Why Xi Is Rebranding Chinese Cultural History

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: Chinese state media doubles down on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative, U.S. federal authorities issue indictments against Chinese police officers for harassment of Chinese nationals in the United States, and India passes China in population for the first time in history.

This week, Chinese state media has heavily promoted Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “all-important” Global Civilization Initiative—part of a trio of ideological frameworks unveiled early last month, including the Global Security Initiative and the Global Development Initiative. So far, all three are short on content, essentially repeating longtime calls for the primacy of sovereignty and the diversity of development paths.

In other words, China says: Don’t come talking about democracy or Westernization to us. This approach has long held appeal in the developing world, whether out of frustration with Western hypocrisy or because of a desire to preserve local autocrats’ power without being troubled by concerns such as voting or human rights. The Global Civilization Initiative contends that these different values stem principally from local traditions.

Although this isn’t a new thought, elements of Chinese diplomacy and economic action around the world are likely to be rebranded through their association with this trio of initiatives—largely because of the primacy of Xi and the degree to which the projects are associated with him. In a system where everything turns around Xi’s blessing, officials and private companies will rush to claim that whatever they’re working on is part of the leader-approved project. For example, the Global Times has—without apparent irony—launched a “Xivilization” series to praise the leader’s thoughts on global culture.

That means the United States will likely overestimate the importance of these initiatives, as anything from Chinese mediation of Saudi-Iranian reconciliation to Chinese investment in Africa will now fall under their umbrella. When the Belt and Road Initiative came onto Washington’s radar, there was great concern among lawmakers and think tankers that it was China’s Marshall Plan—rather than the messy reality, of competing schemes and other boondoggles. (Casting every action as part of some grand Chinese masterplan follows the conspiratorial logic of the most extreme hawks.)

Still, the Global Civilization Initiative offers some genuine insight into how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Xi view culture and how China’s soft-power push is working. At the initiative’s core is the notion that China is unique in its historical continuity—that it has been a dominant power throughout its supposed 5,000 years of history. Although some Western commentators are quick to give credence to this claim, in practice it is quite ahistorical: Until the 1970s, educators on Chinese civilization, such as Lin Yutang, generally described Chinese civilization as 3,000 years old.

The idea of a 5,000-year history seems to have emerged in part to claim that Chinese civilization predates Egypt’s Old Kingdom circa 2,600 B.C.; it rests on a supposed direct connection between neolithic sites and modern-day China. (That’s like claiming that Stonehenge shows that British civilization is 5,000 years old.) Nonetheless, the notion has become a key ideological point in Chinese archaeology and history, tying into attempts to prove that groups such as the Uyghurs and Tibetans have always belonged to China.

The Global Civilization Initiative uses the length of Chinese history to form a connection with other civilizations that claim descent from antiquity, such as Greece. It’s hard to imagine that this is a compelling selling point for the overseas public, which is a problem with China’s cultural push: It’s focused on a limited view of supposedly traditional culture, rather than the creation of new cultural products. Compared with the wave of cultural content that came out of Japan in the 1980s, for example, the constant emphasis on traditional Chinese medicine, Spring Festival celebrations, and calligraphy looks pretty hollow.

Censorship is part of the problem because most Chinese commercial creators fear it. The calls for cultural promotion come from the top, and as a result, CCP officials constantly stick their noses into the creative process. A professor in the United States recently told me about a 2016 trip to a Chinese animation studio alongside a provincial leader. The official clearly knew nothing about animation but upon being shown project designs insisted that the team should rework everything to be “more Chinese.”

Attempts to draw on the appeal of traditional Chinese culture are also self-limiting because so much of pre-1949 Chinese culture was religious—and the CCP, especially under Xi, is deeply suspicious of religion (even homegrown faiths). Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, and other forms of traditional religion have genuine global appeal, as do practices such as qigong—but any promotion of traditional Chinese culture under the CCP is stripped of the beliefs once at its core.

The Chinese government is going to throw a lot of money at “Xivilization,” but foreigners are not the real audience. As ever, the push is intended for Xi himself.

Secret police stations. U.S. federal authorities have issued indictments against Chinese police officers and officials for running targeted harassment campaigns against U.S.-based Chinese dissidents, including arresting two individuals for running an “unofficial police station” in New York City. The United States seems to have gotten unusually good access to a 34-person unit in Beijing dedicated to posting propaganda on social media and threatening exiles.

The indictment offers a picture of a unit that was largely ineffective at spreading its message, comprising a mixture of demands from above to go after the United States on issues including South China Sea disputes and the murder of George Floyd. However, it was effective at terrorizing members of the Chinese diaspora through online harassment and threatening their families back home—a typical pattern for Chinese police efforts overseas.

There is some confusion in the coverage of the secret police station story, which can be mostly traced to flaws in the original report on the topic. These included mixing up covert units, such as confusing the one described above with units mostly run by provincial governments allowing overseas Chinese to participate in legal disputes (usually commercial) back home.

Early heat wave. In what’s becoming a disturbing annual norm, yet another record-breaking heat wave has hit China, setting new highs for April in a number of southern provinces and cities. China tends to underreport deaths from natural disasters, but the devastating effects of last August’s heat wave are still lingering. Air conditioning—a vital part of surviving heat waves—has expanded significantly, but 40 percent of Chinese homes still lack access.

China is transitioning quickly to renewable energy, leading the world in electric vehicles in particular. But its carbon emissions are still increasing. The heat wave shows how climate adaptation plans may not be moving fast enough to cope with new extremes, especially in a country that has attempted massive engineering projects with ecological impacts in the last few decades, from the Three Gorges Dam to the to the South-North Water Transfer Project.

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India’s population passes China’s. India’s population has officially overtaken China’s for the first time in recorded history, with the other Asian giant topping 1.428 billion people, just above China’s 1.427 billion, according to the United Nations. China’s total fertility rate now sits at just 1.15 and continues to decline sharply. (Japan, once seen as a reproductive outlier, now has a higher fertility rate—1.3—than China, Taiwan, and South Korea.)

By contrast, India’s fertility rate is just above replacement level at 2.05, although it has declined recently. Both China and India have attempted to control their populations through forced sterilization and other human rights violations. China’s policies have now reversed, with educated women increasingly under state pressure to prioritize having children.

The news is likely to prompt further demographic worries in China, but it has triggered some soul-searching in India, too, since the two countries’ economies are so disparate. As recently as the early 1990s, China’s GDP per capita was equal to India’s; today, it’s roughly six times higher.

Buoyant GDP figures. The end of China’s zero-COVID policy—plus the seeming cover-up of the resulting wave of deaths from the virus—allowed significant recovery for the country’s economy. China’s latest GDP figures are somewhat better than expected, recording 4.5 percent growth for the first quarter, above the predicted 4 percent. There is now little being done to contain COVID-19 in China: The country has gone from constant testing to tests being almost unavailable.

Retail sales are booming, up 10.6 percent in the first quarter—suggesting that the fear of lockdowns, price-gouging, and lost earnings was a significant constraining factor. GDP recovery also led to a property price bump after 21 months of stagnation—but that won’t unravel the fundamental problem of a debt-laden sector.