First Letter: C

Brief

Emerging in Europe in the late 17th century as a prejudicial marker of social advancement, the modern concept of “civilisation” had evolved by the mid-20th century to include multiple centres of culture around the world. This is reflected in the UN Charter, which urged that “the main forms of civilisation” should be represented in the International Court of Justice.  Introduced to China through Japanese translations in the late 19th century, civilisation initially represented modernisation and a rejection of traditional Chinese and minority cultures.            

Since the early 2000s, China’s communist leadership made a dramatic about-face and has embraced ancient culture as a source of legitimacy. Under Xi Jinping the party depicts itself as inheritor of an ancient culture culminating in a novel form of modernisation, superior to the West’s, that incorporates Sinicised Marxism. Positioned as a uniquely ancient civilisation and an alternative to “Western capitalist civilisation”, China sees itself leading globally — a twist conflating the country’s multipolar ambitions with the UN’s discourse of inclusion.

Analysis

The concept of civilisation arose in ancient Greece and China around the same time — about 2,500 years ago as a way of differentiating between “civilised” cultures (one’s own) and “barbarians” (the other).^[1] In its modern form, it arose in Europe in the late 17^th to 18^th centuries during the Enlightenment to denote a society with laws, commerce, reason, and manners. It soon reverted to its ancient meaning in the European colonial era to justify European conquest over allegedly inferior peoples.    

The modern concept arrived in this context in China in the 19^th century as European countries began carving up China, justifying their actions by China’s supposed backward civilisation. As they grappled with this new situation, Chinese thinkers repurposed an ancient term, wenming (文明), to mean “civilisation” in the 19^th century European sense. Prominent Chinese thinkers used it to adopt Social Darwinist ideas that ranked civilisations. Believing that their own traditional culture, or civilisation, was backward, they advocated a new Chinese nationalism based on “prosperity and power” (富强).^[2] From the late 19^th century onward, successive governments, including that of the Guomindang from 1912 to 1949, attacked traditional culture and religion, including traditional writing styles.

As Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party came to power, “civilisation” largely vanished from official discourse as the party focused on opposing imperialism and bourgeois influences through Soviet-inspired Marxism, culminating in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when Mao purged those who would “corrupt the masses… with the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.” Confucian temples and texts became primary targets for destruction. The decade inspired an orgy of cultural destruction, doing irreparable damage to the traditional Chinese culture that in the 21^st century would return to the centre of the party’s legitimacy.

As China emerged from the Maoist era in 1978, “spiritual civilisation” (精神文明) emphasised that alongside material modernisation the country needed moral development to cultivate idealistic, ethical, cultured and disciplined socialist citizens. For the next three decades, “civilised” behaviour — from public hygiene to proper internet use — became a focus of campaigns coordinated by the Central Civilisation Office. Under Hu Jintao (2002-2012), this drive extended to “civilised” cities and “civilised” online conduct, merging social etiquette with political compliance.

Under Xi Jinping, the concept of civilisation has been aggrandised as a synthesis of cultural glory. According to popular understanding, Chinese civilisation extends 5,000 years, a claim based on writings about a semi-mythical Xia dynasty for which the government seeks evidence — for reasons that have to do with the present-day politics of civilisation.

All of this has a clear political goal, with ancient glories building historically toward the unassailable legitimacy of the Party. China’s ancient civilisation is posited as extending through to the present day, culminating in what the CCP has since November 2021 called a “new form of human civilisation” — a melding of ancient Chinese cultural elements with a new Marxist modernity. This narrative reached its fullest expression in Xi’s 2023 Global Civilisation Initiative (GCI), which promotes cultural relativism in human rights standards while positioning China’s civilisational model as having overtaken Western modernity to offer a superior path for global development.

[1] In China, the term Hua-Yi (Chinese-barbarian) can be found in numerous texts dating to this period. The term Hua is itself illuminating. Used today as a synonym for China or Chinese people, it originally meant splendor or refinement, to be contrasted with rough and primitive outsiders. In ancient Greece, Herodotus framed the Greek resistance to Persia as between civilisation and “barbaroi”.

[2] M. L. Cohen, “Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Traditional Identity”, Daedalus 120, no. 2 (1991), pp. 113–34.

Brief

UNESCO defines culture broadly as “the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group that encompasses, not only art and literature, but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.” For the Chinese Communist Party, however, culture is first and foremost deeply political, one of a number of “fronts” in the Party’s struggle against its enemies and critics, both internal and external. In his remarks to the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Mao Zedong made it clear that “art and literature [must] follow politics”.

While China’s cultural industry has grown in leaps and bounds in the post-Mao period of reform and China’s opening, the Party’s claim to be the political heart of culture has remained. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping since late 2012, culture has been renewed as a political priority around such notions as “building [China as] a cultural power” (建成文化强国), ensuring “cultural security” (文化安全) and mobilising against the “cultural hegemony” of the United States and the West. Culture is a means both to advance the power and legitimacy of the Party and to strengthen the CCP against threats to its legitimacy globally.

Analysis

For much of the modern era, China’s relationship with culture has been fraught with contradictions. During the New Culture Movement of the 1920s, a new brand of scholars, writers and activists sought to throw off the influence of traditional Confucian ideas, which they blamed for China’s weakness, and create a new society based on the “Western” ideals of science and democracy. But even as China looked to the West, notions of culture were closely tied up with the experience of imperialism since the mid-eighteenth century. An influential article written in 1923, in the wake of the May Fourth Movement, sounded a warning about “cultural invasion”, characterised as the last of four means by which Western imperialism was visited upon China. In his remarks to the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1942, Mao Zedong famously spoke of the power “of the pen and of the gun”, and the importance of the cultural as well as the military front. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), zealous bands of so-called Red Guards went on a national rampage of cultural destruction in a campaign to crush the “Four Olds” – old ideas, old culture, old habits and old customs. This inaugurated successive waves of destruction that spanned a decade, resulting in untold cultural and human costs.

The end of the Cultural Revolution came with a growing recognition that the political excesses of the prior decade had stemmed in large part from Mao Zedong’s overwhelming dominance of cultural and political messaging. The relative openness of the 1980s brought about an environment of “culture fever”, with more creativity and truth-seeking in media and the arts.^[1] This came to a dramatic halt with the violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in China in June 1989. The focus for the CCP turned to a combination of maintaining the Party’s political control over culture and the media while pushing commercial development and “a culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics”. The idea that culture is ”an important component of comprehensive national power” (综合国力的重要标志) was introduced in 1997. A decade later, China began prioritising public diplomacy and the development of “soft power”, though only with limited results, and initiated a global media drive in which the government spent an estimated 45 billion yuan to expand state media overseas.

Since 2012, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, Chinese culture as a resource of comprehensive national power has been a major priority for the leadership. Xi Jinping has spoken about the need to “strengthen cultural confidence and build a socialist cultural power” (坚定文化自信，建设社会主义文化强国). China’s leaders and state-run media argue that China’s global cultural strength, which includes its capacity to offset criticism and “tell China’s story well”, is key to “breaking through Western cultural hegemony” (打破西方文化霸权) and to changing the “unequal relationship” with the West. This interpretation of culture and its political value is closely tied to the nationalistic Xi-era notion of the “Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and the CCP’s promise to return China to the centre of global affairs. In his political report to the 19^th National Congress of the CCP in 2017, Xi Jinping said: “Without a high level of cultural confidence, without a glorious and flourishing culture, there can be no great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

[1] S. Ma, “The Role of Power Struggle and Economic Changes in the ‘Heshang phenomenon’ in China”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2008, p. 29.