Why China Adopts Culture as Political Doctrine
To embrace exceptionalism, to stoke nationalism, or else?
If one has to pick a word of the year for 2023 that projects the future pattern for China’s policy behaviors, then I would go with “culture” or “civilization.” Earlier this December, President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to a forum highlighting the study of an ancient city called Liangzhu. The archaeological ruins, rehabilitated under Xi’s personal intervention when he was the provincial Party chief of Zhejiang twenty years ago, are said to be a “demonstration of the 5,000-year history of the Chinese civilization.” If my math is correct, it is the seventh time this year that Xi has sent public blessings to a convention featured by Chinese culture or civilization. Such moves offer a glimpse of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) latest efforts to popularize the concept of the “second integration,”第二个结合 or “integrating the basic tenets of Marxism with China’s fine traditional culture.”
Although this phrasing was already used in Xi’s speech marking the CPC’s centenary in 2021, the wording of culture and civilization began to frequent political documents and translate into actual policies only in the past year following a systematic promulgation of the “second integration” at the 20th CPC National Congress. This March, the “civilization” moved to the main stage for China’s vision for a future global governance model as Xi proposed the “Global Civilization Initiative,”全球文明倡议 in addition to his previous two initiatives themed by development and security. A new political jargon “modern Chinese civilization”中华民族现代文明 was launched at a meeting in June, where Xi elaborated on its “five prominent features” and called the second integration “another emancipation of minds.” The climax of this campaign came in October, when “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture”习近平文化思想 was officially crystallized. To date, only six departments of the statecraft are deemed important enough to be hailed as part of the top leader’s philosophical “thoughts,” and culture is now one of them.
Meet Challenges in China’s Context
Unsurprisingly, what seems to be a synthesis of culture and politics has prompted a wave of worrying conjecture in the China-watcher circle. There are generally three interpretations of this policy: an effort to spin the “civilization factor” into a new source of legitimacy when economic performance no longer suffices, a drive for cultural uniformity that stifles social and ethnic plurality, or an attempt at an ideological contest with the Western values both home and abroad. Tempting as it is to scramble to paint it in a negative light, dissecting the rationale behind the “second integration” requires a narrowly focused approach by putting it back into China’s political context.
In the CPC’s glossary, "integration" is generally referred to as a way that the Party breaks away from a dogmatic transplant of foreign models and blazes its own trail in order to meet the challenge and salvage its cause. The “first integration,” meaning “integrating Marxism with China’s specific realities,” refers to such acts of the previous Party leadership. In the revolutionary period, Mao Zedong, by ditching the Russian tactic of the working-class uprising in big cities, formulated a new strategy of “encircling the cities from the rural areas”农村包围城市 based on China’s reality of a much larger agricultural population. This strategy helped the CPC get through the crisis of survival when its united front with Nationalists broke down and eventually take the national power through a civil war.
Confronted with economic stagnation upon Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping initiated the embrace of a market-oriented economy, setting aside the Soviet model of planned system that had dominated China for three decades. Deng’s refashioning of the application of Marxist theory via reform and opening-up, which navigated the country through an economic backwater and later transformed it into a global industrial powerhouse, was then framed as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
The second integration proposed by Xi is also aimed at meeting the governance challenges of his own time, with China’s own methods. To specify these challenges, Xi raised the notion of “two overall realities”两个大局, namely the goal of realizing “national rejuvenation” at home, and the “global changes of a magnitude not seen in a century” abroad. And culture has a role to play in both of the realities.
Forge Consensus for New Goal
The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, which will be marked by the building of a “modern socialist nation,” is set to be achieved by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the PRC’s founding. This historic mission was not presumed by Xi, but was already a top-level design in Deng’s “three-step strategic plan”三步走战略 proposed in 1987. It is the next phased objective after China achieved moderate prosperity by eradicating absolute poverty in 2021. A national goal in the new stage entails an overhaul of its long-term approach. At the key 20th CPC National Congress, Xi declared a “Chinese path to modernization”中国式现代化 will be the official road map towards national rejuvenation. It was also hailed as “the greatest political task”中国式现代化是最大的政治 at the Central Economic Work Conference this December. Just as Deng forsook the command system imported from the Soviet Union that had curbed economic mobility, Xi believed China’s future model of modernization also should not “plagiarize any other country.”不是照搬照抄其他国家的现代化 Only this time, he was warning against a wholesale import from the West, whose modernizing approach he deemed “capital-centered” “polarizing” “materialistic” and based on “overseas expansion and plundering.”
Promoting another “integration” characterized by Chinese culture, primarily speaking, is an effort to build social consensus for China’s own choice of path to attain the Party’s next centenary goal. The fact that Xi called the second integration “another emancipation of minds”又一次的思想解放 was a clear sign. The last such officially recognized “emancipation of minds” refers to a nationwide debate on the “criterion of truth”关于真理标准的大讨论 in 1978, which helped Deng leverage the public opinion to dethrone the conservatives and carry out groundbreaking reforms. As for now, devising a growth model distinctly different from the Western ones certainly calls for extensive support from the public and elites, considering the fact that China had spent one and half centuries trying to catch up with the Western standard of social and economic development. Culture, with its broad base of social acceptance and rich philosophical texts open to modern-day interpretations, naturally becomes a legitimate source of indigenous theoretical and institutional innovations.
Nevertheless, addressing the need to rejig its development path doesn’t spell China’s intention to provoke a Cold War-style ideological contest with the West. Even if it does, the odds are not stacked in Beijing’s favor in this way. Just like the flexible policy behaviors in Mao’s and Deng’s time, the recent pivot to culture is largely inward-looking, and has been carried out within China’s own context at the time.
One Civilization of Many Ethnic Groups
An emphasis on culture and civilization also tends to deal with another major challenge arising from the domestic reality, that is, how to consolidate the “Chinese nation” while leading it toward the rejuvenation. Separatism and extremism have long plagued China’s border regions, where ethnic and religious tensions were sometimes fueled by foreign elements. They are tangible threats to territorial integrity and stable foreign relations. Contrary to the claim that Beijing asserts ethno-nationalism of Han Chinese, the initiative to build a “modern Chinese civilization” is addressing this problem by encouraging ethnic plurality under a shared civilizational identity, or, in Xi’s own words, a “unified pattern of diverse ethnic cultures.”中华民族多元一体格局
To translate the nation-centered identity into a civilization-centered one is a move to look forward by looking back. Before a global system based on nation-states was forced upon China in the mid-19th century, the right to rule in the “Middle Kingdom” hadn’t rested on the identity of a certain ethnic group, but on a sense of belonging to a set of thousands-year-old values, traditions, and rituals. The conquering nomadic ethnics who conformed to this institution would still be regarded as rightful rulers. That is why the dynasties established by Xianbei, Khitan, Tangut, Mongols, and Manchu have long been seen as an integral part of the power transitions within the ancient Chinese civilization in official historical records.
Only in the early 20th century when revolutionaries tried to overthrow Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty, these agitators expediently took advantage of the imported idea of nation-state and hyped Han-centric sentiment to fight against Manchu rulers with slogans like “repel Tartars and restore China.”驱除鞑虏 恢复中华 The nation-state idea soon proved incompatible with a multi-ethnic China, and the later-established Republic of China adopted the policy of “Five Races Under One Union,”五族共和 highlighting the harmonious existence of Han, Manchu, Mongols, Hui (Muslims), and Tibetans within one political entity. The People’s Republic of China, founded by the CPC in 1949, took one step further and identified a total of 56 ethnic groups, all considered integral part of the Chinese nation.
The drive to reassert the concept of Chinese civilization is the latest attempt to strengthen and reconstruct a super-ethnic identity in a multi-ethnic country. Back in 2014, Xi proposed the notion of a “community for the Chinese nation”中华民族共同体 when he visited Xinjiang, and forging a sense of this community has since been an important aspect of China’s ethnic policy. Xi again visited this autonomous region in 2022, and reiterated the importance of constructing identity through the cultural dimension by saying, “Cultural identity is the identity of the deepest level.”文化认同是最深层次的认同 When Xi elaborated on his understanding of the Chinese civilization this June, he said, “Rather than replacing diverse cultures with a single monoculture, Chinese civilization endeavors to integrate various cultures into a shared tapestry.”中华文明从来不用单一文化代替多元文化 而是由多元文化汇聚成共同文化 It shows the Chinese government is more interested in forging a higher civilizational allegiance above disparate ethnic groups’ self-identities, rather than suppressing ethnic minorities’ cultures. And it is not a brand-new practice in this country, or civilization.
Chinese Don’t Believe Thucydides
If the recent political momentum attached to the “fine traditional Chinese culture” is meant to lend credence to the idea of exceptionalism, then the claim of China’s “peaceful nature” would probably fall in this category.
As China’s comprehensive national strength is drawing close to that of the U.S., the narrative that Beijing will eventually challenge Washington for global hegemony has found its way into the conventional wisdom in the West. Avoiding confrontational relations with America, China has been pulling out all stops to counter this argument on every possible occasion. Even before Xi ascended to the top leadership, Beijing began promoting the idea of “a new model of major-country relations between China and the U.S.,”中美新型大国关系 to which Washington hardly responded. When Xi visited Seattle in 2015, he said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world,” referring to the great-power security dilemma that many believe will lead to a China-U.S. military showdown. Xi quoted this phrase many times to express a willingness for the two powers to peacefully coexist. The most recent example was when he received the U.S. bipartisan delegation on an ice-breaking tour to Beijing this October, saying that “Thucydides Trap is not inevitable.” In such rhetoric, Thucydides has been projected as a symbol of realism or offensive realism in international studies, in which Beijing is not interested in participating.
To explain why China is capable of circumventing a predestined great-power struggle that had occurred in previous hegemonic power transitions, Beijing introduced the alleged unique Chinese cultural tradition into the reasoning. Peacefulness was characterized as one of the five distinct features of Chinese civilization in Xi’s speech this June, where he stressed that China as a civilization “advocates applying moral principles to create a world where the common good and individual interests harmoniously coexist.”主张以道德秩序构造一个群己合一的世界 Not only did Xi deny China’s intention to rival the current hegemon through “the law of the jungle,” but he also rejected an ideological competition with the West by never succumbing to an impulse for “cultural hegemony.” Other than refuting the Thucydides trap, maybe, China’s cultural tendency toward peacefulness is also set to dismiss the “Melian Dialogue,” a fable also featured in Thucydides’s work about how great powers will always prey on the weak. At the sideline of the BRICS summit this August, Xi spoke to the Global South leaders that “hegemonism is not in China’s DNA.”中国没有称王称霸的基因
As Xi argued, “Many people in the West are used to viewing China as a modern nation state through the lens of their Western modernization theory, instead of approaching China from the perspective of its more than 5,000 years of civilization.”西方很多人习惯于把中国看作西方现代化理论视野中的近现代民族国家 没有从五千多年文明史的角度来看中国 Ironically, the rationale behind China’s latest campaign to hold up the banner of culture itself is subject to cross-culture misinterpretations. This is detrimental to an accurate assessment of Beijing’s behavioral pattern because this policy carries heavy weight in China’s politics and is likely to take hold for years if not decades. Pushing a non-Western path is not tantamount to antagonizing the West. Rather, it just fits in with a country’s unique cultural background to deal with its own problems.
Subscribe to Sinical China for more original pieces to help you read Chinese news between the lines. Xu Zeyu, founder of Sinical China, is a senior correspondent with Xinhua News Agency, China’s official newswire. Follow him on Twitter @XuZeyu_Philip
Disclaimer: The published pieces in Sinical China reflect only the authors’ personal opinions, and shall NOT be taken as Xinhua News Agency’s stance or perception.