'Chinese Dream' trumps the constitution, says Communist Party paper

Conservatives within the Communist Party continue their campaign against calls for liberal reforms in China in yet another strongly worded magazine editorial on President Xi Jinping's trademark propaganda slogan, the Chinese Dream. 

"Different countries have different dreams," writes Yu Zhong, director and professor at the School of Law at Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing, in the Red Flag magazine, a bi-weekly party publication on Friday.

The Chinese Dream, as an alternative to the American Dream, is a propaganda slogan first proclaimed by Xi while visiting the National Museum in Beijing on November 29 last year.

The People's Daily and other state-run publications have picked up on the slogan and pointed to China's unique development model and the country's incompatibility with Western values.

But the slogan was also quickly turned around by human rights activists, who argued that they had a Dream of Constitutionalism, in which the Chinese government respected basic rights guaranteed by the Chinese constitution such as freedom of speech and assembly.

The debate about dreams had escalated when in January journalists of one of China's most respected newspapers, Southern Weekly, went to the streets of Guangzhou to protest against the censoring of a call for "constitutionalism" in their New Year's editorial.