On Oct 30, China Daily published a reflective article by Professor Ho Lok-sang entitled, “Humanity should embrace the ‘for all of us’ culture”. In a subsequent article, he argued that “Chinese culture puts brakes on government power”. Shortly after reading the first article, I watched a revelatory (and it transpires, related) interview with Professor Arthur C Brooks on Bloomberg TV.

Brooks currently teaches at Harvard University, where he runs the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory. He has written several best-selling books focused on improving individual happiness, including Build the Life You Want, published in 2023 (co-written with Oprah Winfrey). His “Leadership and happiness” class, which has been widely discussed in the media, is very popular.

In fact, the work of both professors recognizes the need for and promotes the advancement of society-wide psychological well-being. However, differing grand narratives linking the past to the present underpin their basic viewpoints. This juxtaposition reminded me of British author George Orwell’s frequent use of the term “mental atmosphere” in both his fiction and nonfiction writing.

Briefly, this was a synoptic term used to label what Orwell judged to be the prevailing, collective social, political, economic — and moral — essence evident within a given society. The term could thus be used to signal a sinister reality (see his most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four) or the possibility of a better future (see Homage to Catalonia). As it happens, it is also a concept that can help illuminate the foundations of particular grand narratives.

One central aspect of the broader mental atmosphere in China is the persistence of striking wealth inequalities. These inequalities are well recognized by the government in Beijing, where they are the focus of continuous remedial initiatives.

Ho’s recent articles unsurprisingly stress the pivotal importance of the broad public welfare interest of 1.4 billion people and how this, combined with deeply shared Chinese cultural understanding, fundamentally prioritizes long-term public welfare needs (captured in the “common prosperity” doctrine) over intense private empowerment or enrichment.

This is a worthy but rather vast, collective aspiration. So it is fair to ask — how realistic is it?

We are told that the particularly intense American free-enterprise system is a “gift to the world”, but where are the visible, expansive social deliverables? It is true that the US comfortably remains the world’s wealthiest major nation measured by GDP per capita. But it is beset by intensifying poverty, accompanied by extraordinary growth in elite privatized wealth, epitomized by Elon Musk’s recent $275 million-per-day pay package, according to CNN

Ho’s response to this valid implicit question is to summarize China’s extraordinary public welfare performance record, including its ability “to avoid a single year of negative growth since 1976, to eradicate extreme poverty, and to build futuristic infrastructure in less than a decade”.

Writing in The Guardian recently, journalist Eduardo Porter forcefully underscored this assessment when he observed that: “In 1990, 943 million people (in China) lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars — 83 percent of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero.”

Brooks’ substantial online video output verifies that he is an excellent teacher and a cultivated public speaker. Viewing this material also helps confirm what the Bloomberg interview reveals: The atomistic, individualized mental atmosphere that shapes the principal arguments Brooks advances to raise the broad level of happiness in the United States. The contrast here with the molecular, shared human values (dating back over 2,000 years) within which Ho’s arguments have been formulated is exceptionally clear.

Brooks’ work emphasizes the central importance of individual aspirations in achieving long-term, elevated levels of meaningful societal happiness. He campaigns strongly against any sort of “greed is good” approach, however, stressing that individual aspirations need to be shaped by meaningful motivation. Each individual needs to learn to value the enjoyment of unselfish giving and the central desirability of serious friendships and family relationships. These pivotal elements need, moreover, to be combined with finding a commendable purpose in life, which may be derived from a religious belief or from praiseworthy secular sources. Brooks also observes that a good marriage is the single best predictor of happiness.

The delineation of this scheme includes several wider exhortations — and warnings.

First, according to Brooks, his granular, free-enterprise prescription for elevating societal happiness draws on a grand narrative of the US at its best. Given that he served as president of the important, center-right American Enterprise Institute from 2009 to 2019, this is unsurprising.

Next, in The Battle, a 2010 book, Brooks highlights the evils of socialism and argues, with considerable fervor, that America faces a formidable battle between vital free enterprise and devitalizing social democracy. Social democracies (not least in Europe), we are told, consume wealth rather than create it, while “capitalism naturally reinforces democracy”.

The vital implication here is that democracy — the process of selecting a government via the ballot box — is an intrinsically superior good. Even if one supposes that this may have been so in America, an inescapable, contemporary question arises: What sort of material, society-wide, performance outcomes have been delivered by this pinpointed, centrally important procedure?

As we saw above, the identification of specific, major performance outcomes in China is a principal feature within the grand narrative advanced by Ho. Which makes it more noticeable that when one looks for similar, specific lists of broadly elevating material outcomes in America, they are far harder to find in Brooks’ work.

We are told that the particularly intense American free-enterprise system is a “gift to the world”, but where are the visible, expansive social deliverables? It is true that the US comfortably remains the world’s wealthiest major nation measured by GDP per capita. But it is beset by intensifying poverty, accompanied by extraordinary growth in elite privatized wealth, epitomized by Elon Musk’s recent $275 million-per-day pay package, according to CNN.

The above Guardian story explained that more than 4 million Americans presently live below the abject poverty line (less than $3 a day) — three times as many as in 1990. According to the Center for American Progress, almost 36 million Americans (10.6 percent of the population) were living below the official poverty line ($31,812 for a family of four) in 2024.

These singularly unhelpful statistics likely explain why Brooks relies so much on his outstanding communication skills, robust exhortations, and rather alarming warnings, rather than on catalogues of society-wide, poverty-alleviating American success stories.

In The Guardian, Porter sharply captured what is currently unfolding within the contrasting grand narratives embraced in America and China. After observing how very rich the US is, how its productivity eclipses that of Europe and how America enjoys a significant AI lead, he argues:

“This story ignores how the US chooses to spend its riches. It seems reasonable that the success of a society and its system of government, the morality of its political compromises and agreements, would be determined to an important degree by how it chooses to deploy the fruits of its accomplishments and how it apportions the costs of its failures. Unlike China, the US did not offer much to the people eking out a living around the poverty line. Per capita, the US’s economic output is six times China’s, and yet inexplicably, there seem to be more abjectly poor Americans than Chinese.”

The author is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.