The Civilization Trap

On the Inevitable Return of a Surprisingly Recent Idea

China is a civilization pretending to be a state.— Lucian Pye

Western civilization is the only civilization that has attempted to become universal.
— Christopher Dawson

I. Beijing — Davos — Munich

On January 14, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney landed in Beijing for the first visit by a Canadian head of government to China in nearly a decade. The relationship had been frozen since 2018, when China detained two Canadian citizens in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Huawei executive at American request. None of that seemed to weigh heavily on the proceedings. Two days later, Carney met Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People, announced a “new strategic partnership,” agreed to slash Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1%, and came away describing China as a more “predictable” trading partner than the United States. He did not raise human rights issues vocally, saying that Canadians “take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He used phrases like “new world order” — language that, whether he intended it or not, happens to map almost perfectly onto Beijing’s own preferred vocabulary for the post-American international arrangement it has been quietly constructing for years. He was feted, and flew home via Qatar.

Three days later, he was in Davos. What Carney said at the World Economic Forum on January 20 has already acquired the status of a landmark — the kind of speech people will cite when they try to pinpoint the moment a certain era was formally declared over. He opened with Václav Havel’s parable of the greengrocer: the shopkeeper who puts a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” not because he believes it, but to signal compliance, to avoid trouble, to get along. That sign, Carney said, is what the Western world had been displaying in its window for decades — the sign reading “Rules-Based International Order,” the sign reading “Mutual Benefit Through Integration.” Nobody fully believed it. Everyone displayed it. The bargain, he announced, was over. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The old order was not coming back, and nostalgia was not a strategy.

The room gave him a standing ovation — a rare event at Davos, where the default register is knowing concern rather than actual feeling. Even Trump was able to correctly infer that he was (chief) among the unnamed targets of Carney’s speech, and he responded with characteristic bluster. European leaders, already rattled by an American president who had threatened to take Greenland “the hard way,” called Canada’s new prime minister a statesman and a beacon.

Listening to the speech from Geneva, where I was working a freelance writing gig for the World Economic Forum, I nodded a silent kudos to Carney for the Havel move. He had to know what was coming — that the moment he stepped off the plane from Beijing, where he had spent four days announcing strategic partnerships and declining to raise inconvenient subjects, every hawk from Washington to Warsaw would be sharpening their knives. And so he opened with an anti-communist dissident, the most famous truth-teller in the modern European canon, a man who had gone to prison rather than put the wrong sign in his window. It was elegant preemptive inoculation: you cannot accuse a man of appeasing authoritarianism in the same breath as you applaud his invocation of Václav Havel. Whether the inoculation was fully warranted is a separate question — one that the speech’s admirers, in the warmth of the standing ovation, seemed content to leave unasked.

That clever heading-off, one of many smart rhetorical moves in the speech, was not of course the main event. That distinction must be given to what the Beijing-to-Davos sequence revealed about the state of the world in January 2026: that America’s closest neighbor, most integrated trading partner, and longest-standing ally had concluded that its interests were better served by a strategic partnership with China than by continued dependence on the United States. Canada was not alone. In that same month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Ireland’s Taoiseach, and the President of Uruguay all made their way to the Great Hall of the People for audiences with Xi. This was followed in late February by German Chancellor Merz’s trip to Beijing. The queue of leaders seeking to position themselves relative to Beijing — as Trump’s America lurched from one provocation to the next — was getting longer. The rupture Carney named at Davos was real, and it had a direction: away from Washington, toward whatever came next, and with China very much in the picture of what that might be.

Which brings us to Munich, three weeks later, and to the speech that received, oddly, the warmest reception of all.

It helps to remember what European leaders were braced for when Marco Rubio took the stage at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof on February 14. The previous year, Vice President J.D. Vance had used the same podium to deliver what can only be described as a diplomatic drive-by shooting. He had arrived in Munich and, rather than meeting with the governing coalition of America’s most important European ally, arranged a private audience with the AfD — the far-right party whose leading figures were at that moment under investigation for links to Russian influence operations. He then proceeded to lecture a continent that had defeated fascism, rebuilt itself from rubble, and maintained a liberal democratic order for eighty years about the paramount importance of protecting the free speech rights of right-wing political parties. He scolded European governments for their defense spending in a tone that suggested contempt rather than concern. The Europeans left that conference with the specific facial expression of people who have been insulted by someone they are not yet in a position to confront.

So when Rubio appeared a year later and spoke in full, grammatical sentences about the history and depth of the transatlantic alliance, the relief in the room was palpable and, in its way, understandable. He praised Europe. He invoked shared sacrifice. He said the United States would always be “a child of Europe.” He did not meet with the AfD. He did not call European governments decadent or weak. By the standards that Vance had established, this was practically a love letter. Ursula von der Leyen called it “reassuring.” The room gave Rubio a standing ovation.

They were not wrong to be relieved that it wasn’t worse. They were, however, listening to the wrong speech.

What Rubio actually said in Munich — when you set aside the warmth of tone and read the content closely — was something that should have troubled his European audience rather more than Vance’s rude rhetoric. Vance was aggressive and contemptuous, but was also essentially incoherent: a collection of culture-war grievances dressed up in the language of alliance management, coherent as a mood if not as a vision. Rubio’s speech was different. It was fluent, historically informed, emotionally resonant — and it contained, beneath the reassuring surface, a fully articulated argument about what the West is, what threatens it, and what must be done, that represents a far more consequential departure from the postwar order than anything Vance had said.

The key passage comes near the middle of the speech, after the invocation of Cold War alliance and before the peroration about shared destiny:

“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

And a few minutes later, on the question of what this civilization faces:

“The failure to control our borders is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.”

The specter haunting this argument has a name. Samuel Huntington mapped this terrain thirty years ago in The Clash of Civilizations, his 1996 argument that the post-Cold War world would be organized not around ideological blocs or national interests but around civilizational identities — and that the West’s assumption that its values were universal was the most dangerous delusion it could entertain. He was widely denounced at the time, by liberals who found his framework too deterministic and by neoconservatives who found his acceptance of civilizational limits on democracy promotion defeatist. For all the flaws in his argument, Huntington has aged better than his critics. The world he described — multipolar, civilizationally fractured, resistant to liberal convergence — looks considerably more like 2026 than the “end of history” that was his chief rival thesis.

Huntington did not argue that Western civilization was superior and should reassert itself. He argued that it was particular — one among several, each with legitimate standing, none entitled to judge the others by its own standards. For what it’s worth, Huntington’s was, in its own way, a pluralist vision, and the prescription that followed from it was one of acceptance and restraint: tend your own garden, stop imagining that liberal democracy is the universal destination of history, and resist the temptation to remake the world in your image. What Rubio did in Munich was something Huntington never advocated and would likely have found intellectually dishonest: not civilizational realism but civilizational triumphalism, not an acceptance of limits but a reassertion of supremacy, dressed in Huntington’s idiom but animated by a spirit closer to the 19th century imperial confidence that Huntington’s pluralism was implicitly designed to replace. The civilization Rubio invoked has every reason to be proud of its past and owes no one an apology. That is not Huntington. That is something older, and less honest.

To be sure, Huntington’s pluralism was always asymmetric. The same book that argued the West had no business exporting its values argued with equal urgency that the West needed to defend itself against internal dilution — immigration, multiculturalism, the erosion of Anglo-Protestant cultural foundations. His restraint abroad was paired with an almost panicked consolidation imperative at home. In that sense, Rubio’s civilizationalism can’t be read as some betrayal of Huntington; parts of it are recognizably Huntingtonian.

None of this is entirely new in American political discourse. The Christianity-and-ancestry definition of Western civilization runs from 19th century Anglo-Protestant nationalism through Cold War cultural conservatism to Patrick Buchanan’s paleoconservatism. It’s a lineage Rubio is joining rather than inaugurating. What is new is its Huntingtonian clothing: a pluralist and cautionary vocabulary pressed into triumphalist service, the restraint Huntington advocated abroad stripped away while his domestic anxieties about civilizational dilution are amplified into something more aggressive and outward-facing.

What has happened here is precise and worth naming. The thing being defended is no longer democracy. It is no longer the rule of law, human rights, or the universal values that the postwar Western order claimed to embody and that gave it normative authority far beyond its geographic borders. What is being defended is a civilization explicitly defined by Christian faith, by ancestry, by the heritage of specific forefathers — and what threatens it is the arrival of people whose faith, ancestry, and heritage differ. The Great Conversation Robert M. Hutchins described — between the philosophers of Classical Athens and the Enlightenment, between faith and reason — has no place in this framework. It is not even, really, the language of nationalism in its modern form. It is instead the language of civilizational identity politics, and it is doing something specific and important: it is taking a set of principles that could be held up as standards against which practice could be measured and replacing it with an identity that simply is what it is, unapologetically, without internal standards to which it can be held accountable.

The shift may appear subtle, but it is structurally profound. A civilization defined by principles invites debate and judgment — debate over those principles, and judgment even by its own members. A civilization defined only by ancestry, faith, “race” and inherited identity does not. The first can be criticized in the name of its own ideals; the second can only be defended.

It is worth being precise about what kind of identity this is. The concept of civilization has always been available as a more intellectually respectable alternative to both nation and race — broader than the nation-state (and therefore capable of projecting authority beyond borders), but less biologically explicit than race (and therefore harder to charge with what it often actually means). The great utility of civilizational language is that it can carry racial content in cultural clothing. When Rubio says “ancestry,” he is not necessarily speaking the language of genetics, but neither is he speaking a language that would be unrecognizable to those who do. The phrase “White civilization” circulates openly at the harder edges of the movement whose vocabulary Rubio has borrowed and softened. That phrase makes explicit what the respectable formulation keeps implicit. Civilization, here, is doing what it has often done: providing a vocabulary for exclusion that is just elevated enough to avoid the most direct accusations while performing the same function.

Rubio was explicit about the “unapologetic” part. The White House’s own summary of the speech described it as an “unapologetic defense of Western civilization,” and the word was apt. What was being refused was not weakness or self-doubt in some vague sense. What was being refused was the moral accountability that the West’s own best traditions had generated — the abolitionists who used the language of universal rights to indict slavery, the anticolonial movements that used the West’s proclaimed values as leverage against its actual practice, the generations of internal critics who held liberal civilization to the standards it claimed to embody. That tradition of self-criticism, Rubio implied, was not the highest expression of Western civilization but its corruption — the source of the “malaise of hopelessness” he wanted to cure.

The civilization being restored was the one that sent ships into uncharted seas. “Our story began,” he said, “with an Italian explorer whose adventure into the great unknown to discover a new world brought Christianity to the Americas — and became the legend that defined the imagination of our pioneer nation.” Columbus. The Age of Exploration. The legend. What Columbus, Conquistadors, and colonists actually brought to the Americas — the decimation of indigenous populations, the inauguration of the transatlantic slave trade, the extraction of resources that underwrote European prosperity — did not appear in Rubio’s account. That history was precisely what the “unapologetic” was designed to wave away.

The Europeans in the room applauded this. They applauded it because they were so relieved it wasn’t Vance, and because, after Carney’s rupture speech and the Beijing pilgrimages and Trump’s threats against Greenland and Denmark, any American voice that said “we belong together” felt like a lifeline. They heard the warmth and missed the argument. And the argument — that Western civilization is defined by Christian faith and ancestry rather than by universal values, that what threatens it is immigration rather than its own historical failures, that the age of expansion, of colonialism, of imperialism, was a glory rather than a shameful wound — was one that, had they been listening carefully, should have alarmed them considerably more than anything Vance said.

Because what Vance offered was contempt, which can be resisted. What Rubio offered was a vision — of what the West is, what it was, and what it must become again — that, if taken seriously, dismantles the normative foundations on which European security, European identity, and the European project itself have rested since 1945.

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This five-week arc — Beijing, Davos, Munich — is what this essay is about. But it’s not about what transpired just as current events: it’s about these events as a symptom. The civilizational language that saturates this arc, at different levels and pointing in different directions, is not an accident of rhetoric. It reflects something real and consequential: a crisis in the architecture of the international order that has been building for decades and has now arrived, undeniable, at the surface of political speech.

At the center of that crisis, as both cause and mirror, is China. The rise of the People’s Republic — economic, military, technological, and increasingly normative — is the fact that has made the question of Western civilization urgent again after the post-Cold War “holiday from history,” as Robert Kagan termed it. It is China whose development without democratization broke the “end of history” thesis. It is China whose alternative model of governance has inspired admirers and would-be imitators across the Global South. It is China whose theorists have spent decades arguing that “universal values” are not universal at all but Western, that the liberal international order is civilizational imperialism in procedural clothing, that civilization itself — not the nation-state, not the ideological bloc — is the proper unit of political identity and international order.

Those arguments, which Western liberal commentators spent years dismissing as propaganda or deflection, have now migrated into the speech of Western leaders. Carney in Beijing spoke the language of strategic partnership and new world order that Beijing has been developing for a generation. Rubio in Munich spoke the language of civilizational identity and pride that Chinese nationalist intellectuals have been deploying since at least the 1990s — though in Rubio’s case it was stripped of the philosophical seriousness and historical reckoning that, as I hope to show, the best of that tradition brought to the question.

The civilization trap, as this essay will argue, is the condition of being unable to resist civilizational thinking even when you can see its dangers. The mechanism is straightforward: when universalist frameworks lose credibility, as when the liberal international order’s claim to speak for humanity rather than for its architects is exposed as partial, the field is not simply hollowed out. It gets filled with identity. Civilizational thinking rushes in not because it has earned the authority that universalism has lost, but simply because it is available, emotionally resonant, and difficult to argue against without appearing to defend the discredited universalism it has replaced. That is the trap: not a failure of will or intellect on anyone’s part, but a structural condition that captures even those who can see it clearly.

A brief note on origins: the germ of this essay came to me while listening to Chenchen Zhang — a political scientist at Durham University whose work on “civilizationalism” as a transnational ideological formation spans the European far right and Chinese online nationalism — speak on a panel at the British Academy in London in February 2026. One argument in her work, that civilizational signifiers function in reactionary discourse less as markers of genuine cultural distinctiveness than as flexible transnational codes, enabling unexpected alignments across geopolitical boundaries, planted the question this essay tries to answer: What exactly is being invoked when political leaders reach for civilizational language, and why now?

II. What “Civilization” Does

Every argument has a vocabulary, and the vocabulary shapes what the argument can say. Before asking what Chinese civilization means, or what Western civilization means, or why both are being invoked with such urgency at this particular moment, it is worth pausing over the word itself — where it comes from, what it has always done, and why it keeps returning to the center of political life whenever the established order feels threatened.

The English word civilization is, by the standards of the concepts it claims to describe, extraordinarily young. It enters the language in the mid-18th century, borrowed from the French “civilisation,” which itself had only just been coined — most likely by the elder Mirabeau, père of the more famous revolutionary, in the 1750s. The root is Latin: civis, citizen; civitas, the community of citizens, the city; civilis, pertaining to civic life. To civilize, in the original sense, is to make someone fit for civic life — to bring them from the condition of the barbarian or the savage into the condition of the citizen, the participant in a shared political order.

The concept may be young, but the need it fills is not. Every large-scale human community has found some way of marking the inside from the outside, the ordered from the disordered, the fully participant from the lesser or non-participant. Medieval Europe had Christendom — Christianitas — a political-religious community bound by shared faith, shared institutional authority in Rome, and shared enemies on its frontiers, in whose name Crusades were launched and the Americas subsequently claimed. The Islamic world had the umma, the community of all believers transcending tribe, ethnicity, and political boundary, with its own inside/outside distinction between the dar al-Islam (“House of Islam/Peace”) and the dar al-harb (“House of War”). Chinese imperial civilization had tianxia — “all under heaven” — a cosmological order centered on the Son of Heaven and organized concentrically outward, in which other peoples were ranked by their proximity to and extent of adoption of Chinese cultural norms rather than (at least in theory) by any essential ethnic criterion. All three were doing work that “civilization” would later do: generating solidarity across political units, legitimating hierarchy, marking the boundary between the ordered world and the world beyond its edge.

What the 18th century coinage added was something new, and something specifically worth noting: it performed this same function in secular, apparently descriptive language. Christendom’s authority came from God; the umma’s from divine revelation; tianxia‘s from Heaven’s mandate. “Civilization” presented itself as a kind of developmental teleology rather than divine order — not a theological judgment but simply a fact about where a given people stood on the universal ladder of human progress. That pretense of objectivity is precisely what made it so powerful, and so difficult to argue with. You can dispute a theological claim on theological grounds; a scientific-sounding developmental standard is harder to refuse without seeming to refuse progress itself.

But the word’s early usage carried an assumption that its later political deployment would systematically obscure: it was, at first, a universalist concept. The philosophers and historians who elaborated it — the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers whose stadial theory of history would later travel east to Japan, the French philosophes who coined it, François Guizot in his influential 1828 lectures on the history of civilization in Europe — were describing a process, a condition that humanity was progressing toward. Civilization was singular and directional: where you were on a common developmental path, not what you essentially and permanently were. You might ask, in this framework, whether a given people had yet arrived at civilization; you could not yet ask which civilization they belonged to. Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi reportedly replied that he thought it would be a good idea — and the joke is also a precise philosophical claim: it names the gap between the word’s aspirational, universalist content and the actual conduct of the powers that administered it.

The word arrives, however, already containing a hierarchy, and the 19th century made that hierarchy explicit and systematic. International lawyers developed what they called the “standard of civilization” — a formal doctrine holding that only “civilized” states were full members of the international legal community, entitled to its protections and bound by its obligations. The practical consequence was to place the greater part of Asia, Africa, and the Americas outside the law — available for conquest, partition, and exploitation by powers that met the standard. China, in this system, was often classified as “semi-civilized”: not quite beyond the pale, but not quite inside the tent either. The Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the extraterritoriality provisions that exempted Western nationals from Chinese law on Chinese soil — all of this was conducted under the sign of civilization, as the necessary rough education of a people not yet ready for full membership in the international community. The standard was theoretically universalist — any society could, in principle, meet it — but its practical function was exclusionary, and the gap between theory and practice was precisely what Gandhi had in mind.

The pluralized sense of civilization — not a universal condition to be achieved but a set of distinct, mutually incommensurable identities, each with its own values, traditions, institutions, and trajectory — came later, and from a specific place: the ruins of European self-confidence after the first, horrific industrial war. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, published in two volumes between 1918 and 1922, introduced the concept of distinct civilizational organisms with lifecycles, rising and falling on their own terms, none reducible to the others, none measurable against a single universal standard.

The framework was not wisdom but wound. Spengler wrote in the shadow of the Somme, not from the heights of European confidence but from its collapse after the Great War. Arnold Toynbee extended and systematized this over the following decades, cataloguing distinct civilizations as the proper units of historical analysis. By the time Samuel Huntington formalized the framework for political science in the 1990s, civilizations-as-identity-blocs had been a staple of a certain historical imagination for seventy years — but it was still a relatively recent invention, and one born of crisis rather than historical insight.

This genealogy matters for what follows in this essay. When Rubio speaks of Western civilization as an identity defined by Christian faith and ancestry, or when Xi speaks of Chinese civilization as a 5,000-year continuous entity with its own developmental logic, both are operating within a conceptual framework that postdates the First World War. The word they are using is an 18th century one; the pluralized identity-sense they are giving it is 20th century. And there is an irony in the Spengler genealogy that bears naming: the intellectual who made civilizational plurality intellectually respectable was an explicit pessimist about Western civilization’s prospects, so the framework now deployed by Rubio for triumphalist assertion was built by a man convinced the thing was dying. Rubio’s unapologetic pride in Western civilization rests, conceptually, on the shoulders of a thinker who was convinced it was already in terminal decline.

It is worth holding this entire history in mind when we encounter the word today, because none of it ever entirely disappeared from its semantic field. The universalist aspirations were covered over, partially, by the liberal internationalism of the postwar period, which preferred the language of universal rights and development. But the covering-over was always incomplete, and whenever the liberal consensus weakens, the older strata resurface. When Rubio speaks of Western civilization’s “every reason to be proud of its history,” the pride he invokes is inseparable from the history of civilization as a standard his civilization administered and that others were measured against and found wanting. And when he speaks of civilizational identities defined by faith and ancestry, he is reaching for Spengler’s framework while reversing Spengler’s verdict.

So much for the Western genealogy. The Chinese story is different, and arguably more interesting — not least because the Chinese word most commonly translated as “civilization,” 文明 (wénmíng), has a completely independent origin that reveals a completely different set of intuitions about what cultural achievement consists in.

Wenming 文明 is a compound of two ancient characters. 文 (wén) is among the oldest and most semantically rich characters in the classical lexicon — it means pattern, writing, embellishment, the marks that humans make to record and transmit meaning. 文化 (wénhuà) — literally the transformation or flowering of wen — means “culture,” In its earliest graphic form, 文 depicts a figure with a decorated chest, suggesting the tattoos or body markings that distinguish human beings who participate in culture from those who do not. 明 (míng) means bright, illuminated, brilliant — the character combines the sun (日) and the moon (月), the two great sources of natural light. Together, 文明 carries something like “the brilliance of human pattern-making” — the luminosity that emerges when human beings achieve a level of cultural refinement and moral order that makes their achievements visible and meaningful.

The compound appears in the Yijing — the Classic of Changes, one of the foundational texts of Chinese thought, whose earliest strata date to the Western Zhou period, around 1000 BCE. In that context it refers to the patterns that emerge from the sage’s observation of heaven, earth, and human behavior — an ordered luminosity that distinguishes the cultivated person and the well-ordered society from those that lack such discernment. The emphasis is not on the city, the citizen, or the civic community. It is on wén — on pattern, writing, and cultural refinement — and on the illumination that follows from deep engagement with those patterns. It is as much an aesthetic and moral concept as a political one.

Here is the irony buried in the linguistic history: 文明, in its classical sense, is not a word that divides humanity into the civilized and the barbarous. It describes a quality — a kind of luminous cultural achievement — that any society might attain, measured not by military power or political organization but by the depth and refinement of its cultural inheritance. We should consider the possibility that the 19th century Chinese scholar who thought about 文明 was thinking about something fundamentally different from his European counterpart who thought about civilization.

That said, the Enlightenment-inflected sense of “civilization” as a stage of moral and social development also persists in 21st-century Chinese usage alongside the plural, civilizational meaning of 文明 discussed above. In this register, civilization is something that can be cultivated, measured, and advanced through collective effort and individual discipline. The Party-state’s long-running campaign to build “socialist spiritual civilization” (社会主义精神文明) and its designation of “National Civilized Cities” (全国文明城市) both draw directly on this stadial logic. At the level of daily life the concept appears in a thousand small admonitions familiar to anyone who has spent time in China: “Civilized elevator use starts with you” (文明乘梯，从我做起); “Civilized dog raising: pick up after your pet” (文明养犬，及时清理); “Civilized parking for a harmonious society” (文明停车，和谐社会). The same teleological optimism even finds its way into bathroom signage, where a famous line attributed to Neil Armstrong is repurposed for hygienic instruction above many urinals: “One small step forward, one giant leap for civilization” (向前一小步，文明一大步). In such contexts 文明 does not denote a bounded cultural entity but a direction of travel — a movement away from backwardness toward refinement, order, and modernity —echoing the nineteenth-century European sense in which “civilization” described not what a people was but what it was becoming.

The great historical irony is that these two very different concepts were forced into equivalence by the trauma of the 19th century encounter between China and the West — and the intermediary was Japan. It was the Meiji intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi who, in his Bunmeiron no Gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization, 1875), reached for the classical compound 文明 — in Japanese, bunmei — to translate the Western concept of civilization. Fukuzawa was steeped in exactly the Scottish Enlightenment stadial theory that had produced the European concept: the progression from savagery through barbarism to civilization, with European modernity at the summit. As Albert Craig has shown in Civilization and Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2009), his authoritative study of Fukuzawa’s intellectual formation, Fukuzawa drew heavily on Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Scottish historians who had developed that framework, adapting it for Japan’s modernizing project. He needed a Japanese word that could carry this concept of staged development toward a universal standard, and he chose 文明 — a word with different connotations, rooted in pattern and illumination rather than civic hierarchy, but with a classical dignity that made it a plausible vehicle for the new meaning. As one scholarly account notes, the word “already existed as a concept of Confucian thought and referred to ‘a state in which the Way is properly practised and culture flourishes’” — Fukuzawa repurposed it to mean something considerably more pointed.

Within a generation, Chinese intellectuals — many of them studying in Japan in the wake of the humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, and the failed Hundred Days Reforms of 1898, reading Fukuzawa’s work and the flood of Japanese translations of Western texts — had borrowed the word back, now carrying its new meaning. Liang Qichao, the most influential of these intellectual intermediaries, popularized dozens of Japanese coinages through his prolific writing; a Beijing Foreign Studies University scholar has called him “the most important person in actively bringing in and using Japanese loanwords.” 文明 entered the modern Chinese lexicon as the translation of civilization, with all of civilization’s hierarchical freight now loaded onto a character whose original spirit was quite different. Chinese scholars have themselves noted the discontinuity: as one recent linguistic study puts it, “the Classical Chinese wenming expression should be strictly distinguished from its modern Chinese counterpart.” The modern word is a loanword in borrowed clothing — classical characters filled with foreign meaning, returning home transformed.

Defensive and Offensive Civilizationalism

This borrowing matters for the essay’s argument in a precise way. When contemporary Chinese leaders speak of 文明, and specifically of 中华文明 (Zhōnghuá wénmíng, Chinese civilization), they are drawing on both registers simultaneously, often without acknowledging that they are doing so. The deep classical register — pattern, luminosity, moral refinement, the accumulated wisdom of a people in long conversation with heaven and earth — gives the concept its emotional depth and its genuine popular resonance. The modern register — civilization as a unit of political identity, a category in a competition of global powers, one bloc among several in a Spenglerian world of distinct organisms — gives it its strategic utility. The Chinese leadership’s invocations of “5,000 years of Chinese civilization” draw their force from the classical register: the sense of something ancient, continuous, and luminous that the West’s own “standards of civilization” once tried to extinguish. But they deploy that force in the modern register: as claims about power, status, and the right to shape the international order. The double register is not a deception. It reflects a genuine duality in the word’s modern Chinese life — but it is worth naming, because it is precisely what makes civilizational discourse so slippery to engage.

The Western story and the Chinese story converge at the nineteenth-century moment when the hierarchy implied in civilization was used to justify the subordination of 文明 — when the European standard measured Chinese luminosity and found it, provisionally, insufficient. That encounter is the wound from which all of modern Chinese civilizational thinking flows. It is also the reason that Chinese civilizational discourse, whatever its contemporary political uses, cannot be understood apart from its origins as a response to humiliation — and therefore cannot be treated as equivalent to a Western civilizational discourse that originated in, and has never fully escaped, the position of the judge.

And there is one further irony in the genealogy that the essay will need to return to. The framework within which both Rubio and Xi are now operating — civilizations as plural identity-blocs, mutually incommensurable, each entitled to its own developmental logic — is the one that Spengler introduced and Huntington formalized. Chinese nationalist intellectuals in the 1990s engaged intensely with Huntington, arguing against his thesis of inevitable clash while absorbing his framework of civilizational plurality. They wanted the pluralism without the conflict. Rubio has taken Huntington’s conceptual inheritance and reversed his foreign-policy restraint into triumphalism — discarding Huntington’s warning that Western universalism abroad generates backlash, while amplifying Huntington’s domestic anxiety about civilizational dilution into something more aggressive and outward-facing. The parts of Huntington that Rubio ignores and the parts he inherits are equally revealing. Both moves are legible only against the background of a conceptual framework that is, by historical standards, very new — and that was born, like so many things, not from confidence but from historical catastrophe.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

That distinction — between wanting the pluralism and wanting the triumphalism, between accepting civilizational identity as a fact about the world and wielding it as a weapon — points toward a difference that will organize much of what follows in this essay. Civilizational thinking, it turns out, is not a single thing. It comes in at least two modes, which I will provisionally call defensive and offensive, and the difference between them is not merely one of tone or confidence but of origin, audience, and intellectual posture.

Defensive civilizational thinking arises under pressure. It is the response of a civilization that has been measured, judged, and found wanting by standards it did not set — that has been forced, by the experience of subordination or humiliation, to ask what it is, what it is worth, and whether it can survive. Its primary audience is internal: it is addressed to the people whose inheritance is felt to be threatened, whose sense of cultural continuity has been disrupted, who need to be persuaded that what they stand to lose is worth defending. Its intellectual posture tends toward genuine uncertainty — because the pressure that produced it has made the questions real. What exactly is the essence being defended? How much can change before the continuity is lost? Is the defense itself a form of the disease? These are questions that defensive civilizational thinking lives with rather than resolves.

Offensive civilizational thinking is something different. It arises not from pressure but from confidence — or from the performance of confidence, which is not quite the same thing. It makes outward claims: about the civilization’s right to define the terms of the international order, about the superiority of its values, about the inadequacy of alternatives. Its audience is at least partly external — it is addressed to those who must be persuaded, or simply informed, of the civilization’s standing. And its intellectual posture tends toward assertion rather than inquiry: the questions that defensive thinking lives with have been resolved, or foreclosed, or declared irrelevant. The civilization simply is what it is, unapologetically, and the only remaining task is to defend or extend it.

These are, of course, ideal types and not airtight categories. Real civilizational discourse mixes the modes, shifts between them, sometimes deploys defensive vocabulary in the service of offensive aims. But I believe the distinction is analytically useful, and it maps with some precision onto the difference between the Chinese civilizational thinking that emerged from the nineteenth-century encounter with the West and the Western civilizational thinking that Rubio articulated in Munich. The Chinese case, as the next section will show, began unmistakably in the defensive mode — born from humiliation, shaped by genuine philosophical uncertainty, marked by the quality of engagement that comes from actually not knowing the answer. Whether it has remained there is one of the central questions this essay will try to answer.

III. The View from the Other Side

There is a document so familiar to students of modern Chinese history that invoking it has become almost a pedagogical reflex — the first primary source assigned in virtually every survey course on the period, the before-and-after photograph of Chinese civilizational hubris and its undoing. The 1793 letter from the Qianlong Emperor to King George III of Great Britain is a cliché of the field. It is a cliché because nothing else makes the contrast quite so visible, and the contrast is what this section is about, so here it is.

The occasion was a British diplomatic mission seeking to open China to expanded trade and establish a permanent embassy in Beijing. The mission failed — the British envoy, Lord Macartney, had refused to perform the full ritual prostration before the Emperor, and the negotiations had gone nowhere. Qianlong’s letter explained, with magnificent condescension, why this hardly mattered: “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders.” The outside world existed at the periphery of the only civilization that counted. The letter is a perfect expression of a tianxia world still operating on its own terms — confident, self-sufficient, barely curious about the kingdoms beyond its horizon, innocent of the knowledge that it was about to be measured against a standard it hadn’t set and found, by that standard, wanting.

Fifty years later, that world was gone. The First Opium War ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, the first of what Chinese history would call the unequal treaties: Hong Kong ceded to Britain, five ports opened to foreign trade, an indemnity of $21 million silver dollars, and the inauguration of extraterritoriality — the provision that British subjects on Chinese soil would be subject not to Chinese law but to British consular jurisdiction. The message was not subtle. China had been innocent of the knowledge that it was about to be measured against a standard it hadn’t set by powers it had barely registered as serious, and the consequences of failing that standard were being written into law.

This was not merely a military defeat, though it was that too. It was a civilizational humiliation in the precise sense: the encounter forced a question that the tianxia worldview had never needed to ask. If Chinese civilization — the luminous pattern-making of 文明, the accumulated wisdom of millennia, the system that had produced the most sophisticated bureaucratic state in the world — was the obvious apogee of human achievement, how had it been defeated by island barbarians with better guns? The question could be deflected for a while — those were better guns, not better values; the defeat was military, not moral. But the deflections kept failing. The Taiping Rebellion, the Second Opium War, the French seizure of Vietnam, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 in which Japan — Japan, which had spent centuries borrowing from China — annihilated the Chinese fleet in a matter of hours: each successive shock made the deflections less tenable. By the final decade of the 19th century, the question could not be avoided. Something was deeply wrong, and it had to be named.

The first generation of reformers reached for the most conservative possible answer. The Self-Strengthening Movement of the 1860s through 1890s argued that China needed Western weapons and Western technology — the yong, the functional instruments — but that the Confucian moral and political order, the ti, the substance and essence, could and must be preserved intact. The formula was codified most influentially by the scholar-official Zhang Zhidong, whose 1898 tract Exhortation to Learning gave it its canonical expression: Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong 中学为体，西学为用 — Chinese learning as substance, Western learning as function. Buy the rifles, build the foundries, send students to study engineering in Germany and naval tactics in Britain. But do not touch the core. The Chinese essence — the Confucian moral order, the examination system, the relationship between ruler and subject, the entire civilizational inheritance — remained not only intact but sufficient. The West had superior instruments; China had superior values. The division was meant to be clean.

And indeed it was not clean. The ti-yong formula contained a hidden assumption that the encounter with Western modernity kept exposing as false (or at least that a great many Chinese intellectuals came to accept as false): that you can borrow the tools without importing the worldview that produced them. Western military technology didn’t travel alone; it came packaged with Western ideas about science, about the relationship between knowledge and power, about what kind of society produces effective armies and industrial economies. The young men sent to study naval tactics came back having read Spencer and Mill. The factories built with Western methods required new commercial law, new financial instruments, new relationships between state and capital. The yong kept dissolving the ti, not because the reformers were careless but because the separation had never been real. Joseph Levenson, writing a century later, identified this as the deep logic of the formula’s failure: ti-yong “rationalized the westernization of China while ostensibly preventing it.” The shell of Chinese essence was preserved, increasingly hollow, while Western substance quietly filled it.

The military catastrophe of 1895 — the Sino-Japanese War, defeat by a nation that had been regarded as a mere cultural tributary for a thousand years — made the hollowness undeniable. If Japan had succeeded by going further, by doing more than borrowing the yong and actually restructuring its political institutions on Western lines, then perhaps China needed to do the same. The question was no longer whether to adapt, but how radically. And it was in this crucible that the first recognizably modern Chinese civilizational thinking was forged — not as a confident assertion but as an act of desperate construction.

Kang Youwei (1858-1927), perhaps the most brilliant and original of the late Qing reformers, saw the problem with unusual clarity and proposed a solution of impressive audacity. The source of Western power, he argued, was not merely technological or military but organizational: what the Western nations had that China lacked was institutional infrastructure capable of generating mass social cohesion, popular loyalty, and moral energy in the service of a modern state. Christianity was Kang’s model — not because he admired or subscribed to its doctrinal content, which he regarded as derivative of Buddhism and inferior to Confucianism as a system of thought, but because of what it could do: build congregations, sustain missionaries, organize communities, create a national body of believers capable of being mobilized. He had seen, at close range, how Christian missionaries operated in China, and he had drawn the lesson not that China should become Christian but that China needed equivalent machinery. His close working relationship with the Welsh missionary Timothy Richard, who was deeply involved in Chinese modernization efforts, sharpened this perception from both sides.

Kang proposed Kongjiao — the Confucian Church — a reinvention of Confucianism as an organized national religion, with Confucius as its founding sage, with regular worship services, congregational structures, missionary activity, and a hierarchical institutional framework that could operate with imperial endorsement as a vehicle of national cohesion. To provide this institution with its doctrinal content, he read the classical texts with fanatical aggressiveness: Confucius, he argued, had not been a conservative codifier of existing social norms but a visionary reformer whose teachings, correctly understood for the first time, contained a progressive theory of historical development moving through three ages toward a universal world commonwealth — the datong, the Great Harmony — that would ultimately transcend all national and civilizational boundaries. The tradition didn’t need to be abandoned, reasoned Kang. It needed to be purified, to be liberated from the misreadings that had encrusted it.

The project was many things at once: an act of sincere philosophical conviction, a political maneuver, and an elaborate undertaking of motivated reading. It was also, for this essay’s purposes, arguably the first explicit attempt to construct Chinese civilization as a coherent, self-sufficient, world-historical entity — not merely a local inheritance to be defended but a universal contribution to human wisdom with its own developmental logic and its own institutional expression. Kang was trying to build Chinese civilization into a system capable of generating the loyalty, energy, and organizational capacity that he had observed Christianity generating for the Western powers. That he was doing this consciously, in direct response to the challenge of Western dominance, and using Western institutional forms as his explicit template, is precisely what makes it defensive civilizational thinking in its most intellectually ambitious — and most paradoxical — form.

The project failed on multiple fronts. The Hundred Days Reform of 1898, the political movement Kang launched with his student Liang Qichao and a dozen or so allies, all political tyros, under the patronage of the Guangxu Emperor, was crushed after (yes) a hundred days by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who placed the Emperor under house arrest, executed six reformers, and forced Kang and Liang into exile in Japan. The Kongjiao project continued in exile but never gained traction: most Chinese intellectuals found it theologically forced, historically strained, and institutionally alien. Confucianism had never organized itself as a congregational religion with a founding prophet and a missionary mandate — it had embedded itself in state institutions, family rituals, and the examination system rather than in anything resembling a church. The attempt to retrofit it into that shape exposed, with unintentional clarity, how completely the Western model had colonized even the thinking of those most determined to resist Western dominance. Kang was constructing Chinese civilization in the image of the civilization he was trying to differentiate it from — and the fact that he couldn’t see this, or could see it and pressed on regardless, is itself a precise illustration of what the encounter with Western modernity had done to Chinese intellectual life.

Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who had followed his teacher into exile and spent years in Japan absorbing Fukuzawa’s ideas and the flood of Japanese translations of Western thought, took a different path. Where Kang remained committed to the Confucian tradition as salvageable, Liang’s thinking evolved into something more searching and ultimately more honest about the scale of the challenge. His conception of the Chinese nation — he was instrumental in popularizing the term Zhonghua minzu, the Chinese nation or people — was less tied to the Confucian content of Chinese civilization and more focused on the political and cultural solidarity of the Chinese people as a modern subject capable of self-determination. He absorbed Social Darwinism and the nationalist thought circulating through Meiji Japan, and turned them into a new framework: China needed not to preserve its essence but to forge a new national character adequate to the demands of survival in a world of competing powers. The civilization was less a treasure to be preserved than a resource to be mobilized.

There was a third possible response to the crisis, quieter than either Kang’s audacious construction project or Liang’s restless nationalist mobilization, and worth noting even without dwelling on it: the position that the tradition needed no universal justification, no reinvention as a world-historical system, no demonstration that it could compete with Christianity or Spencer or Social Darwinism on their own terms. It was worth defending simply because it was the inheritance of the Chinese people — because they had lived within it, been formed by it, and would be genuinely impoverished by its destruction. That was sufficient. This is the most philosophically honest form of this defensive form of civilizational thinking, and also the most politically insufficient: a defense grounded in belonging rather than superiority can ask only to be left alone, which the world was not going to do. But as a diagnosis of what was actually at stake — what would actually be lost if the tradition dissolved — it was arguably more clear-eyed than anything Kang or Liang produced.

This is where Joseph Levenson (1920-1969) enters — as the intellectual historian whose framework illuminates what all of these responses, in their different ways, were struggling with. Levenson’s central insight, worked out across three dense volumes of Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, turns on a distinction he drew between meum — what is mine, what I have inherited, what I am attached to — and verum — what is true, what is genuinely valid, what would command assent independent of who I happen to be. The crisis of Chinese intellectual life in the nineteenth century was, in his account, precisely the tearing apart of these two things. Scholars and officials of the high imperial period had not needed to choose between them: they inhabited the Confucian tradition because they were born into it, and they believed it was true because they inhabited it. The coincidence was so complete it was invisible, like the water in which the fish swam. Meum and verum were the same thing, and the fact of their identity was never examined because it never needed to be.

The encounter with the West destroyed that coincidence. Once the tradition had to be defended, once it had to be argued for, justified, upheld against external challenges, the very act of defense itself revealed that the identity of meum and verum could no longer be taken for granted. Kang Youwei’s response was, to simplify greatly, to insist they were still identical, to demonstrate through increasingly strained readings of the classics that what was China’s was also what was universally true and humanly necessary. Liang Qichao’s response was more honest: he gradually acknowledged the gap between them, tried various ways of bridging it, and ended in a productive but unresolved tension that his prolific writing never quite settled. The quieter third position — that meum alone, without verum, was still worth defending — was perhaps the purest available, and the most melancholy.

Levenson’s own phrase for this moment of passage is worth holding: “When Confucianism finally passed into history, it was because history passed out of Confucianism.” The tradition had been the lens through which history was understood; when it became instead a subject of history — when intellectuals began writing the history of Confucianism rather than writing from within it — something irreversible had occurred. The ti-yong reformers had tried to preserve the ti while updating the yong, but Levenson’s argument is that there was no stable essence to preserve: the ti was not a fixed substance that could be held intact while the functional elements were modernized. It was a way of being in the world, and once it was placed in the position of having to justify itself, it had already, in the relevant sense, ended.

This is the “modern fate” of Levenson’s title. And it is, he argued, a fate not merely of Confucianism but of any traditional civilization that encounters a modernity powerful enough to force the question of justification. The defense itself is the wound. The very act of constructing “Chinese civilization” as an explicit object of pride, analysis, and political mobilization — the act that Kang Youwei undertook with such desperate and doomed ambition — is already evidence that the unreflective confidence of the tianxia era is gone. You do not celebrate what you take for granted. You celebrate it when you fear losing it.

Levenson was writing in the 1950s, and history has since complicated his verdict in ways he could not have anticipated. The tradition he thought had been irreversibly placed behind glass has been deliberately retrieved, politically refurbished, and deployed at scale. Whether that retrieval represents genuine renewal or the most sophisticated possible form of the museumification he diagnosed is one of the central questions this essay will return to. But his framework remains, to me at least, the sharpest available tool for understanding what is happening when political leaders invoke five thousand years of unbroken civilization with the insistence of people who are not quite sure they believe it. The meum and verum that the 19th century tore apart have not been fully reunited. They have been performed — with genuine popular resonance if imperfect historicity, but also with the slightly too emphatic quality of things that must be asserted rather than simply lived.

The Chinese civilizational thinking traced in this section — from the Self-Strengtheners through Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, shadowed throughout by Levenson’s analysis — belongs unmistakably to the defensive mode. Not merely in the sense that it was responding to external pressure, though it was, but in the deeper sense that the question of what Chinese civilization was and why it mattered remained genuinely open for the people asking it. Kang overreached because he cared. Liang revised himself repeatedly because he was paying attention. The quieter third response (perhaps Zhang Taiyan, 1868-1936, might be named as one of its proponents) arrived at honesty by acknowledging that meum without verum was still worth something — and that was as far as thinking could honestly go. These were people for whom the wound was real and the question was live.

What this essay will trace in the section that follows is the long, uneven, and not yet complete transition from that posture to something different — a mode in which the wound is still invoked but the uncertainty has been resolved, the philosophical earnestness replaced by political confidence, and the question of what Chinese civilization is has been answered not by philology and Confucian exegesis but by assertion. The civilization that these men struggled to defend, mourned, and in Kang’s case tried to reinvent almost from scratch, has become in contemporary China an object of managed pride. The meum has been rebranded as verum. Whether that rebranding represents genuine confidence or its performance — whether the assertion is believed or merely deployed — is perhaps the most important question one can ask about the civilization trap as it operates today.

IV. The Return of Tianxia

There is a paradox in the Maoist period that standard accounts of Chinese civilizational thinking tend to skip over. The Communist revolution of 1949 was, at one level, the most radical rupture with the Confucian tradition that Chinese history had produced — more radical even than the May Fourth/New Culture Movement iconoclasm of the 1910s and 1920s, which had attacked the tradition but left it standing, battered and reduced, as an object of debate. Maoism attempted to destroy it outright. The classics were condemned as feudal; the examination system’s descendants in the educational establishment were purged; ancestor veneration was dismissed as superstition; the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution sent Red Guards to smash ancestral tablets and ransack temples while professors were made to wear dunce caps, clean toilets, and tend pigs. The civilization whose loss Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao had worked desperately to prevent seemed, from one vantage point, to have been deliberately demolished by its own people.

The paradox is that Maoism was also, at another level, structurally continuous with what it replaced. The great sinologist Liang Zhiping, surveying the entire arc of tianxia discourse in a comprehensive essay published in Taiwan, makes the point with characteristic sharpness: the communist vision of world revolution was a functional analogue to the classical tianxia order, not its opposite. (Liang’s essay is most readily accessible to English-language readers through David Ownby’s translation and commentary at the excellent Reading the China Dream website, where Ownby’s framing note — that tianxia discourse is “about myths rather than history, the future rather than the past” — is itself worth the detour.) Both aimed at a universal order transcending the nation-state. Both imagined humanity rather than a particular people as their ultimate constituency — though in the Maoist case this universalism was borrowed wholesale from a Western intellectual tradition rather than recovered from the Chinese one, which is part of what makes the structural parallel so strange. Both organized that order concentrically around a center. In the classical case, this was the Son of Heaven; in the Maoist case, the vanguard party and its thought. And both measured all else by proximity to that center. Levenson had noted that “most of the intellectual history of modern China is a process of transforming ‘tianxia’ into a ‘country’” — but this was, as Liang argued, only the obvious part. The hidden part was that tianxia logic kept operating underneath the nationalist surface, and that Maoist universalism was its most recent, most violent expression — and, in its borrowed universality, its most paradoxical.

To understand why that solution felt genuinely compelling not merely as propaganda but as intellectual conviction to some of the best minds of the generation, it helps to hold the Levensonian framework in mind. The crisis that Marxism-Leninism resolved, for Chinese intellectuals who came to it in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, was precisely the crisis that Levenson diagnosed: the tearing apart of meum and verum, the loss of a framework that could be simultaneously one’s own and objectively true. What the Confucian tradition had once provided — a seamless coincidence of inherited identity and universal validity — Western modernity had destroyed. The question was whether anything could restore it.

Liberalism could not. What Western liberalism offered, in the Chinese context, was a verum that required the meum to be abandoned or reformed out of existence — a universal standard against which Chinese civilization had been measured and found wanting, and whose adoption would mean becoming, in some essential sense, Western. The reformers of the late Qing and early Republic had tried various versions of this bargain and found it psychologically and politically untenable. The verum of Western liberal progress explained China’s predicament as civilizational inadequacy. That was a restatement of the wound, not a solution or even much of a salve.

Marxism-Leninism offered something structurally different, and the difference was what made it electrifying. It provided, first, a verum with impeccable modern credentials — not the inherited wisdom of sages but a science of history, objective and universal in the same idiom that Western rationalism had made authoritative. You were not defending your inheritance against science; you were wielding science. Second, and more importantly for the emotional weight of the question, it explained the meum wound without requiring the meum to be blamed for it. Lenin’s theory of imperialism — capitalism in its final, most predatory stage necessarily reaching outward to exploit weaker economies — gave the entire century of humiliation a structural explanation that absolved China of responsibility and indicted the system that had produced it. China was not beaten because it was deficient. It was exploited because capitalism requires exploitation. The humiliation was not evidence of Chinese inadequacy but evidence of the theory’s truth. And the Leninist component added a redemptive arc that no liberal framework could match: imperialism was not permanent but terminal, a sign of the oppressor’s system’s approaching collapse, and the most thoroughly exploited — the colonized, the semicolonized, the humiliated — were not the laggards of history but its coming vanguard.

This is what meum and verum reunited felt like, at least for a generation that had grown up with their separation as the defining intellectual condition of Chinese modernity. The tradition had been demolished; the wound remained; but here was a framework in which the wound itself became meaningful, the humiliation became structural rather than cultural, and China’s suffering was not a sentence on Chinese civilization but an indictment of the forces that had inflicted it. That the framework was borrowed from the West — that Marx was as European as Mill, that Lenin was as foreign as Spencer — was, paradoxically, part of its appeal: it fought the West on the West’s own epistemological terrain, in the language of universal historical law rather than the language of particular inheritance. It was, in the Levensonian sense, a verum — one that happened to align with the meum. But only for a time. Resolving meum and verum is of little use without wealth and power in the bargain.

The wound, in other words, had not been healed. It had been explained — which is not the same thing. And when the explanation lost credibility, when the Cultural Revolution discredited the most extravagant version of Maoist universalism and Deng’s reforms tacitly acknowledged that the economic model had to change, the older questions surfaced again, now without even the Marxist-Leninist framework to contain them.

The Deng era brought a different kind of deferral. Under the logic of “hide your capabilities and bide your time,” civilizational assertion was not so much rejected as bracketed. Growth was the answer: if China could demonstrate economic performance, if the standard of living rose, if the country’s international standing improved through trade and integration into global institutions, the harder questions about what Chinese civilization was and what it stood for could be left for later. The legitimacy of the party-state rested on delivery rather than identity, and identity questions were inconvenient. And yet the ideological syncretic blend of the reform era was already quietly signaling that the Maoist settlement had come undone at the roots. Confucianism — the tradition whose defenders had mourned it as a lost cause, and whose remnants Mao had tried to finish off in the campaign to “criticize Lin Biao and Confucius” — was no longer anathema. It began its long rehabilitation, invited back into the ideological tent with a pragmatism that would have bewildered anyone who had lived through the Cultural Revolution’s denunciations. The wound from the nineteenth century was still there — the “century of humiliation” remained a staple of official historiography and school curricula — but it was framed as something being overcome by economic modernization rather than something requiring civilizational assertion.

Levenson died in 1969, at 51, in a canoeing accident on the Russian River in California, before any of this could be observed. It is one of the genuine losses of modern China scholarship. His framework — meum and verum, the tragic quality of things that must be asserted rather than simply lived — turned out to be exactly the right set of instruments for making sense of what the Reform and Opening period was doing to Chinese civilization and its self-understanding. The Confucian rehabilitation alone would have given him material for a fourth volume. He would have seen immediately what the rehabilitation was: not the tradition returning to life but the party-state performing its return, borrowing the emotional depth of classical meum for purposes the verum question had never been allowed to resolve.

This deferral had two limits. The first was internal: you can only bracket identity questions for so long before they return with added urgency, especially in a country undergoing the kind of rapid social transformation that China experienced between 1978 and 1989 — urbanization, exposure to foreign ideas, the erosion of Maoist certainties, the opening of a gap between what the party claimed and what educated people could observe. The second was external: Tiananmen in 1989 and the Soviet collapse in 1991 together destroyed the specific terms of the deferral. Tiananmen demonstrated that performance-based legitimacy, to the extent it had been tested, was fragile — that economic growth might not indefinitely suppress demands for political voice — and the Soviet collapse removed the last major ideological competitor to Western liberalism, leaving China facing Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis not as abstract philosophy but as a claim with real geopolitical implications. If liberal democracy was the terminus of historical development, then the party-state’s survival was either a temporary anomaly or a refutation — and if it was a refutation, it needed a theory.

That theory did not arrive all at once. It was assembled, unevenly, by a generation of intellectuals working in the 1990s from different starting points and arriving at different conclusions, some critical of the emerging official line and some increasingly aligned with it. But several converging currents are worth tracing, because together they mark the moment when Chinese civilizational discourse began, however haltingly, to shift from the defensive mode into something else.

The first current was the reception of Huntington. When the article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1993, its Chinese reception was not the horrified rebuttal that liberal commentators had perhaps hoped for. Chinese intellectuals read the article carefully, argued with it seriously, and absorbed from it something that the liberal critics mostly missed: its affirmation that Western universalism was a particular masquerading as a general, that civilizational pluralism was a real fact about the world rather than a failure of globalization, and that China belonged to a distinct civilization with its own logic and its own legitimate standing. They largely rejected Huntington’s darker implication — that civilizational difference would produce inevitable conflict — but they took the pluralist scaffolding and built with it. Here was a Harvard political scientist telling them, in effect, that the West’s claim to represent universal values was ideological rather than actual. The response was not to dismiss Huntington but to appropriate his vocabulary while contesting some of his conclusions.

No one made this move with greater consequences than Wang Huning. A political science professor at Fudan in the early 1990s before Jiang Zemin recruited him to the Central Policy Research Office, Wang produced in 1994 a dense essay titled “Cultural Expansion and Cultural Sovereignty” (which English-language readers can peruse in David Ownby’s translation and commentary at the Reading the China Dream website, which remains the most reliable route to Wang’s pre-Zhongnanhai thinking) that amounts to a blueprint for the ideological posture China has since adopted. His argument moved in three steps. First: in the post-Cold War world, soft power had supplanted hard power as the primary arena of international competition, and cultural conflict had superseded military and political conflict. Second: the West, led by the United States, was consciously pursuing a strategy of cultural hegemony — using values, human rights discourse, and the projection of cultural superiority to constrain the internal development of rival states. Fukuyama’s “end of history,” Wang argued, was not disinterested political science; it was the intellectual foundation of a hegemonic project, presenting Western liberalism as the terminal point of civilization in order to delegitimize any alternative. Third: the appropriate response was “cultural sovereignty” — active defense and strengthening of the state’s own cultural identity as a form of political security.

The essay’s framing was explicitly defensive — China was responding to a threat, not projecting one — but its internal logic had already moved beyond pure defense toward something more ambitious, even if that ambition remained largely reactive in character. The argument’s most revealing formulation comes when Wang describes the ultimate goal of cultural sovereignty: a country that can establish international norms conforming to its own domestic order “will have no need to change.” The logic had shifted without announcement from “we must defend our culture from Western hegemony” to “we should help shape the international normative environment so that it no longer requires us to become something we are not” — from a shield to something we might call a buffer zone, or a moat. It was not yet a projection outward; it was an attempt to push the pressure back. The distinction matters. Defensive posture and offensive aim are not quite the same thing, and Wang’s essay sits in the space between them — no longer purely reactive, not yet assertive, but oriented toward a world in which China’s domestic order would face less external challenge. Cultural sovereignty, in this reading, was not merely a shield. It was the architectural precondition for a more comfortable defensive perimeter.

Wang has published little since entering the Party system. His mature thinking is accessible only through the doctrines he is credited with shaping. But the 1994 essay is a reliable window into the framework he brought to Zhongnanhai, and that framework was not merely ideological. It was strategic in the most precise sense: Wang was not asking whether Chinese civilization was true or good in some universal sense. He was asking how cultural power could be deployed in the international contest over whose norms would set the terms of engagement — and specifically, how China could ensure it did not lose that contest on its own ground. Ideas, in this framework, were instruments, and the question was not whether they were right but whether they worked. It is precisely this instrumental quality — the strategic rather than philosophical relationship to civilizational claims — that made the translation into Party doctrine possible. The ideas were already formatted for policy.

What Wang represented institutionally, figures like Wang Hui and Zhao Tingyang represented intellectually — the New Left and the tianxia theorists who, in the late 1990s and 2000s, began constructing the philosophical architecture that official discourse would later inhabit. Wang Hui (b. 1959), whose early work had been genuinely critical of both Chinese neoliberalism and Western universalism, argued that Chinese intellectual history contained its own resources for thinking about modernity — that the “transsystemic society” (kuatixi shehui) of the Qing empire, with its transethnic, transreligious, transcultural composition, offered a model of political integration that the Western nation-state system lacked. Zhao Tingyang (b. 1961), a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, went further: his 2005 book The Tianxia System argued that the classical Chinese concept of tianxia — a word usually rendered as “all under heaven,” and usually misread in the West as a synonym for Chinese imperial dominance — was not, in its philosophical substance, about Chinese hegemony at all. The misreading typically works by collapsing tianxia into the “tributary system” — the ritual framework through which imperial China organized its relationships with neighboring states — and treating that system as evidence of a settled Sinocentric hierarchy that China is now seeking to revive.

But modern historians have contested even that foundation. Peter Perdue, the Yale historian whose China Marches West won the Levenson Prize, argued in a 2015 article that the tributary system is itself largely a scholarly construct — a concept with no Chinese-language equivalent that no Chinese dynasty ever actually used, assembled by John King Fairbank and his collaborators in the 1960s and tenacious in the field ever since. What the historical record actually shows, Perdue argued, was not a systematic order but a tangle of distinct relationships involving trade, military force, diplomacy, and ritual — and crucially, one in which China’s neighbors did not passively accept the imperial center’s definitions of hierarchy but interpreted and negotiated those ritual relationships on their own terms. The tributary system as a coherent, China-dominated order is, in his account, a retrospective projection more than a historical reality.

Tianxia as a philosophical concept, then, is being misread through a lens that is itself — if Perdue is correct — already a misreading. (The whole discourse on tianxia that follows is drawn almost entirely from translation and commentary on Ownby’s excellent site). The idea, at its most serious, was of the world as a single moral-political order organized around shared values rather than an anarchic competition of sovereign units: a vision of governance that began from the premise of shared humanity rather than the premise of national self-interest. Zhao’s claim was that this idea, separated from its historically Sinocentric implementation, offered a philosophically more adequate starting point for thinking about global order than the Westphalian system of competing sovereign states.

Both projects were presented as universalist arguments rather than Chinese nationalist ones. Both claimed to offer conceptual resources that anyone could adopt. And both had critics who pointed out, with some force, that the universalism was difficult to disentangle from the Chinese particularity. Ge Zhaoguang, the historian who has written the most systematic critique of the tianxia revival, noted what he called “ahistorical history” at work — the tianxia order as actually practiced in the Zhou dynasty had been hierarchical and Sinocentric, and the cosmopolitan rhetoric of the revival acted, as he put it, as a Trojan horse for what was in effect Chinese exceptionalism. His formulation of the central question is the sharpest in the field: who is the author of the world system? Who decides its legitimacy? His answer was that any adequate response must appeal to justice, freedom, and democracy — standards that apply to China as much as to the West, and that the tianxia revivalists tended to obscure rather than engage. Xu Jilin, another liberal critic from within the Chinese academic tradition, made a distinction that maps precisely onto the essay’s central framework: civilization, he argued, is about what is universally good, while culture is about what is ours. When China invokes its civilization, is it making a claim about universal values or asserting a particular inheritance? The tianxia theorists, in Xu Jilin’s reading, were claiming to do the former while actually doing the latter — presenting meum as verum without having done the philosophical work the claim requires.

These internal critics matter for this essay not because they are necessarily right — the debate is genuinely unresolved — but because they show that the shift from defensive to offensive mode was not seamless or complete. Chinese intellectual culture retained, and retains, voices insisting on asking the harder questions: not just whether Chinese civilization is worth defending but whether the defense has become something other than what it claims to be. Xu Jilin’s verdict is the most pointed: China, he argued, has achieved the rise of wealth and power but not the rise of civilization — meaning that the meum has been successfully defended and expanded, but the claim that it is also verum, that it has something genuinely universal to offer, has not been earned. The assertion has run ahead of the justification.

It is Wang Huning, though, who provides the clearest single figure through which to trace the transition — not because he is the most philosophically interesting participant in these debates, but because he is the most consequential. His career arc is, in microcosm, the arc of Chinese civilizational discourse itself: from the relatively open intellectual inquiry of the late 1980s through the strategic consolidation of the 1990s to the confident assertion of the Xi era. He is credited with contributing the theoretical architecture for three successive leaders’ signature concepts: Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents,” Hu Jintao’s “New Development Concept,” Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” and the theoretical framework of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era. The common denominator across three decades of Party doctrine is a China in which the Party rules indefinitely and a world in which China is increasingly influential — and the civilizational claim has become, with each iteration, more explicit and more assertive about what China has to offer beyond its own borders.

The Xi synthesis is where the arc arrives, at least for now — though where exactly it has arrived is itself a question worth sitting with. “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” is not modest about its civilizational ambitions, but the nature of those ambitions is easily misread. The “community of shared future for mankind” — a phrase that descends directly from Wang Huning’s framework and from the tianxia vocabulary developed by Zhao Tingyang and others — presents Chinese civilization not as a universal model to be exported but as a legitimate participant in a pluralist world order, one whose insights about governance, development, and international organization deserve a seat at the table alongside Western liberal assumptions rather than beneath them. The Global Civilization Initiative, launched in 2023, makes the framing explicit: not “adopt our values” but “stop assuming yours are universal.” China proposes an international “equality of civilizations” agenda whose primary thrust is the rejection of Western civilizational hierarchy rather than the assertion of a Chinese one. These are not the same thing. The wound of the 19th century is still doing work here — the equality of civilizations is defined against the civilization that once administered the “standard of civilization” — and that wound goes some way toward explaining why the agenda reads more as a demand for recognition than as a bid for dominance. What was once a defense has become a claim to parity. Whether parity is where the ambition stops is a question the essay cannot answer with confidence — and honesty requires saying so.

The Levensonian framework illuminates precisely what has happened. The meum and verum that the nineteenth century tore apart — that Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao spent their careers trying to rejoin — have been reattached, by proclamation, in the Xi era. The meum of Chinese civilization, successfully defended and politically consolidated, has been proclaimed verum — not merely ours but valid beyond us, not merely Chinese but offered, however tentatively, to a wider human conversation. Whether that declaration is earned — whether it represents genuine philosophical work or a political decision to stop asking the question — is precisely the issue that the tianxia revivalists and their critics have been debating for three decades. The critics argue that it is not earned: the meum has been expanded without the verum being established, the civilizational assertion has outrun the civilizational achievement. The party-state, having foreclosed the debate domestically, asserts that the question has been answered.

The civilization trap, as this essay has been tracing it, now becomes visible in its full structure. The trap has nothing to do with civilizational thinking being inherently wrong or inevitably leading to conflict. The critics who dismissed it as propaganda or deflection made that error.The trap is something subtler: that the movement along the gradient from defensive to something more assertive tends to happen without announcement, in ways the thinkers caught in it often cannot see from inside. Wang Huning’s 1994 essay shifted from defending Chinese culture against Western hegemony to imagining a world in which China would face less pressure to change — a meaningful step, but one he did not name as such. The tianxia revival moved from philosophical inquiry to political legitimation so gradually that it is now difficult to say where one ended and the other began. And on the Western side, as I argued at the beginning of this essay, the same gradient is visible: Rubio in Munich was doing something that Huntington’s vocabulary made available without Huntington having intended it, deploying a defensive framework for triumphalist ends, crossing a line whose location he gave no sign of having noticed.

The asymmetry between the two sides matters and should not be papered over for the sake of a tidy conclusion. Rubio in Munich was making a universalist claim — that Western civilization, defined by Christian faith and ancestry, represented something the world needed and that immigration threatened. China’s civilizational discourse has remained, stubbornly and perhaps deliberately, particularist: what China claims is not that its values should govern the world but that its values should be allowed to govern China, and that the international order should be pluralist enough to accommodate that. “Chinese Characteristics” is not an accident of phrasing — it is a persistent signal that the claim is bounded. The wound of the 19th century still shapes the emotional register of Chinese civilizational assertion, pushing it toward recognition and parity rather than dominance. Whether it stays there is genuinely uncertain, and honesty requires leaving that uncertainty on the page.

The contrast becomes sharper when China’s civilizational assertiveness is placed alongside two cases that clearly represent the offensive mode in its current global expressions. Russia’s Russky Mir — the “Russian World” doctrine developed by the likes of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church) and the far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin as ideological cover for Putin’s revanchism — is explicitly expansionist in its civilizational logic: the Russian Orthodox cultural sphere is held to constitute a transnational community whose members, wherever they reside, fall within Russia’s legitimate sphere of concern and, when necessary, intervention. The doctrine does not merely claim parity or recognition; it claims jurisdiction, as we’ve witnessed in Ukraine. Hindutva, in its more expansionist expressions, carries a comparable logic outward from India, imagining a greater civilizational homeland, Akhand Bharat, whose sacred geography exceeds the borders of the modern Indian state, and whose cultural imperatives press against the autonomy of minorities within those borders and the sovereignty of neighbors beyond them. Both are civilizational doctrines that have generated, or explicitly justified, territorial aggression and internal persecution. Neither is content with the defensive perimeter. By this comparative measure, China’s insistence that its values should govern China — that the international order should be pluralist enough to leave Chinese governance to the Chinese — looks more modest, and the distinction between demanding recognition and demanding deference looks considerably more consequential, than the civilization-clash framing tends to allow.

Taiwan presents the most obvious challenge to this distinction and deserves direct attention. But the Taiwan case is less a civilizational claim than a Westphalian one. Beijing’s official position on Taiwan is not that Taiwan must be reunified because its people share Chinese civilization and therefore fall within China’s normative jurisdiction — though to be sure this logic, of the sort Russky Mir applies to Russians abroad, is part of the emotional rationale for many Chinese. The official position, however, is that the Chinese Civil War produced an unresolved question of sovereign succession that was frozen by American interventions in 1950 and beyond, and that the People’s Republic is the legitimate successor state to the entire territory of the Republic of China. This is a claim about sovereignty and territorial integrity of the kind that might fall under Westphalian international law — the same logic, in its basic structure, that kept the German question open for forty years and that underlies dozens of other unresolved post-colonial and post-imperial border disputes. It is a claim that carries profound dangers, and this essay does not minimize those dangers. But its internal logic is national and juridical rather than civilizational, and that distinction matters for the argument being made here.

What China, the West invoked by Rubio, and all other states where civilizational discourse is back in vogue share is not symmetrical ambition but a common predicament. They are reaching for civilizational language because the alternatives have lost their authority. The liberal international order’s universalism has been exposed as partial; the ideological blocs of the Cold War are gone; the nation-state alone cannot carry the emotional and normative weight that the current moment demands. Into that vacuum, civilization returns — on the Western side with a triumphalism that has not earned its confidence, on the Chinese side with an assertiveness whose ultimate limits remain unclear.

They encounter one another in Munich, in Davos, in the Great Hall of the People, in every forum where the terms of the post-American order are being negotiated. This is not Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” but something more vertiginous: traditions, wounded in different ways and at different moments, reaching for the same vocabulary to name what they fear losing, and discovering that the vocabulary does not quite fit either of them.

Seen in historical perspective, this pattern is not unique to our moment. Spengler wrote of civilization amid the ruins of European confidence after the horrors of the Western Front. Chinese reformers reached for civilizational reinvention after humiliating defeat and unequal treaties shattered the old order. Huntington theorized civilizational conflict in the vacuum left by the Cold War’s end. Each moment shared a similar condition: frameworks that once organized political life had lost their authority, and identity rushed in to fill the space.

The civilization trap is therefore not a pathology peculiar to our time. It seems instead to be a recurring feature of modernity itself. Civilizational thinking emerges most forcefully not when cultures are confident but when political legitimacy wobbles and societies begin searching for deeper foundations for their collective life.

This essay has not attempted to prescribe a way out of the trap. No clean exit is obvious. The universalism that civilizational thinking displaced was real in its achievements and partial in its self-presentation, and simply reasserting it is not a serious option. What remains — the only thing that remains — is the quality of thinking brought to the trap itself: whether civilizational claims are held with the philosophical seriousness and uncertainty that Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao brought to their question, or with the performed confidence of people who have decided to stop asking it.

That distinction will not dissolve the trap. But it is the difference between being caught in it thoughtfully and being caught in it blind.