China has grown rapidly in influence and ability to act in the international arena. That means it faces bigger, tougher and ever more urgent challenges. Therefore, there is a growing need for more high quality think tanks which can offer solutions to these challenges by mining the wisdom in the broader society.

Given the sheer size of China, its development has the ability to impact the world. With its rapid growth, China is often put under the international spotlight. However, China is very different from many countries in terms of its cultural traditions, social system, development path, and value systems.

Like the original creation of the American Dream, the Chinese Dream has been utilized institutionally to show that anything is possible for the average individual, with the right amount of drive and hard work. Over time, the American Dream has become driven more by the material signifiers of a house and car. China must nurture a more balanced dream to avoid the emphasis on materialism.

Speaking at the recent Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, Xi Jinping spelled out China’s new foreign-policy vision, which many have characterized as a diplomatic manifesto to secure the “Chinese dream”.

China’s leaders need to look hard at the “Chinese Dream” they are trying to realize for their country and decide if that dream rests more on cooperation at this critical moment with the world’s other largest economy, the United States, or on an absurd and outdated allegiance to the bizarre and historically obsolete feudal regime of the Kim family in Pyongyang.

The first state sponsored World Internet Conference was recently held in Wuzhen, China. Its main goal was to reinforce the idea of Internet sovereignty for individual nations, which has been decried by the U.S. as a veiled attempt to impose China’s state-centric approach to Internet governance to the wider world.

The “New Type of Great Power Relations” enables China to establish a code of conduct to protect its core interests, but the U.S. has not completely adopted it out of protection of its own geopolitical allies. For greater endorsement China should advance the interests of smaller nations in the Asia-Pacific, and the U.S. should move beyond its Cold War, realist mentality.

It was perhaps only a matter of time before Chinese President Xi Jinping shared his idea of transforming the China dream into an ‘Asia-Pacific dream’.