The Return of Culturalism in Chinese Political Thought

What do China’s leaders mean when they talk about “Chinese characteristics”?

One evening about 30 years ago — the exact date eludes me; it was ‘92 or ‘93 — my parents hosted a senior Chinese diplomat at our family home in Tucson for a private dinner. I was, at the time, a graduate student studying under Allen S. Whiting at the University of Arizona, a political scientist regarded then as the doyen of American studies of Chinese foreign policy. He joined us for dinner and engaged the diplomat in lively conversation. At one point, after the phrase had been used more than a couple of times, I interrupted to ask, “What exactly are the Chinese characteristics referred to in ‘with Chinese characteristics?’” To my surprise, he answered, without a moment’s hesitation: “Backwardness. China’s chief characteristic is that it is backward, underdeveloped, and poor.” 

Dr. Whiting and I talked about it a lot afterward, and my contention then — and I’m still convinced of this —was that the diplomat wasn’t being glib, or making a show of modesty, but rather that he was using Deng’s standard ideological justification for market liberalization in earnest: China remained at a primitive stage of socialism because the bourgeois mode of production had never been allowed to complete its historical mission and produce the material abundance that Marx believed was a precondition to advancing to communism, so the revolutionary vanguard Party that ruled China was now doing a kind of historical in-fill — completing the aborted mission that history assigned to capitalism, something which could take 50 or even a hundred years.

In the 80s and the 90s, understanding what was meant by “Chinese characteristics” was fairly straightforward. It was a phrase used to justify the introduction of market mechanisms that would have been deemed anathema while Mao still lived and to do it in a way that, in the right light, was ostensibly compatible with dialectical materialism. 

In the intervening years, “Chinese characteristics” attached themselves to other planks of the Party’s ideological program, so that we now have “great power diplomacy with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色大国外交, Zhōngguó tèsè dàguó wàijiāo), a “road to a strong military with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色强军之路 Zhōngguó tèsè qiáng jūn zhī lù), and “the construction of an ecological civilization with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色生态文明建设 Zhōngguó tèsè shēngtài wénmíng jiànshè). Clearly, along the way, Chinese characteristics came to mean something quite different from “backwardness.” 

I would suggest that as China gained confidence through the years of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, its “characteristics” were still used mainly to assert an identity and a mode of modernity distinct from the West. But these characteristics themselves remained, for quite some time, nebulous and undefined. What has changed in more recent years is that the shapers of China’s ideology — and Wáng Hùníng 王沪宁 perhaps chief among them — have now embarked on an effort to give substance to Chineseness, to put forward an affirmative vision of what China’s characteristics are or should be, and to assert their importance in national rejuvenation, their appropriateness for China, and their morality or even moral superiority.

(This is something I speak with the historian Rana Mitter about in next week’s Sinica Podcast — something he discusses in a review essay in the current issue of Foreign Affairs of the first volume of Tsinghua professor Wāng Huī’s 汪晖 The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. Read Mitter’s piece before listening to the podcast if you get a chance.)

When the Chinese leadership extols, as they’ve done this week at the Two Meetings, of the National Party Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the virtues of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” it is no longer in a defensive crouch. Battered though the Chinese economy may be, Beijing sees this as only a temporary setback — a storm surge that, only for the moment, has covered over a colossal idea that the Party is determined to see rise well above the surface. Poorly branded as that idea may be, what it represents is of great historical significance. The Party is standing up a civilizational identity with multiple dimensions: an idea of its place in history and its relationship to the future; a distinct conception of nationhood and of the relationship between ethnicity and nationality — one that represents a major and already manifestly disruptive shift from the old model; a sense of cultural confidence that Wang Huning has long held to be a vital source of national vitality; a conception of humanity’s relationship with the natural world; and of course a conception of China’s place as a civilization in a world comprised of states.

Why do I confer on it “great historical significance”? I do so because whether successful or not — and its success is by no means assured —  it represents the first serious effort to close the only chapter in Chinese history any of us have ever known: China’s modern history. 

I recognize that that’s a bold claim; perhaps it only makes sense if you’re familiar with, and you broadly accept, the framework that the great intellectual historian Joseph Levenson (d. 1969) laid out in his magisterial trilogy Confucian China and its Modern Fate. As succinctly as I can manage, Levenson argued, uncontroversially, that the defining quest for modern Chinese intellectuals was to restore China to wealth and power. But he added an important condition, and that is that this had, somehow, to be accomplished in a way where the tension between the historical inheritance of Chineseness and the objective reality faced, beginning in the mid-19th century, by China’s intelligentsia, had somehow to be resolved. The problem was that “what is mine” (the inherited traditional culture of China, its values, beliefs, institutions, etc.) was not itself sufficient to meet the challenges and attain wealth and power in the face of “what is true” — namely, that technologically advanced, predatory Western powers and their more precocious pupils were riding roughshod over China’s sovereignty and dignity. China’s core cosmology, the whole system of beliefs on which its civilization was predicated, wasn’t fit for purpose the in face of industrialized imperialism. 

Through this Levensonian lens, you could see every intellectual response — every system of thought or ideology embraced or repudiated, every form of government, every package of reforms tried on across the ensuing 180 years — as an attempt to reconcile what is mine (meum) and what is true (verum). 

What happens, then, when China does attain wealth and power? What happens when significant numbers of its thinking class believe that they’ve found a way to reconcile meum and verum, have found a Chinese path to modernity that has yielded results (the wealth, the power), and that has restored dignity — however stitched together and improvised it might be, and however unwieldy its name? 

Whether or not they’ve read Levenson, it seems clear to me that the Chinese leadership is conscious of an ending, and is trying to define and give substance to a new homo Sinicus at this new era’s beginning. China’s new global initiatives — the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Civilization Initiative — are perhaps best understood as instances of this bigger project. Since this idea first occurred to me a couple of years ago, I’ve started seeing it everywhere: How else, after all, should we interpret China’s recent assertive promotion of traditional Chinese medicine?

Manoj Kewalramani, in his excellent Substack, translated Wang Huning’s speech at the opening of the National Party Congress on Monday, March 4. It included this passage: “A special consultation meeting on ‘Enhancing the Spread and Influence of Chinese Civilization’ was held to provide research and suggestions on the protection, inheritance and promotion of China's excellent traditional culture, the construction of an all-media communication system, the development of the digital cultural industry, and strengthening the integration of culture and tourism to serve the construction of a cultural power.” He notes that Wang also spoke of “promoting Chinese-style modernization,” “ecological environmental protection and promoting the construction of a Beautiful China,” and much more that falls under the rubric of this new affirmative vision of Chinese characteristics.

Note that “affirmative” here means positively defined, and not just defined, as Chinese characteristics once were, mainly negatively — by what they are not. The synthesis is supposed to serve as a bulwark against the perceived negative impacts of globalization and Western influences and to serve as the cornerstone of national rejuvenation. So what does the leadership now believe these characteristics to be, then? What are the solid foundations of China’s cultural confidence? From what we can see so far, they bring together selective Confucian social and moral principles like harmony, filial piety, respect for the elderly and love for the young (尊老爱幼 zūn lǎo ài yòu), and communal responsibility; socialist ideals like egalitarianism and common prosperity; Enlightenment ideals like democracy, freedom, and the rule of law; and personal qualities such as patriotism, dedication, and friendship.

If some of these sound familiar, it’s because most of them are expressed in some form in the “Core Socialist Values” proclaimed on billboards and murals all over China:

The top row — Prosperity (富强 fùqiáng), Democracy (民主 mínzhǔ), Civility (文明 - wénmíng), and Harmony (和谐 - hé xié) — are officially described as national level values. Freedom (自由 zì yóu), Equality (平等 píngděng) Justice (公正 gōngzhèng), and Rule of Law (法治 - fǎ zhì) are values to be held at the societal level. The remaining values, Patriotism (爱国 àiguó), Dedication (敬业 jìngyè), Integrity (诚信 chéngxìn), and Friendship (友善 yǒushàn), are personal values, as I’ve said. The roots or origins of these ideas are not explicitly identified and are jumbled, to an extent, so that Confucian, socialist, and “Western” values sit together at each level.

I would suggest that there are other values implicit in the new formulation that Chinese ideologists have begun to articulate. These include rationalism, secularism, materialism, and a scientific (or perhaps more accurately, scientistic) mindset that may have its roots mainly in Marxism but that also claims a heritage from some later Neo-Confucian schools, as well as the empiricism championed in the May Fourth/New Culture period. This Neo-Confucian heritage, I believe, will probably be foregrounded by a growing number of scholars as part of the project to legitimate those values and situate them in a Chinese tradition. It has undergirded and will continue to buttress the heavily technocratic character of Chinese governance, and will serve as the truth paradigm against which merit and knowledge are measured, and suitability to govern is judged. Increasingly, there is an ecological dimension to this value system, something that China will certainly lean into as one of the less ambiguously attractive features of its affirmative vision, and another source of moral capital.

I remind you of what I mean by “affirmative” when I talk about this emerging Chinese vision, because there was also, in Wang Huning’s speech, a great deal that few in the West will find at all affirming:

“Ten research inspections were conducted in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Tibetan-inhabited areas of Sichuan to advance the sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism and Islam in Xinjiang,” reported Wang Huning in that same speech. “In-depth research was carried out on enhancing historical interpretation, propaganda education on strengthening interactions and exchanges among various ethnic groups, and promoting education in universities to strengthen the consciousness of the Chinese national community.” It would be hard, I imagine, for any Western liberal to read this and not recognize in Wang’s words the specter of ethnonationalism. 

There is, believe, a danger inherent in this quest to articulate the "Chinese characteristics" that have often been alluded to but rarely spelled out. Ambiguity, after all, allows flexibility: definition tends toward rigidity. Even as we plunge ahead into the “New Era” proclaimed by Xi — dare we call it the post-modern era? — there’s something that reminds me too much of the early days of the old era, the era of modern history. The Self-Strengthening Movement, which ultimately failed, sought to protect a defined Chinese cultural “essence”(or form, or body) — the tǐ 体 as it was called by employing the technology of the West, the 用 yòng or utility. Today we see this cultural essentialism perhaps making a comeback: This Chinese essence is once again positioned against the backdrop of Western materialism and individualism, and once again advocates for a moral and cultural core intrinsic to Chinese civilization. Today, this notion finds its expression in the synthesis of Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism, where Confucian values of harmony, hierarchy, and collective well-being are somehow melded with Marxist principles of social organization and development. Maybe China’s much-vaunted knack for syncretism — after all, did not Confucianism coexist with Daoism and Buddhism? — somehow makes this alloy more stable, but it’s not hard to pick out many deeply contradictory impulses. 

Contradictions may abound, but again, the big difference between the days of Self-Strengthening and China today under Xi Jinping is that China is not coming at the problem from a position of weakness, of a severe deficit in wealth and power. What will a wealthy and powerful China do, then, with its “cultural essence”?

Beijing still recognizes a massive shortfall of “soft power,” and that much is clear from Wang’s speech. China need only look around it, at countries in its neighborhood punching well above their weight in global cultural impact.

Despite Wang Huning’s apparent desire to “enhance the spread and influence” of Chinese civilization, I don’t think there’s reason to believe that China will eagerly and proactively export either its developmental model or its authoritarian politics. China, so far, remains regime-type agnostic when it comes to the rest of the world: insofar as export is happening, it’s all pull and not push, driven by demand and not by a desire to proselytize. Chinese characteristics, after all, are just that: Chinese characteristics. Kerry Brown, who I interviewed in Salzburg a couple of weeks back — that show will run in two weeks — wrote about this in his latest book, China Incorporated, which I quote here at length: 

The main question posed in recent times is how a world pushes back against a China rolling towards it promoting its own values and seeking to undermine and replace those of the Enlightenment West. The better question is how China can be a global player when its worldview is constructed in ways which are both immediately alienating because of their syncretism and complexity, and because of the way they insist on being uniquely and distinctively Chinese? A world where China plays an increasingly larger role is not likely to be one where its belief systems and worldview swamp the minds of everyone else and where everyone then magically become practitioners of Sinified Marxism-Leninism, with important traces of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. It is much more likely to be a world of long-term, structural divisions, where the issue is not so much that China is a power rising to global prominence with a competing coherent belief system the rest can adopt, but for precisely the opposite reason – that in fact it does not have an alternative, and its rise will make the world more complex, not simpler. No one, in the end, knows what a world run on Chinese values looks like. The greatest likelihood as of 2022 is that they are unlikely ever to find out.

Nevertheless, we do need to take seriously the notion that China is entering a "New Era." This era is not merely a temporal marker but signifies a profound shift in the way China conceives of its place in the world and the ideological underpinnings that guide its path forward. The return of culturalism, in the form of this synthesis of Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism, does articulate a vision of modernity that is distinctly Chinese — rooted in Chinese cultural traditions, yet notionally responsive to the exigencies of contemporary global politics.

To return to Joseph Levenson’s frame, the question we might all be asking now might be something like this: What is the new Great Question for this “New Era”? What will be the defining question for China’s intellectuals?

If I had to guess, I think the question would be along the lines of this: How will China, restored now to power, wealth, and dignity, conduct itself in the world? And I take some comfort knowing at least that this is the same question many other countries will be asking of China. 

Images: OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. /g/g-pmuQfob8d-image-generator

Ominae, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons