BEIJING – One World, One Dream. That's the slogan chosen by the Chinese for these Olympics. Do they mean it? Or are they saying, We're No. 1?

In business as in sports, you compete to win. The Chinese are competing in every event in these Olympics, and their gold medal total may well fulfill their fans' dream to beat the United States.

But Hu Angang, a professor at Tsinghua University, says that One World, One Dream is not about China on top.

It's about China accepting the urging of the U.S. that it become a stakeholder in the common global welfare. It means becoming the world's leading importer and not just the world's exporting workshop.

It's about China joining a worldwide fight against global warming instead of sitting it out and blaming the problem on the United States. It's about China and America both investing lots more money into research and innovation to find alternatives to fossil fuels.

"China's dream is the world's dream," he said.

A month in China talking with politicians, economists and ordinary Chinese found most in agreement with Dr. Hu.

Take the global warming argument. China, thanks to its heavy dependence on coal-fired power plants, is now surpassing the United States as the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. So U.S. climate negotiators say China has to make major curbs in its emissions if people expect the United States to do the same.

The Chinese have been saying most of the greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere, which linger there for decades, were put there by the United States and other developed countries. That means the cleanup burden belongs to them rather than China, they say.

Economist Huang Fanzhang of the China Reform Forum said it's time to move beyond this dispute.

"All this arguing should become history. There's no point to blame one or the other more ... when we all live on the same earth. Pollution is a problem we should be working to solve together," he said.

The Chinese will need action as well as words to convince the world that they want to be part of the solution to problems such as energy security and climate change. Last week, China raised its gas-guzzler tax on cars with large engines to a whopping 40 percent of the purchase price. Customers who buy cars with the smallest engines will see the sales tax drop from 3 percent to 1 percent.

The Chinese government is also going to leave in place discounted subway fares of less than 30 cents that were put in place for the Beijing Olympics.

In the United States, we're not doing as much. We're still struggling with how to pay for public transit, with DART's proposed parking fees just the latest example of a pricing strategy that pushes commuters back into their cars.

Chinese universities are cooperating with researchers in Japan, Britain and the United States on four different carbon capture and sequestration demonstrations for power plants.

Meanwhile, the lead attempt to go to a commercial-scale demonstration of this technology in the United States, with China participating, is floundering.

China is investing massively in wind, solar and biofuels, with financial incentives to producers. The U.S. Congress has let tax incentives for wind and solar lapse in a bitter partisan feud over other aspects of energy policy.

All this is not to say the Chinese are doing a better job on climate change, pollution abatement and lessening dependence on fossil fuels.

They have a long way to go.

But what they are doing is demonstrating their sincerity about finding common ground. And that's an outreached hand that's worth grasping.