Chinese Civilizationalism
The Core Argument
Chinese civilizationalism begins from a claim that is at once historical and political: China is not simply a nation state that has modernized successfully, but the contemporary expression of an ancient civilization capable of defining modernity on its own terms. Under Xi Jinping, this proposition has moved from intellectual debate into the ideological vocabulary of the Chinese Communist Party. China is presented as a civilization with more than five thousand years of continuity, the Communist Party as the legitimate inheritor of that civilization, and “Chinese-style modernization” as the basis for a new form of human civilization.
The imaginary therefore challenges one of the central assumptions of Western modernity: that modernization ultimately means convergence toward institutions and values first developed in Europe and North America. China can become technologically advanced, prosperous, urbanized, and globally influential without becoming politically liberal or culturally Western. More ambitiously, it claims that Chinese civilization contains intellectual resources that may allow China to correct some of the failures of Western modernity itself.
The doctrinal foundation of this project is what Xi Jinping calls the “Second Combination.” Mao had called for Marxism to be combined with China’s concrete realities. Xi has added a second synthesis: Marxism must be combined with China’s “fine traditional culture.” Confucian, classical, and other elements of China’s philosophical inheritance are consequently no longer treated primarily as remnants of a feudal past, as they often were during the Maoist period, but as resources through which socialism can become specifically Chinese.
This synthesis performs a crucial function of political legitimation. The Communist Party is no longer justified only through revolutionary history or economic performance, or nationalism but as the institutional custodian of Chinese civilization itself. From this perspective, authoritarianism is also given a different meaning. Rather than being portrayed as the absence of liberal democracy, centralized political authority is reframed as a source of competence, continuity, and long-term capacity. Debates around political meritocracy are important here. Daniel A. Bell, for instance, has argued that the Chinese system combines elements of local participation and experimentation with meritocratic selection at higher levels. More broadly, proponents of the Chinese model contrast the state’s capacity for long-term planning and coordination with liberal democracies constrained by electoral cycles, veto points, and political polarization. Authoritarian institutions are therefore represented not merely as mechanisms of control, but as the institutional expression of an alternative conception of good government.
Strong state capacity is justified by what it can deliver: infrastructure, social stability, economic development, technological innovation, environmental transition, and increasingly the management of demographic and social challenges. This is one of the Chinese project’s central ambiguities. The capacity to coordinate society at scale is inseparable from the capacity to monitor and discipline it. Technologies used for public safety, transportation, environmental monitoring, and social provision can also extend political surveillance. Care and control become two sides of the same governing infrastructure.
This is also where the imaginary becomes decisively future-oriented. Its ambition is not simply to recover Chinese tradition, but to demonstrate that civilizational continuity can provide the basis for a more advanced form of modernity. “Ecological civilization,” technological self-reliance, artificial intelligence, robotics, and “new quality productive forces” are increasingly presented as interconnected elements of Chinese-style modernization. The past supplies legitimacy and cultural orientation, while technology supplies the means through which a specifically Chinese future can be constructed.
Environmental governance is incorporated into this narrative through the classical ideal of harmony between humanity and nature, while digital technologies promise a state capable of perceiving and coordinating society with unprecedented precision. Artificial intelligence, data integration, and automation are consequently more than economic instruments. They become part of a political imaginary in which superior knowledge, coordination, and anticipatory governance may overcome the disorder, inefficiency, and short-termism attributed to liberal democracy.
The wager of Chinese civilizationalism is therefore that the political system criticized in liberal terms as authoritarian may instead prove better adapted to the coming age of ecological constraint, technological complexity, and large-scale social coordination.
The Chinese civilizational imaginary is built on a tension between particularism and universalism. On the one hand, it insists that China must be understood on its own civilizational terms. The Party presents Chinese civilization as distinguished by continuity, innovation, unity, inclusiveness, and peacefulness, while state-sponsored archaeology and historical research seek to demonstrate both its antiquity and the inadequacy of supposedly Western criteria for defining civilization. China is therefore claiming not only a distinct historical trajectory, but the right to contest the categories through which universal history itself is written.
Externally, however, this defense of civilizational particularity is articulated through a language of pluralist universalism. The Global Civilization Initiative rejects the imposition of a single political model and argues that democracy, freedom, development, and other values must take different institutional forms across civilizations. The claim is thus not that universal values should disappear, but that no civilization, and especially not the West, should monopolize their definition.
The tension becomes clearest in contemporary debates over tianxia, or “all under heaven.” Zhao Tingyang reconstructs tianxia as a universal political order capable of overcoming permanent outsiders and enemies. Critics such as Xu Jilin warn, however, that such universalism can easily become Chinese hierarchy presented in universal terms. The question is whether China is genuinely proposing a world of multiple civilizations or gradually recentering universality around Chinese concepts.
This unresolved movement from sovereignty to universality is what makes the imaginary more than conventional nationalism. China demands recognition of its own civilizational particularity while increasingly suggesting that its experience offers lessons for humanity as a whole. The central question is therefore whether Chinese civilizationalism can sustain genuine pluralism once it begins to make universal claims of its own.
Philosophical Roots
The philosophical roots of the Chinese civilizational imaginary are unusually heterogeneous because the project explicitly seeks to reconcile traditions that twentieth-century Chinese politics often treated as enemies.
The first is Confucian and classical thought. Ideas of relational personhood, family and social obligation, meritocratic administration, harmony, and ordered hierarchy provide an intellectual vocabulary through which liberal individualism can be criticized. Contemporary New Confucian thinkers have played a particularly important role in recovering these traditions, although their relationship to the Party varies considerably. The second root is Marxism-Leninism. Whatever the revival of classical China, the political architecture of the imaginary remains Leninist. The Communist Party retains the role of historical agent, political educator, and institutional organizer of modernization.
The argument rests on an asserted compatibility between traditions once regarded as antagonistic. Classical ideas about social obligation and harmony, and about the location of individuals within larger communities, are presented as compatible with Marxism and opposed to liberal individualism. The Communist Party can therefore describe itself simultaneously as the bearer of a revolutionary Marxist project and as the inheritor of several millennia of Chinese civilization. Xi calls the result a new “cultural life form” and speaks of recovering China’s “cultural subjectivity”: the ability of Chinese society to understand itself through categories derived from its own historical experience rather than through those supplied by the West.
A third source lies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about China’s place in world history. Zhao Tingyang’s reconstruction of tianxia, Zhang Weiwei’s theorization of the civilizational state, and debates surrounding political meritocracy all question whether categories generated from the Western nation-state and liberal-democratic experience can adequately describe China. Their arguments differ considerably, but together they provide languages for thinking about political modernity beyond Western convergence.
To quote: Victor Liu, “China’s Civilizational Imaginary,” Vivatopia. The Lab of Political Imaginaries, September 2026.
To Know More
Bell, Daniel A. The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. Princeton University Press (2015).
Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. MIT Press (2016).
Ownby, David, ed. Reading the China Dream. https://www.readingthechinadream.com/
Xi Jinping. “Speech at the Symposium on Cultural Inheritance and Development.” June 2, 2023. https://www.gov.cn/yaowen/liebiao/202308/content_6901250.htm
Xi Jinping. “Working Together for a Modernization Path.” March 2023. https://www.mfa.gov.cn/zyxw/202303/t20230316_11042624.shtml
Xu, Jilin. Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique. Cambridge University Press (2018).
Zhang, Weiwei. The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State. World Century Publishing (2011).
Zhao, Tingyang. All Under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order. University of California Press (2021).
“Report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.” October 2022. https://www.idcpc.gov.cn/english2023/tjzl/cpcjj/20thPartyCongrssReport/