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.