Dream with a foreword by Lord Wei was published. In the foreword, Wei wrote: The Chinese Dream today as portrayed in Helen's book speaks of a changing China, discovering consumerism, globalised, at a cross roads. Will her path in years to come continue to be one that resembles that of Western countries with all the benefits of further urbanization and industrialization, but at the same time challenges in managing scarce resources, population migration, the social problems that affluence can bring, elsewhere called'Affluenza'? Or will the Chinese people themselves inside and outside China create a new sustainable Chinese Dream, based on their ancient values of respect for culture and nature, harnessing technology and creativity?

In September 2012, Helen H. Wang gave a copy of her book The Chinese Dream to Tom Friedman at a dinner in Shanghai hosted by Peggy Liu, chairwoman of Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy; the British publication The Economist credits a column written by the American journalist Thomas Friedman for popularizing the term in China. A translation of Friedman's article, "China Needs Its Own Dream", published in The New York Times was popular in China. Friedman attributes the phrase to Peggy Liu, the founder of the environmentalist NGO JUCCCE. According to Friedman in the magazine Foreign Policy, "I only deserve part credit... the concept of'China Dream' was created by my friend Peggy Liu, as the motto for her NGO about how to introduce Chinese to the concept of sustainability."James Fallows of The Atlantic has pointed out that the phrase has been used in the past by journalists. He mentions Deborah Fallow's book Dreaming in Chinese, his own article "What Is the Chinese Dream?", Gerald Lemos' book The End of the Chinese Dream as examples.

In response to Fallows

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