Today, July 4, 2026, the United States of America celebrates 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. For me, this anniversary is more than an important date in American history. It is also deeply personal.
I was not born in the United States. I do not hold an American passport, and life eventually brought me to Europe rather than America. I was born in Shanghai and grew up in mainland China. Yet since childhood, the United States has occupied a special place in my imagination. Long before I understood economics, constitutional government, political philosophy, or even the complicated history of Sino-American relations, I already had an American Dream.
I still consider the United States the country I admire most in the world. That is, of course, a personal judgment rather than an objective ranking that everyone must share. America has serious problems, and loving a country should never require pretending otherwise. But there are reasons why, after so many years, my emotional attachment to the United States remains unusually strong.
The first reason came not from an economics textbook or an American movie.
It came from my grandmother.
My Grandmother, the War, and My First Image of America
My grandmother was born in 1925. Her generation experienced something that, fortunately, my generation knows principally through history books: the Second Sino-Japanese War and the suffering caused by the Japanese invasion.
When I was a child, she told me about what her generation had experienced. For her, the war was not an academic subject. It was part of her life.
One thing remained particularly strongly in my memory. She told me about the Americans who helped the Chinese during the war. The way she described them was simple and deeply human. She believed that the American people had humanity. China was suffering, and people from another country came to help.
Naturally, as I became older and eventually became an academic, I learned that history is more complicated than childhood memories. States have interests. Alliances are not acts of pure charity. American policy toward the Republic of China evolved considerably during the war, and Washington’s decisions were influenced by its own strategic interests in defeating Imperial Japan.
None of that, however, makes the assistance unreal.
American military assistance, equipment, training, air power, logistics and advisory support became important components of the Republic of China’s war effort. After General Joseph Stilwell’s departure in 1944, General Albert C. Wedemeyer became commander of U.S. Forces in the China Theater and chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek. The U.S. Army’s official history documents the substantial American effort to strengthen Chinese forces during the final phase of the war.
And here I think historical terminology matters.
In early 1945, the Republic of China was fighting under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), Chairman of the National Government of the Republic of China (中華民國國民政府主席), Director-General of the ruling Kuomintang/Chinese Nationalist Party (中國國民黨總裁), Chairman of the Military Affairs Commission of the National Government (國民政府軍事委員會委員長), and President of the Executive Yuan (行政院院長).
By spring 1945, the military situation was changing. Chinese forces increasingly demonstrated their capacity to halt and reverse Japanese operations, assisted materially by American equipment, air support, transport, training and advisers. This does not mean that Americans won China’s war for the Chinese. Millions of Chinese had fought, suffered and died during eight years of resistance. Nor should we forget that the Republic of China had been resisting Japan long before Pearl Harbor brought the United States directly into the Pacific War.
But neither should American assistance be erased from the story.
The two countries fought a common enemy. China survived the war. Japan surrendered. The territories lost to Japan were recovered, including Taiwan, which was placed under the administration of the Republic of China in October 1945.
The Republic of China also emerged from the war as one of the principal Allied powers and became one of the five permanent members of the newly established United Nations Security Council.
As a child, I knew almost none of these institutional details.
What I knew was what my grandmother had told me:
The Americans helped us.
Sometimes a child’s first understanding of another country begins with something that simple.
America Entered My Life Before I Ever Entered America
My second America came through culture.
I began learning English when I was eight years old. English opened a window onto a world very different from the environment in which I grew up. Through English textbooks, films, television programs, music and books, America gradually became something more than a distant country on a map.
One of the television programs that influenced me most was Growing Pains.
I loved it.
At the time, of course, I did not watch the Seaver family as an academic studying American sociology. I was simply a kid watching a funny television series.
But looking back, I realize that I was learning something.
The family had problems. The parents disagreed with the children. The children made mistakes. People became angry. They argued.
But they also talked.
There was humor inside disagreement. Parents could exercise authority without behaving as though authority required emotional distance. Children could make mistakes without every mistake becoming a catastrophe. Serious questions could coexist with laughter.
I liked that atmosphere enormously.
Perhaps this sounds like a small cultural detail. Yet culture often teaches us things before we acquire the vocabulary to explain what we have learned.
Even today, when I teach, I sometimes recognize a little of this influence in myself. I do not want my students to see a professor as a distant authority who enters a classroom, delivers information and leaves. I want them to learn seriously, but I also want to laugh with them. I want them to ask questions. I want to be relaxed enough to admit mistakes. I want there to be some humanity in the classroom.
Being serious does not require being permanently solemn.
Being a professor does not require forgetting how to laugh.
That is something I first discovered in American culture.
The American Dream I Found in a Mainland Chinese University
Later, when I went to university, the idea acquired a name.
The American Dream.
I remember encountering a text about the American Dream in a mainland Chinese university English textbook. The story was about an ordinary person trying to build a better life through his own effort.
The idea fascinated me because the American Dream, at its best, never meant that everybody would become a millionaire.
It meant something much more important:
Where you begin should not completely determine where you are allowed to finish.
You can work.
You can learn.
You can try.
You can fail.
You can try again.
You can create something.
You can improve your life.
You can become something that previous generations of your family could scarcely have imagined.
Much later, as an economist, I acquired more sophisticated terminology for these things: entrepreneurship, human capital, social mobility, property rights, economic freedom, incentives, capital accumulation and institutions.
But the emotional intuition came before the economics.
Give people the freedom to try.
That was the America I imagined.
And that was why, when I was young, I wanted to study there.
Life eventually took me somewhere else. I was recommended to study under a professor in Spain, and one decision led to another until Spain became the center of my academic and professional life.
But the American Dream never completely disappeared.
America and the Economic Transformation of Mainland China
There is another reason I find anti-American narratives in mainland China historically strange.
The economic transformation of mainland China after the market-oriented reforms beginning in 1978 cannot be understood in isolation from its reintegration into the international economy.
The United States played an important role in that process.
American companies invested capital in mainland China. American consumers purchased enormous quantities of goods produced there. American technology, management practices and business relationships entered the mainland Chinese economy. Access to international markets contributed to the expansion of export-oriented industries.
This does not mean that the United States somehow “created” mainland China’s economic development.
That would be nonsense.
Mainland Chinese workers worked. Entrepreneurs took risks. Families saved. Domestic institutional reforms changed incentives. The gradual retreat from some aspects of Maoist economic organization allowed markets to perform functions that central planning had suppressed.
But economic development does not occur in a vacuum.
Capital matters.
Technology matters.
Trade matters.
Markets matter.
The international division of labor matters.
And America’s role in the international economic system mattered.
This is why I find historical amnesia so unfortunate. One can criticize American policies without rewriting the history of how deeply the post-1978 mainland Chinese economy benefited from participation in an international economic order in which the United States was central.
Gratitude does not require political obedience.
But intellectual honesty requires memory.
The America I Eventually Met
The America of my childhood could easily have disappeared once I encountered the real country.
Instead, much of my affection became stronger.
For many years, I traveled regularly to the United States for academic and personal reasons. I met professors, students, professionals and ordinary people.
Of course, I met people I liked and people I did not. No country contains only wonderful human beings.
But something consistently impressed me.
America is extraordinarily diverse.
Walk through an American city and you encounter people whose families originated in Europe, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, South Asia and almost everywhere else. Interracial relationships are ordinary. You see Asian men and white women, black men and Asian women, Latino and white couples, and countless combinations that nobody around them finds particularly remarkable.
People can look completely different from one another and simply be American.
As an Asian person, I generally felt comfortable there.
I want to formulate this carefully because personal experience is not statistical evidence. Racism obviously exists in the United States. American history contains slavery, segregation, exclusion and discrimination. Racial prejudice did not magically disappear after the Civil Rights Movement.
Nor would it be serious to declare from my personal travels that one continent is intrinsically more racist than another.
But my experience nevertheless matters to me.
I have encountered racial comments in parts of Europe that surprised me—questions based on crude stereotypes about Chinese people, sometimes presented as harmless jokes. I have found that American educational and professional culture is often particularly conscious of the need to avoid treating people as racial stereotypes.
America has had terrible racial conflicts.
But it has also spent generations openly arguing about them.
That willingness to identify an injustice, debate it and gradually change social norms is itself part of what I admire about the country.
July 4, 1776
This brings me to the document whose anniversary we celebrate today.
The Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776. After further revisions, it officially adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4. The parchment copy familiar to us today was engrossed later, and delegates began signing it on August 2.
That chronology matters because July 4 commemorates principally the adoption of the Declaration, not a mythical moment in which all 56 delegates simultaneously signed the parchment.
But what matters even more is what the document says.
The Declaration begins from a revolutionary proposition about the relationship between human beings and political power: government does not create our fundamental rights. Political authority exists to secure rights that precede it. The document invokes equality, unalienable rights, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and government deriving its legitimate powers from the consent of the governed.
The United States did not live up to these principles in 1776.
Slavery existed.
Women did not possess equal political rights.
Native Americans suffered enormous injustices.
The subsequent history of the United States includes a civil war, segregation, racial discrimination, abuses of governmental power and many other contradictions.
But I do not think those contradictions make the Declaration less important.
They make it more important.
Because a principle can become a standard by which the society that proclaimed it is itself judged.
If all people possess fundamental rights, somebody can ask why slavery exists.
If legitimate political power requires consent, somebody can ask why certain citizens cannot vote.
If liberty belongs to the individual, somebody can challenge a government that violates it.
America repeatedly failed to fulfill its own ideals.
But its own ideals also provided arguments with which Americans could challenge those failures.
That is extraordinary.
What My American Students Taught Me About America
In the spring semester of 2026, I was teaching Public Choice.
Among my students were Americans.
When we discussed American political institutions, I discovered something that genuinely surprised me. Only a few had seriously read the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the constitutional amendments.
So I made these documents part of what they had to learn.
I even used them in examination questions.
Perhaps there was something slightly unusual about the situation: a professor born in Shanghai reminding American students that they should read the founding documents of their own country.
But I meant it seriously.
I told them that I regard the U.S. Constitution as one of the greatest examples of constitutional government ever created. That is my assessment, not a proposition students are required to accept. The Constitution contains historical compromises and imperfections, and it has been amended repeatedly.
What fascinates me is its underlying institutional logic.
Do not assume that rulers will always be good.
Divide power.
Create checks.
Allow institutions to constrain one another.
Protect rights.
Make political authority contestable.
Public Choice teaches us not to imagine that politicians stop being ordinary human beings once they enter government. They continue to possess ambitions, incentives, incomplete information and personal interests.
Good institutions should therefore not depend on finding angels to govern us.
My American students also understood something about me that I wish were more widely understood elsewhere.
They knew that because I am ethnically Chinese, I am not therefore a representative of the Chinese Communist Party.
A country is not its ruling party.
A civilization is not its government.
A population is not identical to whoever exercises political power over it.
I can be ethnically Chinese and oppose CCP policies.
An American can criticize an American president and still love America.
Indeed, the ability to criticize one’s government without ceasing to belong to one’s country is one of the characteristics of a free political order.
The Dollar Is Not a Football Team
A few years ago, one of my relatives asked me an interesting question.
What if the U.S. dollar collapsed and the mainland Chinese yuan appreciated dramatically or replaced it?
The question was presented almost as though currencies were football teams: if the dollar loses, the yuan wins.
Economics does not work like that.
The U.S. dollar occupies a central position in the global financial system. International trade, reserves, financial markets, debt contracts, investment and banking are deeply connected to dollar-denominated institutions.
A genuine collapse of confidence in the dollar would therefore not simply make America poorer while everybody else became relatively richer.
It would create enormous disruption throughout the international economy.
Mainland China would not be magically protected from that disruption.
Europe would not be protected.
Emerging economies would not be protected.
The world economy is interconnected.
This is one reason I do not celebrate fantasies of American economic collapse.
I want America to prosper.
Not because prosperity should belong exclusively to Americans, but because a prosperous, innovative and economically open United States has generated enormous benefits beyond its own borders.
America has produced technologies used around the world. Its universities have educated generations of international students. Its companies have created products used by billions of people. Its capital markets finance innovation. Its consumers participate in an international division of labor that creates income far beyond American territory.
The success of a productive economy is not a zero-sum game.
Why Ronald Reagan Has Always Mattered to Me
There is also one American president who has particularly influenced how I think about political leadership: Ronald Reagan.
My admiration for Reagan is personal and should not be confused with an objective ranking that everyone else must share. What interests me is what I think his presidency illustrates.
First, Reagan understood the importance of economic incentives.
He emphasized lower marginal tax rates, private initiative, entrepreneurship and a more limited role for government in economic decision-making. His administration was certainly not a perfect implementation of limited government. Federal deficits increased substantially, and government expenditure did not shrink nearly as dramatically as some free-market rhetoric might suggest.
That is precisely why I prefer evaluating politicians policy by policy rather than turning them into heroes who can never be criticized.
But Reagan understood something fundamental: government does not manufacture prosperity merely by issuing commands.
People create.
People invest.
People save.
People work.
People discover opportunities.
Entrepreneurs take risks.
Markets coordinate enormous quantities of dispersed information without requiring one political authority to possess all of it.
That understanding matters.
But there is another reason I admire Reagan.
He knew how to communicate.
He could disagree strongly without giving the impression that half the American population was his enemy. He understood humor. He could make fun of political opponents, but he could also make fun of himself.
Most importantly, his political language was often optimistic.
That quality seems increasingly rare.
A president is not merely the chief executive of the federal government. The president also speaks to a country containing hundreds of millions of people who will never agree about everything.
Leadership therefore requires more than defeating an opponent.
It requires giving people who did not vote for you some reason to believe that they still belong to the same country.
America needs that capacity.
Every democracy does.
The America I Love Is Not a Perfect America
The United States in 2026 has problems.
Political polarization is serious.
The fiscal situation worries me.
Protectionism worries me.
There are cultural conflicts that increasingly make Americans speak about political opponents as though they were enemies.
Some Americans have lost confidence in their institutions.
Others seem to have forgotten why those institutions exist.
None of this makes me love America less.
I do not admire the United States because I think Americans are biologically, morally or intellectually superior to other people.
They are not.
Human beings everywhere possess the same capacity for courage and cowardice, generosity and selfishness, wisdom and stupidity.
What I admire is an institutional idea.
A president can be criticized.
A professor can criticize the president.
A student can criticize the professor.
A newspaper can criticize all three.
A political movement can lose an election and organize for the next one.
A government policy can be challenged in court.
A person whose parents were born thousands of kilometers away can arrive, become a citizen and eventually simply call himself American.
America has often failed to live up to that ideal.
But the ideal remains worth defending.
An American Without an American Passport
Sometimes students ask me whether I would like to teach in the United States.
Yes.
If God gives me that opportunity someday, I would be very happy to teach there.
And if life ever led me to immigrate again, the United States remains the country that has always occupied that special place in my imagination.
When I was younger, I even learned to sing The Star-Spangled Banner.
Perhaps I will never become an American citizen.
Perhaps I will never hold an American passport.
That is fine. Life does not have to follow exactly the route we imagined when we were young.
But a passport is not the only way in which a country becomes part of someone’s life.
America came into mine through my grandmother.
It came through the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the American assistance she remembered.
It came through English lessons when I was eight.
It came through the American Dream.
It came through Growing Pains.
It came through books, television, films and music.
Later it came through economics, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Public Choice and Ronald Reagan.
And eventually it came through actual Americans—friends, colleagues, students and countless people I encountered during my visits.
The real United States was never identical to the America I imagined as a child.
No real country could possibly live up to a child’s imagination.
What surprises me is that, after seeing the imperfections of the real country, I still believe deeply in the central idea that attracted me.
250 Years Later, the American Dream Still Matters
Today, exactly 250 years after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Americans are celebrating an extraordinary historical anniversary. The original Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights remain preserved at the National Archives, where the 250th anniversary is being commemorated today.
But preserving the parchment is not enough.
A free society must preserve the ideas.
I hope young Americans read their own history.
Read the Declaration of Independence.
Read the Constitution.
Read the Bill of Rights.
Read Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton.
Read Lincoln.
Read Frederick Douglass.
Read the history of slavery and the Civil War.
Understand the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.
Study America’s failures as seriously as its victories.
Understand why checks and balances exist.
Learn why freedom of speech matters especially when the person speaking says something you dislike.
Understand why political power needs limits.
And learn why millions of children born outside the United States once looked across an ocean and imagined America as a place where they might become something that their circumstances of birth seemed to make impossible.
I was one of those children.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States began an extraordinary experiment. It has never perfectly realized its own principles. Perhaps no society ever can.
But the attempt to construct a political order around individual liberty, constitutional limits, pluralism, property rights, entrepreneurship, freedom of expression and the possibility of self-improvement remains one of the great experiments in modern history.
My grandmother’s America helped her generation during a terrible war.
The America of my childhood gave me a dream.
The America I later visited gave me friendships, intellectual inspiration and memories.
And the America I teach about today still reminds me of something even more fundamental: liberty cannot survive merely because previous generations created good institutions. Each generation must understand why those institutions are worth preserving.
I may never have an American passport.
But America has been part of my intellectual and personal life for as long as I can remember.
So today, on July 4, 2026, I want simply to say:
Happy 250th birthday, America.
Thank you for the dream you gave a child thousands of kilometers away.
Keep believing in liberty. Keep learning from your mistakes. Keep giving people the freedom to try, to fail, to begin again and to build something better.
And keep giving the next child, wherever in the world that child happens to be born, a reason to dream.
May God bless the United States of America.
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How to Cite this Article (APA 7th edition)
Wang, H. H. (2026, July 4). My American Dream: Why the United States Still Matters to Me 250 Years After Independence. https://williamhongsongwang.com/2026/07/04/my-american-dream-why-the-united-states-still-matters-to-me-250-years-after-independence/
