A Civilization of 2,958 Votes

On the afternoon of March 11, 2018, a set of numbers appeared on the electronic tally screen in the Great Hall of the People: 2,958 votes in favor, 2 against, 3 abstentions, and 1 invalid. The 13th National People's Congress passed a constitutional amendment, formally abolishing the term limits for the President of the State. In his report that day, NPR correspondent Anthony Kuhn referred to the five delegates who did not vote in favor as the "Fearless Five." In a vote of 2,964 people, the fact that the dissent of five individuals was labeled "fearless" is itself the most precise pathological description of the voting environment.

That same year, Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei's television program China Now premiered on Dragon TV, telling hundreds of millions of viewers why China is a "civilization-state" and how this identity grants unique legitimacy to China's political system.

The tension between a country that requires a 99.8% approval rate to amend its constitution and a narrative claiming to inherit five thousand years of civilizational wisdom is the entry point for understanding contemporary Chinese political discourse.

The 99.8% Civilization

The 2,958 votes became a carefully designed symbol of political aesthetics. It was not the North Korean-style 100%, nor was it the 51% to 49% common in Western parliaments. The 99.8% approval rate attempted to convey two contradictory messages simultaneously: an overwhelming national consensus, and the symbolic preservation of a tiny space for dissent to demonstrate the form of "democracy."

If the "civilization-state" theory holds—that China's legitimacy stems from thousands of years of historical continuity and the meritocracy of the Confucian tradition—then the rituals of the modern nation-state, such as voting, are actually redundant. Confucius did not need votes, and Emperor Wu of Han did not need to amend a constitution. When Zhang Weiwei and Martin Jacques argue that China is a "civilization-state," a glaring fact is overlooked: this "civilization" has a near-obsessive dependence on the forms of the "state."

This contradiction is similar to the dilemma of the "divine right of kings" in medieval Europe. If power truly comes from God, the king does not need to be crowned by the Pope; if legitimacy truly comes from civilizational tradition, the government does not need a vote from the National People's Congress. The existence of coronation ceremonies and voting procedures themselves proves a fact: power requires an external, visible confirmation mechanism, whether that mechanism is religious or political. Neither the Mandate of Heaven nor civilizational tradition can automatically transform into the right to govern; there must be an institutionalized converter in between. The 2018 ballot box was that converter.

The 2018 constitutional amendment vote showed that despite the official discourse holding high the banner of "civilization," the actual basis of power remains entirely dependent on the organizational machinery of a modern Leninist party and the logic of state sovereignty under the Westphalian system. Civilization is the surface; the state is the core. The existence of the ballot box proves that the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy is not the Mandate of Heaven, nor history, but modern political procedures—even if those procedures are strictly controlled to allow only 0.2% dissent.

Civilization does not need to count votes; only a state does.

Three Flips of a Concept

The history of the evolution of the "civilization-state" concept is a rare process of an academic concept being appropriated.

In the autumn of 1990, a year after the Tiananmen Square incident, MIT political scientist Lucian Pye published an article in Foreign Affairs titled "China: Erratic State, Frustrated Society." On page 58, Pye wrote the sentence that would later be repeatedly cited and repeatedly misinterpreted: "China is a civilization pretending to be a state."

In Pye's original intent, this was a diagnostic critique. "Pretending" was the key, referring to China's shortcomings in its capacity as a modern state: the lack of a true legal system, the lack of an independent civil society, where the center issues orders, the local levels perfunctorily execute them, and society retreats into the private sphere. Pye was describing a "conspiracy of make-believe," a drag on modern state-building by pre-modern political culture.

A common academic misattribution needs clarification: this sentence is often attributed to Pye's 1968 work The Spirit of Chinese Politics, but the earliest traceable source is the 1990 Foreign Affairs article. A footnote in a 1992 New York Review of Books review also confirms this. That a concept about China has been misattributed for 30 years without correction is itself a small allegory about academic citation habits.

The first flip occurred between 2009 and 2011. British scholar Martin Jacques published When China Rules the World in 2009 and preached to a global audience in a 2010 TED talk that "China is a civilization-state." Zhang Weiwei published The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State in 2011. Both simultaneously completed a conceptual makeover: they kept the "civilization" label, stripped away Pye's critical context, and reshaped "pre-modern remnants" into "advantages that transcend modernity." Jacques removed the word "pretending" and used a hyphen to join "civilization" and "state" into a compound word: civilization-state. This act of splicing eliminated the tension and irony in Pye's original expression, creating a seemingly neutral academic classification.

The second flip came from Alexander Lukin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Writing in Noema magazine, Lukin pointed out that today's China is actually "a modern state pretending to be a civilization for political and ideological reasons." Lukin reversed Pye's formula once again: the problem is not civilization pretending to be a state, but the state pretending to be a civilization. Beijing is using "civilization" as a defensive weapon to construct a sovereign firewall against the penetration of universal values. Lukin also pointed out a fatal counterexample: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore, which all belong to the Confucian civilizational circle, have completely different attitudes toward the West and different political systems. If "civilization" determines the system, these countries should not be so divergent.

From Pye's "capacity shortcoming" to Zhang Weiwei's "institutional advantage" to Lukin's "defensive strategy," the same term has been assigned three completely different political functions over 30 years. This shows that "civilization-state" is not a rigorous academic classification, but an elastic container that deforms according to political needs. What it holds depends on who is using it.

From Academia to National Policy

Zhang Weiwei's personal trajectory almost perfectly replicates the politicization of this concept.

From 1983 to 1988, Zhang Weiwei served as a senior English translator in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, translating for Deng Xiaoping and other national leaders. In 2011, he published The China Wave, which topped the list of most influential new books at the Shanghai Book Fair. In 2019, China Now began broadcasting; as of 2025, approximately 300 episodes have aired, and in 2022, it won China's highest television award. On May 31, 2021, Zhang Weiwei entered Zhongnanhai to lecture the 30th collective study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on "strengthening the construction of our country's international communication capacity."

From translating language for leaders to translating the world for leaders, his career trajectory has been consistent.

David Ownby, a historian at the University of Montreal who has long translated and studied the works of Chinese intellectuals, made a precise characterization of the nature of Zhang Weiwei's research: "This is actually marketing research, looking for data points, arguments, and analogies to help sell a product." Ownby also noted that many Chinese intellectuals do not hold Zhang Weiwei in high regard, comparing him to Western media-type ideological promoters. Canadian scholar Lynn Hu added an observation: if Zhang Weiwei fails to convince foreigners, "it can always be blamed on anti-China bias," which allows this narrative to remain invincible domestically.

The 2021 Politburo lecture marked the formal entry of the "civilization-state" theory from a peripheral apologetic theory into the toolbox of the highest decision-making level. The theory was chosen not because it possesses irrefutable academic truth, but because this discourse precisely filled the vacuum of official ideology in the post-Cold War era. The Marxist narrative of class struggle was no longer sustainable, and nationalism is a double-edged sword that is easy to provoke but difficult to control. The "civilization-state" provides an ideal middle ground: it can stimulate national pride, justify the particularity of the current system, and simultaneously reject universal standards internationally in the name of "civilizational diversity."

It was not academia that convinced politics, but politics that selected the appropriate academic packaging.

The Boundaries of Narrative

On March 15, 2023, Xi Jinping proposed the "Global Civilization Initiative" (GCI) at the "CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting," which includes four pillars: respecting the diversity of world civilizations, advocating the common values of all humanity, valuing the inheritance and innovation of civilizations, and strengthening international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. The GCI is the third piece of the puzzle in Xi Jinping's "Four Global Initiatives" system, which, together with the Global Development Initiative (2021) and the Global Security Initiative (2022), constitutes an alternative international order discourse.

David Bandurski of the China Media Project pointed out a key detail: the expression "common values of all humanity" in the GCI is a replacement for Western "universal values." The former emphasizes that state power takes precedence over civil rights, while the latter does the opposite. Behind the two sets of expressions lies a deep divergence in the logic of the international order.

However, this narrative has a massive, unspoken implicit premise: economic performance.

The reason the "civilization-state" has been persuasive over the past decade is not because people suddenly fell in love with Confucian classics, but because the "China Model" brought about staggering economic growth. Material achievements provided credit endorsement for cultural exceptionalism. When the high-speed rail network covered the country and mobile payments led the world, the narrative of "five thousand years of wisdom" gained support from a realistic foundation.

The severe test this narrative faces around 2027 stems precisely from this. GDP growth has dropped from 7% to an officially announced 5%, and many independent institutions believe the actual figure is much lower. In 2024, 15,200 millionaires emigrated from China, the highest number in the world; the PPI has been negative for three consecutive years, and factories are working overtime to produce goods that are becoming increasingly worthless. The cloak of "civilization" will find it increasingly difficult to hide the "state's" governance dilemmas. Every specific unfinished building and every local debt crisis is dissolving the magic of the grand narrative.

For an ordinary person who needs to withdraw money from a bank or wait in line at a hospital, life happens in a concrete modern state that requires public services and the protection of the rule of law, not in an abstract civilization.

Lucian Pye's Curse

On October 21, 1921, Lucian Pye was born into an American Congregational missionary family in Fenzhou, Shanxi. He spent his childhood in China and did not return to the United States until the 1930s. In 2009, Martin Jacques, former editor of the British Communist Party's theoretical journal Marxism Today, published When China Rules the World, transforming Pye's critical analysis of Chinese politics into a celebration of China's rise.

The two men never crossed paths. Pye died of pneumonia in Boston on September 5, 2008, a year before Jacques' book was published. A concept critical of China, proposed by the son of a missionary, was taken up by a former Communist to eulogize China. This conceptual lineage is itself a micro-history of how academia is instrumentalized by politics.

The Missionary's Son's Diagnosis

Lucian Pye's career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was built on a bold hypothesis: that political culture is the key variable in explaining political development. Studying under Gabriel Almond, he sought to fill the gaps in institutional analysis with psychoanalysis and cultural traits. Joining the MIT Department of Political Science in 1956 and elected president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1988, Pye became one of the central figures in the American study of Asian politics during the Cold War.

In 1990, Pye published his famous assertion in Foreign Affairs: "China is a civilization pretending to be a state." In its original context, this sentence was a pathological analysis of China's modernization dilemma, pointing out that China had failed to establish the legal and institutional frameworks required for a modern nation-state and could only maintain unity through ancient cultural ties. Such "pretending" was seen as a pre-modern remnant rather than a postmodern innovation.

The flaws in this analytical method had long been apparent. Attempting to explain the politics of great powers through childhood trauma was a common problem of the political culture school at the time. In March 1976, Kirkus Reviews, in its review of Pye's Mao Tse-tung: The Man in the Leader, noted that it was "built on sketchy biographical literature and a superficial understanding of psychoanalysis." Pye's psychological analysis of Mao Zedong exposed not Mao's psyche, but the methodological limitations of the analyst himself.

The deeper problem lay in the methodology itself. Uday Singh Mehta pointed out that such scholars tended to "embed every conceivable feature of the American political system into the developmental framework." The "normal state" in Pye's eyes was the American-style nation-state; any political entity that deviated from this model was seen as being in some state of "pretense" or "incompleteness." He assumed the existence of a unified, enduring "Chinese political culture," an assumption that itself carried the color of cultural essentialism. The seeds of the curse were sown at the moment of diagnosis.

The Nineteen-Year Gap

Nineteen years separate Pye's 1990 article and Jacques' 2009 book. During this time, the political culture school gradually declined under the impact of rational choice theory and new institutionalism. For the "civilization-state" to be transformed from a pathological analysis into a symbol of political glory, two external conditions needed to mature.

Samuel Huntington provided the first condition. His 1996 work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order established "Sinic civilization" as an independent unit of analysis in international politics, defining China as the "core state" of that civilization. Although Huntington never used the compound term "civilization-state," he gave "civilization" a sense of geopolitical entity, making it no longer merely a museum exhibit. Ironically, the history of the reception of The Clash of Civilizations in China shows a U-shaped curve: initially rejected (because it implied the inevitability of conflict between China and the West), it was later selectively adopted (the legitimacy of "civilization" as a unit of analysis was accepted, while the "clash" part was replaced by "dialogue"). The 2023 Global Civilization Initiative is the endpoint of this U-shaped curve.

Post-colonial theory provided the second condition: moral license. If the default unit of analysis in Western political science (the nation-state) is deconstructed as a product of Eurocentrism, then the corresponding "abnormal" concept (the civilization-state) automatically gains a kind of indigenous legitimacy. Since the "state" is Western, "civilization" becomes Eastern. This logic paved the way for the conceptual inversion.

Without Huntington, civilization could not have become a legitimate unit of political analysis; without post-colonial critique, inverting Western concepts would have struggled to gain moral legitimacy. Both conditions were indispensable, explaining why the inversion occurred in 2009 rather than 1995. During these nineteen years, the fragments of Pye's concept drifted on the academic periphery, waiting for the right political moment.

Conceptual Surgery

Martin Jacques is not a China specialist in the traditional sense. He served as the editor of Marxism Today from 1977 to 1991, specializing in capturing theoretical trends in leftist politics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western leftist intellectuals faced a massive ideological vacuum. Jacques' transition from a Marxist to a prophet of China's rise illustrates that the China model filled the faith gap left by the collapse of the Soviet model.

Jacques performed precise adjustments on Pye's concept: he retained the shell of the "civilization-state" (China is unique, historically continuous, and based on cultural identity) while excising its critical connotations. What Pye called a "lack of the rule of law" became, in Jacques' writing, the advantage of "Confucian moral governance"; what Pye called a "failure of modernity" was reconstructed by Jacques as an "alternative modernity." The ingenuity of the adjustment lay in the fact that while the framework remained unchanged, the value signs were completely inverted.

This adjustment was largely completed in Zhang Weiwei's 2011 book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State. Zhang Weiwei further weaponized Jacques' academic inversion, transforming it into a specific discourse of political legitimacy. While Jacques was still trying to explain why China was different, Zhang Weiwei went straight to asserting that this difference represented superiority.

Huntington provided the theoretical resources, post-colonial theory provided the moral support, Jacques was responsible for driving the transition, and Pye had long since passed away.

The Curse of Methodology

In his 1966 work Aspects of Political Development, Pye listed ten different definitions of political development, frankly admitting the inherent tensions between the three dimensions of equality, capacity, and differentiation. Ten definitions meant ten possible analytical paths, and also meant a respect for complexity. Zhang Weiwei, however, dissolved all tension with five phrases: "four supers and one combination" (super-large population, super-vast territory, super-long history, super-rich cultural accumulation + a unique "civilization-state"). The move from ten definitions to five phrases is a regression from acknowledging complexity to flattening it; the depth of scholarship appears fragile in the face of politics.

This constitutes a classic case of brand hijacking in academic history. In the commercial world, brand hijacking refers to consumers or competitors redefining the meaning of a brand; in the academic world, an original concept (critical analysis) is redefined by a competitor (apologetic narrative), while the original brand owner is unable to respond due to death. Unlike commerce, academic concepts have no protection under trademark law.

The true curse lies with Pye himself. By asserting that China can only be understood as a civilization rather than a state, he effectively denied the possibility of institutional change through cultural essentialism. This assertion implies a kind of fatalism: China can never become a modern state and can only be a continuation of an ancient civilization.

Zhang Weiwei and Jacques gladly accepted this fatalism and repackaged it as "confidence." Both inherited Pye's methodology, viewing culture as an unchangeable political gene, merely changing the sign of the value judgment. Pye's curse lies not in the correctness of the concept itself, but in its elasticity—anyone can fill it with the content they need and then claim it as an academic conclusion. This elasticity has already begun to backfire. Narendra Modi promotes a Hindu nationalist version of the "civilization-state," Aleksandr Dugin envisions a Russian Eurasianist version, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan peddles a Neo-Ottomanist version. When the territorial claims and spheres of influence of multiple "civilization-states" overlap, this concept will transform from a tool of legitimacy into a catalyst for conflict. Huntington's prophecy will be realized in an unforeseen way: not as a clash between civilizations, but as the implosion of the concept of the "civilization-state" itself.

The Editing of Five Thousand Years

In November 1966, more than 200 Red Guards from Beijing Normal University arrived in Qufu by train. Local Red Guards had failed for three months to breach the Temple of Confucius, a complex that has been a vital symbol of Chinese culture since 478 BC. The students from Beijing took less than a week. The Tomb of Confucius was leveled, historical steles were smashed, and the plaque inscribed with "Model Teacher for All Generations" was chopped into firewood.

Fifty-eight years later, in 2024, the same regime hosted the International Confucian Conference in Qufu. Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter, calling Confucianism an "important component of Chinese civilization."

Between the leveling and the congratulatory letter, less than two generations have passed. The two events are by no means a restoration after a rupture; they are, in fact, two starkly different edited versions of the same film.

The Editor's Techniques

The persuasiveness of "five thousand years of continuity" lies in avoiding questions about what "continuity" actually means. Once scrutinized, every standard tends to reveal rupture rather than endurance.

If the standard is "continuous human habitation on the same land," the historical records of Egypt, Iraq, and India all show greater continuity than China's. If the basis is an "unbroken writing system," the Simplified Character Reform and the Vernacular Chinese Movement have created a chasm: today's Chinese university students can hardly read documents from before 1920 without annotations. If the criterion is the "succession of political entities," the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), as dynasties of foreign conquest, require extremely complex historiographical arguments to construct their legitimacy.

The fate of the Liangzhu civilization is an awkward example. According to research published by Zhang Haiwei and others in Science Advances (2021), this civilization, which flourished in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River about 4,300 years ago, collapsed due to massive flooding caused by climate change. Its people scattered, leaving no institutional or genetic inheritance to the later Central Plains civilization. However, the "Project to Trace the Origins of Chinese Civilization" has forcibly incorporated Liangzhu into a linear grand narrative, making it an indispensable piece of the "five thousand years" puzzle.

The editor's technique is "montage": splicing together two shots with no causal connection so that the viewer's brain automatically fills in the logical chain. The Shang Dynasty oracle bone inscriptions never mention the Xia Dynasty, but this does not prevent textbooks from arranging the Xia, Shang, and Zhou into a sequence resembling father-to-son succession. This narrative technique masks a fact: what is called "Chinese civilization" today is actually a superposition of multiple re-inventions, not a single, continuous river.

Restoration as Rewriting

Every "restoration of tradition" is not a simple return to the past but a re-editing of history according to current political needs.

When Buddhism entered the Han Dynasty, this foreign faith faced a completely alien cultural environment. To adapt, Buddhists adopted the method of "concept-matching" (geyi): translating "Nirvana" as the Taoist "Non-action" (wu-wei) and "Prajna" as "The Way" (Dao). After such drastic localization, the resulting Chan Buddhism's relationship to original Indian Buddhism is similar to that of sushi to raw fish: the ingredients may be similar, but the finished product is entirely different.

This logic of "restoration as rewriting" became increasingly aggressive after the late Qing Dynasty. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) resulted in 20 to 70 million deaths, and population growth in affected areas was 38% to 67% lower than in unaffected areas for the following 150 years (Li Yang & Lixin Colin Xu, World Bank Working Paper 8620, 2018). The post-war reconstruction of monasteries was ostensibly a restoration of the old, but Gregory Scott pointed out in Building the Buddhist Revival (2020) that these reconstructions often shed their original community-driven religious character to become state-led functional projects.

In the contemporary era, this kind of rewriting has reached an extreme. During the Cultural Revolution, 4,922 out of 6,843 historical sites in Beijing were destroyed, accounting for 72% (MacFarquhar & Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 2006). The "ancient sites" tourists see today are mostly reinforced concrete pseudo-antique reconstructions from after the 1980s. They are physical fakes and serve as spiritual reconstructions. James Palmer precisely noted in Foreign Policy in February 2026 that Xi Jinping's version of Confucianism is "more censored and restricted than Zhu Yuanzhang's version." Zhu Yuanzhang deleted chapters from the Mencius regarding "the people being more important than the ruler," while the modern version has completely transformed Confucian thought into an authoritarian tool emphasizing obedience, stripping away all traditional responsibilities of the literati to remonstrate.

One's Own Blade

A popular victim narrative suggests that the ruptures in Chinese civilization primarily stem from external shocks: Mongol cavalry, the Manchu invasion, or the "ships and guns" of Western powers. However, history shows that the deepest wounds to Chinese civilization often come from internal, proactive liquidations.

In 213 BC, Qin Shi Huang issued the decree to burn books. According to Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian: Annals of Qin Shi Huang, all private collections of the Classic of Poetry, the Book of Documents, and the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought were burned, except for the Qin historical records and books on medicine, divination, and agriculture. Those who used the past to criticize the present were executed along with their entire clans. This was the first attempt to sever the memory chain of the civilization.

Two thousand years later, this impulse for proactive destruction recurred in an even more tragic form. Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Heavenly Kingdom not only physically eliminated opponents but also attempted to mentally format China. He burned the classics of Confucius and Mencius and demolished Taoist and Buddhist temples, attempting to replace a thousand years of Confucian ethics with a crude Christian heresy.

This trend reached its climax in the 20th century. In 1918, Lu Xun wrote in A Madman's Diary that "the whole book was filled with the two words: 'Man-eating'." The May Fourth New Culture Movement shouted the slogan "Down with Confucius and Sons." Behind this was not simple radicalism, but a profound despair among the intellectual elite toward their own traditions. The subsequent "Destroy the Four Olds" was merely a violent extension of this logic. Zehao Zhou's 2011 study detailed the 1966 Qufu incident: the participants were not ignorant thugs engaged in random destruction; the event was an ideologically driven political ritual aimed at purging "feudal remnants."

The most intense "anti-Chinese civilization" forces in Chinese history have always been the Chinese people themselves.

The Global Editing Room

In the editing room of civilizational continuity, China is not an isolated case. However, the editing techniques of various countries show a clear path of escalation: beginning with ritual, moving to deification, and finally landing on institutional justification, with each level more dangerous than the last.

In 2021, Egyptian President Sisi orchestrated the "Pharaohs' Golden Parade," moving 22 royal mummies from the old museum to a new one. This is the most basic level of editing, using visual spectacle to leap over the long history of Islamization and Arabization to weld the modern republic to the ancient empire. After the ritual, daily politics continued as usual; the glory of the Pharaohs would not change the procedures required for Sisi's constitutional amendments.

India has gone further. In January 2026, the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) publicly claimed that India possesses a "200,000-year unbroken civilization." Here, ritual has crossed the line; myth is given a historical veneer to redefine who a "true Indian" is using an unfalsifiable timescale, thereby politically marginalizing Muslim groups. Yet even so, India's electoral system still provided a corrective mechanism: in the 2024 general election, Modi's BJP lost its absolute parliamentary majority.

Iran provides the end of this path. In 1971, the Shah Pahlavi held a celebration for the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire, using the glory of Cyrus the Great to argue for the eternal legitimacy of the monarchy. Eight years later, the successor to this "2,500-year civilization" was overthrown by a revolution. The civilizational narrative failed to save the Shah because when legitimacy is built entirely on historical imagination and detached from actual performance, any economic crisis can cause the entire edifice to collapse.

China's uniqueness lies in completing all three steps simultaneously: using ritual to create identity (Confucius Institutes, International Confucian Conference), using myth to exclude dissent ("five thousand years of continuity" is not to be questioned), and using civilization to justify the system ("China is not suited for Western democracy").

The official narrative claims that because Chinese civilization is "unique and continuous," it cannot apply Western liberal democratic systems and must instead implement a special form of paternalistic governance. This argument transforms historical continuity into a political privilege.

However, this narrative will face its most determined internal challenger before 2030—the questioning from archaeology. As early as the 1990s, Su Bingqi proposed the "Starry Sky" model, arguing that the origins of Chinese civilization were multi-centered, by no means a single Yellow River-centric model. As excavations at peripheral sites like Sanxingdui, Liangzhu, and Shimao deepen, the evidence increasingly supports a decentralized ancient picture.

When archaeological evidence accumulates to the point where it can no longer be ignored, the authorities will be forced to abandon the "linear, single-lineage" narrative and retreat to a complex narrative of "pluralistic unity." This in itself is a correction of the "continuity" myth. The editor will eventually find that the film in the archives is shorter than expected, the break points are more numerous than admitted, and the audience's patience is more limited than assumed.

The Chosen Tradition

In November 2013, Xi Jinping entered the Confucius Research Institute in Qufu, picked up the Interpretations of the Family Sayings of Confucius and Interpretations of the Analects from the table, and remarked that he wanted to "take a close look." This was the first time a top leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC) had officially visited the Confucius Temple. Yet, 47 years earlier, the same party had dispatched 200 Red Guards to the same location to level the tomb of Confucius. Between these two visits, the meaning of the term "Confucianism" underwent at least three transformations. During the 1974 "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" campaign, Confucius was viewed as a "restorationist maniac turning back the wheels of history"; in 2013, he became the "representative of excellent traditional Chinese culture." What changed was not Confucius, but the role he was required to play.

The Empty Vessel

In the contemporary political context, "Confucianism" is not a coherent system of thought but an empty vessel that is repeatedly refilled. Zhu Yuanzhang believed that Mencius's idea that "the people are more important than the ruler" threatened imperial power, so he expurgated the Mencius and expelled the "Second Sage" from the Confucian Temple. The Kangxi Emperor needed the loyalty of Han scholar-officials, so he solidified Confucianism into a ruling tool of the "Three Cardinal Guides and Five Constant Virtues." The May Fourth generation saw it as "cannibalistic ritual teachings," while Mao Zedong viewed it as "feudal remnants" that had to be eradicated. Entering the 21st century, as the explanatory power of Marxism weakened alongside slowing economic growth, this vessel was opened once again, filled with "harmony," "patriotism," and "obedience."

Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval, in their 2015 book The Sage and the People, provided a precise description of this phenomenon: the contemporary Confucian revival is "primarily a phenomenon of cultural production, invention, and imagination." Activists and officials are not restoring an intact historical tradition but are instead selecting elements beneficial to the present from a "broad reference library." This operation aligns closely with the framework proposed by Eric Hobsbawm in 1983 in The Invention of Tradition: those traditions that appear ancient are often creations of recent times.

In China, this even goes beyond Hobsbawm's definition. It is not just invention, but more like the embalming of a corpse. When a political party severed the intergenerational transmission of tradition decades ago, today's "revival" inevitably takes on a performative character. To ask "which version of Confucianism is being revived"—whether it is the School of Principle of Zhu Xi, the School of Mind of Wang Yangming, or the practical statecraft of Gu Yanwu—is an answer that in itself deconstructs the singularity of "tradition." The official choice is always that neutered version of Confucianism, stripped of its critical edge and emphasizing hierarchical order.

The Forgotten List

By placing the "promoted traditions" and the "suppressed traditions" into two lists, the criteria for selection become clear at a glance.

Promoted traditions include Hanfu (Han-style clothing), calligraphy, the guzheng (zither), sacrificial rites for Confucius, and the Standards for Being a Good Pupil and Child (Di Zi Gui). Suppressed traditions, meanwhile, include the judicial functions of clan ancestral halls, the social organizations of folk religions, temple fairs not controlled by the state, and underground churches.

The logical thread here is not the antiquity of the tradition. On November 22, 2003, Wang Letian, an electric power worker in Zhengzhou, wore Hanfu on the street. After being reported by Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao, it sparked online discussion, which is generally regarded as the starting point of the contemporary Hanfu movement. A subculture born less than 20 years ago, whose standards of form remain controversial to this day, is hailed by official media as an embodiment of "cultural confidence." In contrast, the Mazu belief on Meizhou Island in Putian, Fujian, and the clan organizations in Chaoshan, Guangdong, have persisted for thousands of years, forming the oldest autonomous fabric of Chinese grassroots society, yet they are often labeled as "feudal superstition" or "illegal structures" and demolished.

The large-scale campaign to remove church crosses that began in Zhejiang in 2014, and the direction of the "Sinicization of Religion" proposed by Xi Jinping at the Central United Front Work Conference in 2015, clearly demonstrate this red line. Chosen traditions must be aesthetic, symbolic, and atomized; rejected traditions are often those with organizational capacity, community autonomy functions, or transcendent moral authority.

The selection criterion is not "traditional or not," but "controllable or not."

A dead philosopher is safe because the dead cannot dissent against current policies; a living, organized religious community is dangerous because such communities might form an alternative loyalty to state power. This explains why the government can allocate funds to renovate Confucius temples while simultaneously cracking down on rural clan forces. The former is a spectacle; the latter is a competitor.

Branded Civilization

China's "revival of traditional culture" bears a striking structural resemblance to Disney's adaptations of Grimm's Fairy Tales: retain the brand name and visual symbols, delete the violence and discomforting content, and add values that suit the tastes of contemporary consumers (or rulers). The relationship between the final product and the original is more like trademark licensing than cultural inheritance.

Disney's Snow White does not truly die after biting the poisoned apple, and Xi Jinping's version of Mencius will not say to the camera, "If the ruler regards his subjects as dirt and grass, then his subjects will regard the ruler as a bandit and an enemy."

James Palmer pointed out in a February 2026 article in Foreign Policy that Xi Jinping's version of Confucianism is "more censored and restricted than Zhu Yuanzhang's version." Zhu Yuanzhang merely deleted Mencius's books; the modern version attempts to reshape the memory of the citizenry. The "Chinese culture" presented to the world by Confucius Institutes is a set of carefully sanitized rituals and dumpling-making tutorials, far removed from the historical Confucian political culture that was full of moral tension and even included the tradition of "remonstrance by death."

Wang Guowei once wrote in anguish: "What I love, I cannot believe; what I believe, I cannot love." This sentence accurately predicted the dilemma of contemporary Chinese cultural conservatives. The "tradition" these people love has been transformed into a political tool that cannot be intellectually believed; while the modern values that might be intellectually believed are "Western imports" that cannot be fully embraced emotionally.

The consequence of this branding is two-way. While branding provides a temporary cloak of legitimacy for the regime, it also drains the vitality of tradition. When "tradition" becomes a footnote to the Socialist Core Values that must be memorized, it loses its ability to serve as a moral resource to check power.

The End of the Selection

Swedish sinologist Torbjörn Lodén analyzed in 2017 the pendulum effect of China's attitude toward tradition, swinging from radical anti-traditionalism back to instrumental traditionalism. Lodén noted a deep paradox: the revival is possible precisely because China is already highly modernized and Westernized; "the lives of Chinese people today are strikingly similar to those of Westerners." In other words, the prerequisite for "traditional revival" is that tradition is already dead. A living tradition does not need revival; only a dead tradition needs to be repackaged.

The "Sinicization of Religion" policy will create a logical paradox around 2028. This policy requires all religions (Christianity, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism) to conform to "Chinese characteristics" in doctrine, ritual, and architectural style. Once this process is complete, if all belief systems are homogenized into variants that support the existing political order, "Chinese characteristics" themselves will lose their cultural distinctiveness.

If a church, a mosque, and a Taoist temple all become endorsements of the same set of political documents in their core doctrines, then the definition of "China" is no longer a unique civilizational tradition, but pure political power projection.

The end of the "tradition selection" is now emerging. Through screening and transformation, the state attempts to create a culture without impurities. But like distilled water purified in a laboratory, this "perfect tradition"—stripped of all heterogeneity, criticality, and wild energy—cannot nourish the growth of civilization, nor can it even sustain its own existence. This magnificent specimen can ultimately only be displayed in the showcase of power, for people to visit, but for no one to believe in.

India's Counter-Evidence

On September 9, 2023, at the G20 summit venue in New Delhi, a hardcover manual was placed on the seat of every foreign leader: Bharat: The Mother of Democracy. The manual's opening declared that India is the "world's oldest democracy," asserting that its democratic traditions did not originate from the Western Enlightenment but could be traced back to the village councils (Sabha) of the Mahabharata era.

On March 31 of the same year, at the Kremlin in Moscow, Vladimir Putin signed a new version of "The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation." This document officially defined Russia for the first time as a "unique country-civilization."

The two documents employed nearly identical vocabulary, including "civilization," "tradition," "uniqueness," and "continuity." Both cited their respective millennia of history to emphasize the transcendence of indigenous values over Western universalism. However, such strikingly similar rhetoric ultimately provided the basis for entirely different political systems. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs used "civilization" to argue for the natural legitimacy of parliamentary democracy, while the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs used "civilization" to justify sovereign authoritarianism.

In mathematics, if the same variable can produce both positive and negative results, it is usually considered irrelevant to the outcome. In political science, however, this phenomenon is known as the "civilization-state" theory.

The Same Card

The "civilization-state" is not a rigorous academic classification; it is more like a blank check.

As long as a history is long enough, any regime can extract the arguments it needs from it. In his 2009 book When China Rules the World, Martin Jacques argued that China's civilizational attributes determine that it will not move toward Western-style democracy. However, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar reached the opposite conclusion using the same logic in his 2020 book The India Way. He argued that India's identity as a "civilization-state" is precisely the foundation of its multi-party democracy, because Hindu civilization itself is pluralistic and inclusive.

Consider examples from other countries.

Turkish President Erdogan justifies a new system—a blend of elections and strongman politics—by reviving Ottoman imperial traditions. Iran's Supreme Leader maintains theocratic rule through the narrative of Islamic civilization. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán digs into Magyar history to construct an "illiberal democracy."

The same conceptual framework is used to justify one-party systems, multi-party democracies, theocracies, hybrid regimes, and nationalist authoritarianism. Such logical contradictions turn "civilization" into a massive black hole: if "civilization" can explain everything, it actually explains nothing. It is like a panacea that a doctor tells a patient can cure both insomnia and hypersomnia.

When Zhang Weiwei claimed in 2011 that China could not implement Western systems due to its civilizational attributes, he ignored an embarrassing fact: India, which is equally ancient, equally populous, and possesses equally deep non-Western traditions, is using the same "civilizational" reasoning to market itself to the world as the "mother of democracy."

If civilization is the independent variable and the political system is the dependent variable, then China and India should fall on the same side of the axis. But the reality is that the two countries are at opposite ends of the political spectrum. This indicates that what determines the form of a political system is not that constant "civilizational background," but the specific way current power-holders tailor historical materials.

Five Menus

The "civilization-state" narratives of various countries are like different regional franchisees of the same multinational fast-food brand: the brand name is the same, but the products are entirely determined by the local political market.

McDonald's sells veggie burgers in India, teriyaki burgers in Japan, and fried dough sticks in China. Similarly, the "civilization-state" brand produces a parliamentary system in India, a party-state system in China, and the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist (Velayat-e Faqih) in Iran. The brand does not dictate the menu; rather, the local chefs determine what the brand means in that locality.

Iran is a deeply ironic case.

In the forty years following the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic was dedicated to suppressing pre-Islamic Persian civilizational symbols, viewing them as the decadent remnants of the Pahlavi dynasty. However, in July 2025, a week after Israeli airstrikes on Tehran and nuclear facilities, Supreme Leader Khamenei gave a rare public speech praising the "resilience of ancient Persian civilization" at length, citing anecdotes of the Sassanid Empire's resistance against foreign enemies.

Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews, points out that such shifts usually occur when the regime's religious legitimacy faces a crisis. Khamenei spent 46 years disparaging the pre-Islamic period as an "illusion" (tawahhom), only to suddenly discover the united-front value of Cyrus the Great the moment missiles began to fall.

The instrumental nature of the "civilization-state" is thus exposed. This concept is not some geological structure sleeping underground, waiting to determine the shape of the buildings on the surface; it is a fuel pile in the ruler's backyard. Usually, they burn natural gas (ideology); when the gas runs low, they go to the backyard to dig up some coal (civilizational tradition) to burn.

Turkey's trajectory is equally clear. In his 2001 book Strategic Depth, Ahmet Davutoğlu mapped out a "Neo-Ottomanist" blueprint for Turkey, which at the time was intended to argue that Turkey could exert unique diplomatic influence within a democratic framework. Twenty years later, this theory was appropriated by the Erdogan government, becoming the historical basis for purging secularist military officers and amending the constitution to centralize power.

The same recipe produced a moderate Islamic democracy twenty years ago and a Sultan-style strongman politics twenty years later. The ingredients didn't change; the cook did.

Nehru's Legacy vs. Modi's Project

India is not only a counter-evidence to the "civilization-state" theory but also a concentrated manifestation of its internal contradictions.

If China is a "civilization pretending to be a state," then India is an "experiment trying to fit a civilization into a state mold." At the Constituent Assembly in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar faced the same 5,000-year-old Indian civilization. The "civilizational tradition" they saw was one of caste oppression and religious conflict; therefore, they designed a secular, federal constitutional system based on individual rights, attempting to domesticate this civilization.

Seventy years later, Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) faced the same civilization but reached the opposite conclusion.

In August 2025, at the centenary celebration of the RSS, its supreme leader Mohan Bhagwat declared that India has been a "Hindu State" (Hindu Rashtra) since ancient times and that the constitution should reflect this "civilizational fact." In the Modi government's narrative, civilization is no longer a beast that needs to be domesticated by modern institutions, but the sole source of institutional legitimacy.

There is a fatal logical rift here: the same civilizational tradition supported both Nehru's 17-year secular rule and Modi's dismantling of secularism.

If civilizational determinism held true, the India of 1947 should not have given birth to a secular constitution; or, the India after 2014 should not have been able to pivot to religious nationalism so quickly. The reality is that Indian political elites chose different facets of civilization at different times.

According to the 2011 census (data still cited by the Press Information Bureau of India in February 2026), India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages, 99 non-constitutional languages, and thousands of mother tongues. Such extreme heterogeneity forces India to adopt federalism and democratic consultation; otherwise, the state would disintegrate. Indian civilization is not naturally "democracy-loving"; rather, within such a complex civilizational structure, the governance cost of autocracy is prohibitively high.

The Modi government's attempt to overlay this diversity with a singular "civilization-state" narrative is essentially challenging the physical structure of Indian civilization. When New Delhi attempts to promote Hindi as the "civilizational language," it meets fierce resistance from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. This proves that "civilization" is not a homogeneous whole; it is full of fractures and confrontations.

Politicians claim they are "conforming" to civilization, but in reality, they are "violating" it, forcing civilization to give birth to the political offspring the power-holders desire.

A Devalued Currency

Shifting the gaze from South Asia to East Asia, the counter-evidence becomes even more glaring.

According to the 2024 Freedom House report, Taiwan scored 94/100, Japan 96/100, and South Korea 83/100. These three societies are deeply influenced by Confucian civilization, with hierarchical concepts and family ethics in their social structures sharing the same origin as mainland China. However, all three societies have established stable liberal democratic systems.

If the "genes" of Confucian civilization inevitably led to authoritarianism, then the existence of Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul would be a biological miracle, like swans hatching from crocodile eggs.

By 2030, the concept of the "civilization-state" will have devalued due to overuse. This follows Gresham's Law in economics: when everyone starts issuing currency, the currency becomes scrap paper.

When democratic India, authoritarian China, theocratic Iran, Neo-Ottoman Turkey, and even Eurasianist Russia all crowd into the "civilization-state" club, the membership card no longer represents any special identity. The label will degenerate into a hollow mantra meaning: "Don't criticize this system; it has a long history behind it."

By then, theorists like Zhang Weiwei will be forced into a strategic retreat. They can no longer simply declare that "China is a civilization-state," because Indians will say "India is too," and pull out a ballot box as evidence. These theorists will have to retreat to the defensive line of "China is a unique civilization-state."

And once the qualifier "unique" is added, the "civilization-state" as a universal analytical framework is declared bankrupt. Because "uniqueness" is precisely the core logic of the nation-state—the idea that every nation-state believes itself to be unique. After going in a large circle, the effort to transcend Western nation-state theory ultimately falls back into the trap of the nation-state, with nothing more in hand than a non-existent historical instruction manual.

The Bill for the Tianxia Order

In 2005, Zhao Tingyang, a philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published an ambitious work: The Tianxia System: An Introduction to the Philosophy of a World Institution. In the book, he proposed that the ancient Chinese concept of "Tianxia" (All-Under-Heaven)—a world order characterized by "no-outside" (no outsiders)—is ontologically superior to the Westphalian system of sovereign states because it focuses on relationships rather than boundaries. Eight years later, on March 23, 2013, during a speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Xi Jinping first proposed the "Community with a Shared Future for Mankind," elevating Zhao Tingyang's philosophical concept to the highest level of foreign policy. Another twelve years passed, and by 2025, annual investment in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) reached a record $213.5 billion. That same year, a Pew Research Center survey showed that 67% of respondents across 24 countries held a negative view of China. After investing $1.4 trillion, the "Tianxia Order" has garnered not universal recognition, but increasing vigilance and debt defaults.

Generous Giving and Frugal Receiving

When constructing The Tianxia System, Zhao Tingyang skillfully extracted "Tianxia" from the quagmire of history, polishing it into a morally irreproachable philosophical ideal. However, this extraction process intentionally ignored the material basis that sustained the system's operation. As early as 1968, John King Fairbank pointed out in the edited volume The Chinese World Order that the core of the tribute system was "generous giving and frugal receiving" (hou wang bo lai): to maintain the political legitimacy of the Celestial Empire, the Ming and Qing courts often returned gifts to tributary states worth several times the value of the tribute itself.

This asymmetrical exchange was not born of some generous civilizational impulse, but was a fiscal transfer payment to purchase political loyalty.

During the Yongle reign of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng He’s seven voyages to the Western Seas (1405–1433) involved a fleet scale that once reached approximately 300 ships and 27,000 crew members. This projection of force, which was nearly science fiction under the technical conditions of the time, eventually came to an abrupt halt due to fiscal exhaustion. The Ming Dynasty spent 28 years and seven massive fleets to prove the high cost of the "Tianxia Order," while the modern Belt and Road Initiative has used 12 years and $1.4 trillion to reach almost the same conclusion. The operating model of the "Tianxia Order" is strikingly similar to the "burn rate" customer acquisition strategy of Silicon Valley venture capital: the Ming Dynasty subsidized tributary states with silk and porcelain, while the BRI subsidizes countries along its routes with low-interest loans. In essence, both trade economic losses for market share (political influence).

The difference is that venture capital burns money for an eventual IPO exit or monopoly profit, whereas the "Tianxia Order" has no exit mechanism.

When Fairbank used positivism to deconstruct the economic ledger of the tribute system, he revealed the realistic logic behind it; when Zhao Tingyang reshaped "Tianxia" in 2005, he used an idealized narrative to obscure these ledgers. This type of selective forgetting is identical to Zhang Weiwei's discourse on "civilizational continuity": theorists only display those grand, continuous, and soul-stirring slices of history, while maintaining a deliberate silence on the stability-maintenance costs that led to the fiscal collapse of dynasties. This silence itself is a costly rhetorical strategy.

The Boundaries of No-Outside

The most attractive yet fragile concept in Zhao Tingyang's theory is "no-outside" (wuwai). In theory, the Tianxia system does not recognize "infidels" or "enemies," only "people beyond the pale of civilization" who have yet to be transformed by culture. However, a logical rift exists between this philosophical claim and China's actual diplomatic behavior that is difficult to bridge.

In 2020, after the Australian government called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19, China's Ministry of Commerce quickly launched anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations. Subsequently, Australian barley was hit with tariffs as high as 232%, and wine tariffs soared to 218%. In 2021, because Lithuania allowed the establishment of a "Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania," its exports to China faced a de facto trade blockade, and even German automotive supply chains using Lithuanian components were affected. Combined with the frequent advancement of militarized island and reef construction in the South China Sea, these actions outline a picture diametrically opposed to "no-outside."

A civilizational order that claims to have "no-outside" yet possesses the world's most sophisticated economic punishment mechanisms and most sensitive political red lines constitutes, by definition, a logical self-destruction.

In the same year Zhao Tingyang proposed "no-outside," the technical architecture of the Great Firewall was undergoing a critical upgrade. A world order with no outsiders that requires a wall at both the physical and digital levels to maintain itself is a paradox full of dark humor. When the "Tianxia" concept is transformed into a diplomatic tool, it is no longer an inclusive philosophy but becomes a political sieve to distinguish friends from foes: the submissive enjoy high-speed rail and loans within "Tianxia," while the defiant endure tariffs and sanctions outside of it. This binary opposition not only reconstructs the Westphalian boundaries that "Tianxia" vowed to transcend but even makes those boundaries more rigid and punitive.

The Irreproducible Cost Structure

The Ming Dynasty's tribute system was able to last for nearly three hundred years due to a frequently overlooked prerequisite: technical asymmetry. In the 15th century, Southeast Asian states—whether Siam, Malacca, or Brunei—had a generational gap with the Ming Dynasty in fields such as shipbuilding, metallurgy, and textiles. Consequently, the cost of "generous giving and frugal receiving" was controllable. The returned gifts of silk and porcelain were industrial goods with extremely low marginal costs for the Ming Dynasty, but were unattainable luxuries for the tributary states. This asymmetry ensured that while the economic ledger of the tribute system was in deficit, it did not spiral out of control.

More importantly, the number of tributary states was limited, and they lacked horizontal connections. Ryukyu would not compare whether the gifts it received were fair compared to Siam, nor would Malacca demand reciprocal treatment because Brunei received more rewards. The operating cost of the tribute system thus grew linearly: one more tributary state meant one more gift budget, and nothing more.

The world the BRI faces is entirely different. Sri Lanka's Hambantota Port is the most frequently cited case. In 2017, unable to repay a $1.4 billion loan, Sri Lanka handed the port over to China Merchants Port Holdings on a 99-year lease. This event was widely reported by Western media as a classic case of "debt-trap diplomacy." Professor Deborah Brautigam of Johns Hopkins University pointed out in a 2019 study that the "debt-trap diplomacy" narrative was oversimplified, and that Sri Lanka's debt crisis stemmed primarily from international sovereign bonds rather than Chinese loans. While this clarification is accurate, it also happens to expose another problem: the risk assessment of BRI projects was not conducted according to commercial logic from the beginning. The annual throughput of Hambantota Port has long been less than 10% of its designed capacity; any due diligence would have flagged this project.

Pakistan's Gwadar Port tells a similar story. As a flagship project of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Gwadar Port has consistently failed to reach expected commercial operations since its handover to China Overseas Ports Holding Company in 2013. The security situation in Balochistan Province, the lack of fresh water supply, and the absence of hinterland transportation infrastructure—these problems existed before the project started. A port project evaluated by commercial standards would not have chosen this location, but a project running on the logic of the "Tianxia Order" would. Gwadar's value lies not in port throughput, but in its position on the geopolitical chessboard.

The root of the cost difference between the ancient tribute system and the modern BRI lies in the change in network structure. The Ming Dynasty faced a radial network: all tributary states only had a relationship with the center (the Ming court) and had almost no connection with each other. This topological structure meant that the dissatisfaction of one tributary state would not infect others. The BRI faces a fully connected network: Sri Lanka's port lease is reported in Malaysian newspapers, Pakistan's debt problems become fodder for debates in the Kenyan parliament, and all relevant news spreads worldwide via Reuters and the Associated Press within 24 hours. Negative events at every node are amplified through network effects and transmitted to all other nodes.

This is the modern dilemma of the "Tianxia Order": the operating cost of the ancient version was linear, while the operating cost of the modern version is exponential.

The Depreciation of Civilization

The investment structure of the BRI is undergoing a silent transformation. In 2025, China's investment in the energy sector of BRI countries saw spending on hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas) skyrocket from $3 billion the previous year to $51 billion. This dramatic shift in data marks a change in strategic direction: moving away from prestige projects designed to win hearts and minds (stadiums, parliament buildings) toward resource extraction projects capable of generating hard currency cash flow.

The driving force behind this transformation is not the epiphany of a decision-maker, but the profound impossibility of the "Tianxia" model within the Westphalian system.

The ancient tribute system operated in a world without the concept of sovereign equality. Tributary states accepted the arrangement of "generous giving and frugal receiving" because, in that world, hierarchical order was the default paradigm of international relations; no one believed that Siam and the Ming Dynasty should be "equal." After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, sovereign equality gradually became the foundational principle of the international system. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter explicitly states the "sovereign equality of all its Members." Under this framework, the logic of "generous giving and frugal receiving" is fundamentally unsustainable because accepting subsidies is equivalent to admitting inequality, and the political elites of sovereign states cannot explain to domestic voters or the military why they should accept an economic arrangement that implies a hierarchical relationship.

The political consequences in Sri Lanka proved this point. The lease of Hambantota Port triggered a strong nationalist backlash within Sri Lanka and became one of the core issues of the 2019 presidential election. Gotabaya Rajapaksa campaigned on a promise to review the agreement with China. An arrangement that would not have caused a ripple in the tribute system—such as a suzerain state gaining port usage rights—became political dynamite in the system of sovereign states.

The contradiction of the "Tianxia Order" is that this system requires the recipient to default to an unequal relationship, while all the efforts of modern international law are directed toward eliminating such inequalities.

The rhetoric of a "Community with a Shared Future for Mankind" is fading from specific BRI project documents, replaced by Internal Rate of Return (IRR) calculations and risk-hedging clauses. This is not a policy failure, but an inevitable degradation of an ancient conception of world order upon encountering the modern sovereign system. The "Tianxia" Zhao Tingyang envisioned in 2005 presupposed a world willing to be integrated into a hierarchical order; the world of 2025 has rejected that presupposition. When Chinese banks begin evaluating the credit risk of BRI projects like J.P. Morgan, "Tianxia" transforms from a civilizational ideal into an accounting line item. Zhao Tingyang's philosophy book may remain on bookshelves for a long time, but as a diplomatic manual, its shelf life has expired along with those unpayable loans.

The Foundry of Discourse Power

In June 2011, Zhang Weiwei stood on the TED stage in Geneva, telling "A Tale of Two Political Systems" to a Western audience in fluent English. This 18-minute speech garnered over 4 million views on the TED website and YouTube. Seven years later, Zhang Weiwei appeared in the studio of China Central Television's This is China, repeating almost identical arguments in Chinese to a domestic audience. The English monologue in Geneva eventually evolved into a Chinese sermon in Beijing; Zhang Weiwei's trajectory encapsulates the complete process of an intellectual production line.

The Assembly Line

The production process of the "Civilizational State" narrative bears a striking resemblance to the model of the modern pharmaceutical industry, from laboratory research and development to pharmacy sales.

The basic research phase was completed by Western scholars such as Lucian Pye. In his 1968 book The Spirit of Chinese Politics, Pye proposed the original theory that "China is a civilization pretending to be a state." Although Pye's original intention was to analyze the difficulties of China's modernization rather than to praise its system, this viewpoint became the raw material for subsequent narratives. The clinical transformation phase was taken over by Martin Jacques and Daniel A. Bell, who stripped away the pathological elements of Pye's theory and refined "civilization" into an alternative to Western liberal democracy.

Next, Zhang Weiwei and the China Institute of Fudan University undertook the task of mass production.

The positioning of the China Institute of Fudan University in the academic landscape appears quite unique. While nominally affiliated with a top university, the institution functions more like a narrative assembly workshop. Complex history is compressed here into flat slogans, and academic concepts full of tension are standardized into television soundbites. In his 2011 TED speech, Zhang Weiwei still maintained a scholar's restraint and a framework of comparative politics; by the 2018 This is China, this framework had been simplified into an absolute binary opposition: China is a "civilizational state," while the West consists of "nation-states"; the former symbolizes good governance, while the latter represents poor governance.

However, there is a fatal difference between this assembly line and the pharmaceutical industry.

Before a drug goes to market, its efficacy must be verified through double-blind trials, whereas the "civilizational state" narrative has never undergone any independent "clinical trials." No one has verified whether the core hypothesis that "civilization determines the political system" holds true, nor is there data to support the idea that a "civilizational state" is necessarily superior to other models in responding to modern crises. The entire production process skips the verification stage and goes straight to marketing and promotion.

This also explains why there are many logical ruptures in this narrative: a civilization claiming five thousand years of continuity becomes hesitant when explaining why it needs a modern internet firewall; a system claiming to be more responsive than Western democracy requires the suppression of dissent to maintain "confidence."

The Paradox of Discourse Power

In August 2013, Xi Jinping proposed "telling China's story well" at the National Conference on Propaganda and Ideological Work. Subsequently, "discourse power" rapidly became a core vocabulary in China's external strategy.

The obsession with "discourse power" exposes a deep logical paradox: if a country's civilizational narrative were authentic and possessed universal appeal, that narrative would not need to be "fought for."

The United States has never established a "Federal Office of Discourse Power," nor has it issued a white paper on the definition of the "American Dream." Hollywood screenwriters and Silicon Valley product managers, in the process of chasing commercial interests, have incidentally achieved a more effective export of values than any propaganda department. When a country needs to mobilize the state apparatus to demonstrate the attractiveness of its civilization, that attractiveness is often already significantly compromised.

According to research by the South China Morning Post and David Shambaugh, China launched its "Great Overseas Propaganda" plan in 2009 with an investment of approximately 45 billion RMB. China Global Television Network (CGTN) began broadcasting on December 31, 2016, establishing luxurious production centers in Washington, London, and Nairobi in an attempt to create a Chinese CNN.

However, this massive investment resulted in a downgrade of identity. In February 2020, the U.S. State Department designated five Chinese media outlets, including Xinhua News Agency and CGTN, as "foreign missions," stripping these institutions of their status as "media" and treating them as extensions of the government. When a media outlet's editorial policy is completely subordinate to political instructions, this designation is undoubtedly a confirmation of objective facts.

The tragedy of the concept of "discourse power" lies in its treatment of cultural influence as a strategic resource that can be mined and stockpiled like coal or oil. However, discourse power is more like a credit currency that can only be accumulated through long-term consistency between words and deeds; once fraud is discovered, the exchange rate collapses instantly.

Inherent Dilemma

CGTN's production center in Washington is equipped with 4K studios, professional lighting systems, and fluent English-speaking presenters, with a technical level no less than that of CNN. The problem is not about product quality; the crux lies in the product's "label of origin."

This is the inherent dilemma of state-led production of discourse power: the value of information products depends on independence, while state investment naturally weakens that independence. The greater the investment and the tighter the control, the lower the credibility of the product. This paradox cannot be solved by increasing the budget, just as a company cannot compensate for defects in the product itself by increasing advertising expenditure.

An analogy can help understand this dilemma. The difference in credibility between a state-run newspaper and an independent media outlet has nothing to do with technology, talent, or funding; it is entirely determined by the ownership structure. The credibility of The New York Times is built on over a century of editorial independence, which includes the freedom to criticize its own government. When the prerequisite for a media outlet's existence is that it can never criticize its funder, no matter how many Pulitzer Prize winners it hires, the audience will mentally label it as an "advertisement."

The 45 billion RMB investment in "Great Overseas Propaganda" is, in the final analysis, an attempt to manufacture credit ratings using the logic of factory capacity. However, a credit rating is by no means an asset that can be acquired through investment; it can only rely on the accumulation of reputation through consistency in words and deeds. The reason ratings from Moody's and S&P are valuable is precisely because the rating agencies are not controlled by the entities being rated. Once a rating agency is acquired, the rating itself loses its meaning.

The same logic applies to Confucius Institutes. After reaching a peak of over 500 institutes, they are now facing large-scale closures. The failure of Confucius Institutes is not about the quality of Chinese language teaching; the crux is that these institutes were embedded within university systems while simultaneously accepting curriculum guidance from Beijing. When academic freedom and political instructions coexist under the same roof, the former is inevitably swallowed by the latter. Sweden closed the country's last remaining Confucius Institute in 2020, with a straightforward reason: academic institutions should not accept content censorship from foreign governments.

The failure mode of state discourse power production originates from within and has nothing to do with the level of execution. Replacing them with smarter propaganda officials, purchasing more advanced equipment, or hiring more professional foreign employees cannot change a fundamental fact: when the sender and the censor of information are the same entity, the credibility of the information is already zero the moment it leaves the factory.

Free Agents

Ironically, the official communication channels built with 45 billion RMB are far less effective in shaping Western perceptions of the "civilizational state" than a few Western scholars who do not receive a salary.

The mechanism of this phenomenon is "credibility arbitrage." In the information market, when the same viewpoint is issued from different sources, its market value is completely different. When a CGTN host praises the Chinese model, the audience sees a paid employee reading a script; when a scholar from the London School of Economics expounds the same viewpoint on a podium, the listeners hear an independent academic judgment. The information content is the same, but the credibility premium is a difference of orders of magnitude.

The reason Jacques and Bell became highly effective agents is entirely due to their precise utilization of two deep gaps in the Western intellectual world, regardless of the quality of their arguments. Jacques exploited the left's weariness with liberal hegemony, packaging China's rise as a possibility for a non-Western modernity; Bell exploited the academic world's disappointment with the polarization of electoral politics, describing meritocracy as a rational alternative. Both voluntarily filled these gaps, becoming academic distributors of the "civilizational state" narrative.

This type of credibility arbitrage has a built-in self-destruction mechanism: the arbitrage depends on the distance between the narrative and reality being small enough so that the agents do not damage their own reputations by endorsing the product. After 2019, as Chinese foreign policy shifted toward a "Wolf Warrior" style, this distance was stretched to the breaking point. Bell left mainland China for Hong Kong and adjusted his tone in subsequent works. When the most effective agents begin to distance themselves from the product, the product's market prospects become self-evident.

This assembly line is ultimately trapped in a dead loop: official channels are trusted by no one due to a lack of independence, and independent agents gradually fall silent due to the gap between reality and narrative. The 45 billion RMB failed to buy discourse power; it only bought an expensive lesson about the fact that discourse power cannot be purchased.

The Immunology of Civilization

On August 15, 2023, China's National Bureau of Statistics announced the suspension of the release of youth unemployment data for the 16-24 age group. The last figure previously released was 21.3%, a record high. Official explanations stated that "labor force survey statistics need further improvement and optimization." In the same week, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responding to foreign media questions about the economic slowdown, stated that "the resilience of the Chinese economy is rooted in the heritage of five thousand years of civilization."

A statistics bureau that stops releasing data and a Ministry of Foreign Affairs that responds to economic skepticism with "five thousand years of civilization"—the actions of these two institutions seem unrelated, but they actually share the same logic: when reality conflicts with the narrative, it is not the narrative that is adjusted, but the visibility of reality. The speed at which the statistics bureau stops releasing data is far faster than the speed at which the unemployment problem is solved.

Immune Mechanism

The narrative of the "civilizational state" is regarded in academic circles as an explanatory framework, but in political practice, such narratives have gradually evolved into a high-intensity immune mechanism. Its mode of operation bears a striking resemblance to autoimmune diseases in biology.

In a healthy organism, the core function of the immune system is to distinguish between "self" and "non-self," precisely attacking foreign pathogens. In an autoimmune disease, however, the system loses this recognition capability and begins to misidentify the body's own healthy tissues as invaders and launches attacks. The "civilizational state" narrative re-encodes all criticism, including demands for reform from within, as "the penetration of Western values" or "ignorance of Chinese exceptionalism." This encoding method transforms pain signals generated within the social organism (such as unemployment rates, protests over unfinished buildings, and local debt crises) into variants of external viruses.

The Anti-Espionage Law revised in April 2023 is a legalized manifestation of this mechanism. The new law expands the definition of espionage to include "documents, data, materials, or items related to national security and interests," yet it fails to clearly define what constitutes "national security and interests." This ambiguity is not a lapse in legislative technique but a leukocyte-like characteristic of the immune system: the system requires unlimited authorization to engulf any cell that might be deemed heterogeneous.

When Zhang Weiwei argued in his 2011 book The China Wave that China is a "civilization masquerading as a nation-state," he actually provided the theoretical basis for this immune system. Since China is not merely a modern nation-state, universal standards based on the nation-state model (such as freedom of the press and judicial independence) are naturally inapplicable. This not only defends against external accusations but, more importantly, this logic strips internal dissent of its legitimacy. Any call for transparency is now not just a political demand, but a betrayal of "civilizational subjectivity."

The result is: the stronger the immune system, the weaker the host. This is because while the immune system attacks viruses, it also kills the feedback nerves that maintain the body's equilibrium.

The Weaponization of Feelings

In the records of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' regular press conferences from 2000 to 2025, the phrase "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people" appears more than 600 times. However, no official document has ever defined what the "feelings of the Chinese people" are, no polling agency has been permitted to measure real-time readings of these feelings, and no quantitative standards have been set to trigger "injury."

The undefinability of this concept is precisely where its function lies. A standard that cannot be defined is a standard that cannot be refuted.

"Civilization" plays a similar role here—a concept grand and vague enough to justify any specific policy. In March 2023, a spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, responding to a BBC report on human rights issues in Xinjiang, used the phrasing "lack of understanding of China's five thousand years of civilization." This mode of response completes a shift in the burden of proof: the logic requires the questioner to first obtain a qualification in "understanding five thousand years of civilization" before having the right to ask specific questions about detention camps.

This is an epistemological fortification. If Western scholars or journalists point out specific governance flaws, the response is often not a rebuttal of the facts themselves, but a questioning of the other party's epistemological framework. Western scholars see human rights violations because they are wearing "Western-centric" tinted glasses; if they take off the glasses and look through the perspective of a "civilizational state," they would see the necessary governance of "de-radicalization."

This type of logical closed loop creates a perfect defensive shield. Inside this shield, no facts can penetrate the thick walls of "civilization." However, such logic has a fatal side effect: it turns the "feelings of the Chinese people" into a trigger for trade sanctions, yet it uniquely fails to represent the true joys and sorrows of the Chinese people.

Blocking Feedback

Another consequence of the "civilizational state" immune mechanism is the institutionalization of information cocoons.

The Great Firewall is usually seen as a barrier to block external information, filtering platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter (X), and YouTube. But from the perspective of cybernetics, the inward function of the Great Firewall is far more destructive than its outward function: it blocks the system's ability to obtain a true mirror image of itself. A civilization that needs a firewall for protection and a confidence that needs censorship for maintenance are, by definition, contradictory.

The Shanghai lockdown from March to June 2022 provides a painful case study. During these three months, 25 million residents were restricted in their movement, and secondary disasters occurred frequently. However, in the information flow of the decision-making level, cries for help and protests from the grassroots were quickly identified by the immune system as "color revolution plots by hostile forces" or "smearing the overall situation of Dynamic Zero-COVID." When the voices of Shanghai citizens were filtered as noise, or even characterized as part of the virus, the decision-making center lost the most critical basis for error correction.

This is precisely the late-stage symptom of an autoimmune disease: the system cannot distinguish between harmful aggressive information and beneficial pain feedback.

Pain is a necessary mechanism for an organism's survival; it warns the body that it is being harmed. When the narrative of the "civilizational state" demands the blocking of all negative information to maintain "institutional confidence," this narrative is actually severing the pain nerves. The suspension of youth unemployment data in 2023 was not an isolated incident, but an inevitable extension of this logic. When the data becomes unsightly, the immune system's response is not to treat the lesion, but to sever the optic nerve—as long as the data is not seen, the problem does not exist.

This break in the feedback loop leads to a comprehensive decline in the quality of decision-making. Policy formulation relies increasingly on filtered reports rather than raw but true reality.

The Cost of Immunity

If the timeline is extended, the long-term consequence of "civilizational immunology" will be the progressive degradation of decision-making capabilities.

The more successfully the "civilizational state" narrative shields against external criticism at the ideological level, the more sluggish the state machinery becomes in responding to actual crises. It is not that the leadership lacks wisdom; the problem is that the quality of information input into the decision-making model has been severely contaminated by the immune system.

This brings to mind the predicament of the late Soviet Union. Stephen Kotkin, in his analysis of the Soviet collapse, pointed out that the problem was not a lack of data, but that the entire system was producing and consuming false data until the radioactive dust of Chernobyl made it impossible for Geiger counters to lie anymore.

China's current immune mechanism is creating similar blind spots. When "civilizational heritage" becomes the universal key to explaining the economic slowdown, economists lose the space to discuss reform; when "national security" becomes the reason to censor all data, sociologists lose the ability to warn of social fractures.

Returning to the missing unemployment figure at the beginning. That number did not disappear because its publication was suspended; it merely went underground, becoming an unmonitored undercurrent. A healthy civilization does not need to prove its superiority by covering its ears, and a powerful state does not need to demonstrate strength by eliminating the sensation of pain. When the immune system begins to attack the host's eyes and ears, what is being protected is no longer a civilization, but a slow suffocation.

The Silence of 1.4 Billion People

Late on the night of November 26, 2022, on Urumqi Middle Road in Shanghai, hundreds of young people stood in the biting wind, holding up sheets of white paper. There were no slogans on the paper, no cries, and no ink. In an environment where any written word could become evidence of a crime, writing nothing became the only form of protest. This was one of the largest street actions in China since 1989. The protesters did not quote Locke or Montesquieu, nor did they wave foreign flags; they simply held up a sheet of A4 paper. In his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, economist Albert Hirschman categorized political behavior into three types: exit, voice, and loyalty. The White Paper Movement was a rare instance of "voice," whereas in this country, the more common form of political expression is silence.

A Civilization Spoken For

The most important source of legitimacy for proponents of the "civilizational state" theory is the claim that they represent a unique Chinese civilizational identity that has endured for thousands of years. In his 2012 book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State (Zhang Weiwei), Zhang Weiwei proposed that China's current system is a "choice" made by the people based on civilizational traditions. This narrative forms a closed loop: because China is a civilizational state, Chinese people naturally prefer collectivism and hierarchical order; because Chinese people have this preference, the current system possesses a deep foundation of public support.

A key link is missing from this logical chain: a verification mechanism.

When a certain institutional arrangement is described as a "civilizational necessity," such a claim effectively strips individual members of that civilization of their right to interpretation. Zhang Weiwei claims that the Chinese people "chose" the current model, yet this "choice" occurs in a closed environment without alternative options. When there is only one brand of milk in the supermarket, the act of buying it cannot be called "consumer choice"; it can only be called a "survival necessity."

The White Paper Movement in November 2022 provided a rare window of observation for the outside world. When young people took to the streets at the risk of arrest, they were challenging not only the Zero-COVID policy but also the assumption of "submission" within the "civilizational state" narrative. If Chinese people truly valued social order over individual freedom, as Martin Jacques suggested in his 2009 book When China Rules the World, then such an order would not need to rely on high-pressure tactics to be maintained.

Silence is often interpreted by rulers as acquiescence and by observers as a cultural trait. In a high-pressure environment, silence is merely a survival strategy. Beautifying this forced survival strategy as "unique civilizational values" is the laziest aspect of the "civilizational state" theory.

A Company Without a Shareholders' Meeting

If the "civilizational state" is viewed as a mega-corporation, its governance structure exhibits typical characteristics of "insider control."

In modern corporate governance, it is common for management to claim they represent the interests of shareholders. To prevent management from harming shareholders, systems are designed with independent directors, shareholder meeting votes, and transparent financial audits. More importantly, the market allows for short-selling mechanisms to cast votes of no confidence against management errors. The theoretical construction of the "civilizational state" is, in effect, management claiming to represent the will of all shareholders (the people) while simultaneously canceling shareholders' meetings, sealing the financial ledgers, and arresting any analysts who attempt to short the stock.

The problem with this company lies not only in "insider control" but also in widespread "related-party transactions." In normal corporate governance, related-party transactions require approval from independent directors and information disclosure because conflicts of interest are inevitable when decision-makers are also interested parties. The local government debt crisis is a classic case. As of the end of 2023, China's explicit local government debt exceeded 40 trillion yuan (the International Monetary Fund estimates the total including implicit debt to be approximately 100 trillion yuan). In the process of forming this debt, local officials were simultaneously the decision-makers for borrowing, the approvers of infrastructure projects, and the beneficiaries of political performance evaluations—decision-making, execution, and benefit were unified. When debt risks are finally exposed, it is the "shareholders" who bear the cost: residents face unfinished buildings, shrinking pensions, and cutbacks in public services. The case of Dushan County in Guizhou is particularly striking: a poverty-stricken county with an annual fiscal revenue of less than 1 billion yuan accumulated 40 billion yuan in debt to build the "World's Number One Water Bureau Building" and a hollow university city. The decision-makers have long since been promoted or retired, leaving the debt to be repaid by the future tax revenues of the county's residents.

In a normal company, management at least needs to maintain the stock price to appease shareholders. The stock price is a real-time, unfalsifiable feedback signal. For the "civilizational state" corporation, the "stock price" is the economic growth rate. Over the past forty years, high-speed growth has served as a substitute for shareholders' meetings; as long as the stock price continued to rise, shareholders would not question the details of corporate governance. When growth slows, the role of the "civilizational state" narrative becomes apparent: it is the rhetoric used by management in the annual report to explain why a falling stock price doesn't matter. "China's development cannot be measured by GDP; it must be understood through the scale of five thousand years of civilization"—translated into corporate language, this means "please ignore the stock price; please look at management's vision statement."

Without independent third-party audits and the free flow of information, the so-called "will of the people" becomes an unverifiable bad debt. Management can arbitrarily claim a 90% support rate, just as a company without auditors can arbitrarily release financial reports. Under such a structure, 1.4 billion people are not shareholders, nor even customers, but fixed assets recorded on the balance sheet, remaining silent and subject to the management's disposal.

The Three-Layer Structure of Silence

The reason the White Paper Movement was so shocking is that "voice" is extremely rare in this system. The more common state is silence. Yet silence is not monolithic; it contains at least three distinct layers.

The first layer is forced silence, which is the easiest to identify: censorship deleting posts, surveillance suppressing assemblies, and legal punishment for dissent. According to Freedom House's 2024 Freedom on the Net report, China was ranked as the country with the lowest internet freedom in the world for the ninth consecutive year. The logic of silence here is simple: the cost of speaking is higher than the cost of silence, so rational individuals choose to keep quiet.

The second layer is strategic silence. Even without an obvious threat of censorship, many individuals still choose not to speak because experience has proven that speaking is ineffective. The "mortgage strike" protests by owners of unfinished buildings across the country in 2022 are a microcosm of this: owners collectively issued statements, sought help on social media, and petitioned local governments, only to have their statements deleted, their social media accounts throttled, and the petitioners summoned for talks. When feedback channels fail over the long term, silence transforms from being forced into a strategy. When the result of speaking or not speaking is the same, not speaking is less effort.

The third layer is internalized silence, which is the most far-reaching part of the "civilizational state" narrative. It does not suppress the voice but rather dissolves the capacity to produce it. When "collectivism" is defined as a civilizational gene and "individual rights" are defined as Western imports, the spectrum of political imagination is truncated in advance. A person who has never been told that alternative options exist will not develop a desire to choose. Such silence does not need censorship to be maintained, because the thoughts that would need to be censored never arise. Vaclav Havel described a similar mechanism in his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless: the deepest control of a totalitarian system is not punishing opponents, but making people lose the ability to imagine "another life." The ultimate function of the "civilizational state" narrative is to disguise the first layer of silence (coercion) as the third layer (volition), and then label that third layer as "civilizational identity."

Cracks in the Silence

The greatest internal challenge facing the "civilizational state" narrative comes from generational rupture.

Gen Z is the generation that grew up within the Great Firewall. Theoretically, this generation should be the most loyal believers in this narrative. However, reality points in another direction. In the first half of 2023, the unemployment rate for youth aged 16-24 in China reached 21.3% (the National Bureau of Statistics subsequently suspended the release of this data). In 2024, the number of applicants for the national postgraduate entrance examination dropped from 4.74 million the previous year to 4.38 million, the first decline since 2015. "Full-time children" became a trending topic on social media, as highly educated young people returned to their parents' homes to exchange housework for living expenses, giving up on attempts to enter the labor market.

The data above describes not rebellion, but retreat. Using Hirschman's framework: the White Paper Movement was "voice," while the more common choice for this generation is "exit." Voice is costly, risky, and sporadic; exit is low-cost, safe, and everyday. The White Paper Movement was suppressed in less than a week, but exit as a collective behavioral pattern has permeated the daily decisions of an entire generation.

The forms of exit can be precisely quantified. In 2023, the number of marriage registrations in China dropped to 7.68 million couples, a 43% decrease from 13.47 million in 2013. In the same year, the number of births was 9.02 million, halved from 17.86 million in 2016. The growth rate of per capita consumption expenditure fell from 8.6% in 2019 to 5.2% in 2023 (National Bureau of Statistics). These are not emotional indicators, but what economists call "revealed preference." When people vote with their hard-earned money and life choices, the results stand in stark contrast to the 90% satisfaction rates in official polls.

Not marrying, not having children, not buying property, not working overtime—every "not" is a silent ballot. Street protests can be suppressed, but no one can force a person who has decided to "lie flat" to stand up and run.

The "exit" of this generation is not political resistance, but economic rationality. While grand narratives promise the "Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation," specific individuals face unemployment upon graduation, the chasm between housing prices and income, the 996 work schedule, and a narrowing path for upward mobility. When the grand blueprint fails to deliver on specific promises, rational individuals choose to minimize their input. This collection of choices is more corrosive than any organized opposition movement.

While the likes of Zhang Weiwei talk about the "rise of a millennial civilization" within grand narratives, young people have written their own evaluation reports through marriage and birth rates. Returning to that cold night in 2022, that sheet of white paper represented not only current anger but also foreshadowed a more enduring silence—not forced, not strategic, but the indifference of an entire generation that has lost interest in grand narratives. The "1.4 billion" who were simplified, represented, and quantified are redefining the meaning of silence by refusing to participate.

A Performance Without an Audience

On March 15, 2023, in Beijing, at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-Level Meeting, Xi Jinping proposed the "Global Civilization Initiative" (GCI), elevating the concept of the "Civilizational State" from the academic level to the highest tier of diplomatic strategy. That same week, the Pew Research Center released a survey covering 24 countries: the median percentage of respondents holding a negative view of China reached 67%.

A grand initiative regarding "civilization" is facing a world that increasingly distrusts this very "civilization."

The Scissors Gap

The golden age of the "Civilizational State" narrative was built on an implicit premise: economic performance. In 2011, when Zhang Weiwei gave his TED talk in Geneva, China's GDP growth rate was 9.5%. This figure itself was the most powerful argument, requiring no explanation of civilizational continuity or tracing of the tradition of "Great Unification" (Da Yitong); the growth rate substituted for all theoretical work.

By 2024, this implicit premise no longer exists.

The official GDP growth target has dropped to "around 5%," yet nominal growth is lower than real growth—a textbook signal of overcapacity as the economy sells more goods at lower prices. In June 2023, after the surveyed urban unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24 touched a historic high of 21.3%, the National Bureau of Statistics announced in August that it would suspend the release of this data. When publication resumed in January 2024, the statistical scope had been adjusted to exclude students, and the figure under the new scope dropped to 14.9%.

The disappearance and redefinition of a set of data reveal the gap between narrative and reality more precisely than any critical essay.

This gap can be quantified as a "narrative-reality gap" (scissors gap). When economic performance supported the narrative, the logic of the "Civilizational State" argument was: China's unique civilizational tradition gave birth to a unique governance model, the superiority of which is proven by economic achievements. This is a falsifiable proposition, and the conditions for falsification are gradually maturing.

Facing this scissors gap, producers of the narrative have two choices: revise the theory or shift the basis of the argument.

The latter was chosen. From 2022 onward, the focus of official discourse shifted from the "economic miracle" to "security" and "civilizational confidence." The implications of this shift go far beyond the surface: when a theory moves from "explaining success" to "explaining why failure doesn't matter," the theory itself has degenerated from an analytical tool into a psychological defense mechanism. A theory that explains success can be tested, while a theory that explains why "failure doesn't matter" can only be believed. This marks a qualitative change rather than a quantitative adjustment.

Self-Looping Academic Production

The production of the narrative does not stop due to the loss of international audiences. On the contrary, a closed, self-looping system is accelerating its operation.

In 2021, more than 20 major projects related to "Chinese Civilization" were approved by the National Social Science Fund, with individual funding ranging from 600,000 to 800,000 RMB. The output path for these projects is highly standardized: project approval → papers → publication in core journals → media citations → adoption in official documents → serving as "theoretical innovation achievements" to support the next round of project approvals.

The structure of this cycle bears similarities to a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme uses funds from new investors to pay returns to old investors, creating an illusion of long-term surplus; academic self-looping uses conclusions from new papers to cite old papers, creating an illusion of knowledge growth. The commonality between the two is that every transaction within the system appears reasonable, but the system as a whole acquires no new information input from the outside world.

The specific operational mechanism can be tracked. A scholar argues in a Social Science Fund project that the "Tianxia system is China's unique contribution to the international order," and the paper is published in Social Sciences in China; the theory section of the People's Daily cites the paper as "academic consensus"; the Foreign Ministry spokesperson cites "academic research shows" at a press conference; the following year's Social Science Fund guidelines list "the contemporary value of the Tianxia system" as a key direction. Each layer of citation dilutes the gold content of the original concept while inflating its political face value.

The outputs of such self-looping are increasingly sophisticated in form. Scholars extract governance concepts from the Book of Documents (Shangshu) and the Rites of Zhou (Zhouli), repackaging them in modern political science terminology to produce papers such as "The Chinese Civilizational Genes of Consultative Democracy" and "The Confucian Origins of Meritocratic Politics." These papers are methodologically impeccable, with standardized citations, detailed footnotes, and peer-review approval, yet they lack one thing: an interface with observable reality. No paper attempts to explain why, if "consultation" is a gene of Chinese civilization, the 2018 constitutional amendment vote allowed only 0.2% dissent.

A Ponzi scheme collapses not because it is exposed from the outside, but because the inflow of new capital cannot keep up with the promised rate of return. The crisis of academic self-looping will not come from external criticism (criticism from the international academic community has long been isolated by firewalls and language barriers), but from within: when more and more young scholars discover that the end products of this production line have no practical use other than for professional title evaluations, the system's human resource supply will begin to wither.

The Failure of All Labels

Stripping away the layers of rhetoric, the ultimate problem with the "Civilizational State" narrative is not that it is wrong, but that it is redundant.

A political entity with a population of 1.4 billion, a complete industrial system, a nuclear arsenal, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council is unique as a physical fact; it does not require cultural justification. India possesses an equally ancient civilizational tradition and a massive population, yet chose federalism and electoral democracy; Japan inherited the legacy of the Confucian cultural sphere, yet established a constitutional monarchy. "Civilization" has never determined the form of a political system.

Why, then, is there such an obsession with this label?

Because the true function of the "Civilizational State" is not to explain China to the outside world, but to explain internally why political reform is unnecessary. This narrative naturalizes and historicizes current political arrangements, implying that any check on power is a betrayal of "civilizational tradition." The narrative tells the audience: the current situation is not due to policy choices, but because we are within a unique civilizational logic that stands above individual rights, above short-term economic fluctuations, and above any external standards.

Deconstructing this narrative does not mean accepting Western alternative frameworks. It must be admitted that the labels provided by Western political science are equally problematic. In 2003, Andrew Nathan proposed "authoritarian resilience" in the Journal of Democracy, predicting that the Communist Party of China would maintain its rule through institutionalized reforms. Twenty years later, the direction of institutionalization has been exactly the opposite: term limits were abolished, and collective leadership was replaced by personal centralization. Nathan's framework explained why the system did not collapse, but it could not explain why the system slid toward the opposite of its prediction.

In 2007, Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower depicted a China that takes risks externally due to internal insecurity. This framework captured a certain real dynamic, but it simplified a political entity of 1.4 billion people into a psychological case study, as if a country could be "fragile" or "confident" like an individual.

"Civilizational State," "authoritarian resilience," "fragile superpower"—each label illuminates one corner while obscuring the rest of the room. A more intellectually honest approach is not to find a better label, but to admit that no existing framework can fully explain how a political entity of 1.4 billion people operates within its internal contradictions. The admission of ignorance is closer to the truth than any sophisticated theory.

Advocates of the "Civilizational State" will not accept such an admission, because admitting ignorance means giving up the narrative's function of serving power. Western critics are equally unwilling to accept it, because admitting ignorance means giving up the intellectual authority of prediction and policy recommendation. Both sides need a label, because labels are the prerequisite for control, whether political or intellectual.

If a more honest starting point exists, it lies not in the dimension of "civilization," but in the dimension of "institutional capacity." The quality of governance in a political entity depends on whether it can establish credible property rights protection, independent judicial adjudication, effective fiscal redistribution, and institutionalized constraints on power. These capacities have nothing to do with a five-thousand-year civilizational tradition and everything to do with fifty years of institutional building. Starting from institutional capacity rather than civilizational attributes requires neither seeking historical justification for current arrangements nor applying external templates; it only requires answering one testable question: how does this set of institutions perform in solving specific problems?

The Echo of 2,958 Votes

March 11, 2018, Great Hall of the People: 2,958 votes in favor, 2 votes against, 3 abstentions, 1 invalid vote.

That ballot box is the most concise rebuttal to the "Civilizational State" narrative. If legitimacy truly came from a five-thousand-year civilizational tradition, the constitutional amendment would not have required a voting procedure. If the "Mandate of Heaven" and "the will of the people" were already automatically granted to the ruling power through civilizational continuity, the raising of hands by 2,964 delegates would be a redundant ritual. The existence of the ballot box acknowledges a fact that the narrative will never admit: power requires confirmation by the modern state apparatus; civilizational tradition cannot automatically translate into governance authorization.

Civilization does not need to count votes; only the state does.

This judgment was an observation in the first chapter. After nine chapters of testing—from Lucian Pye's diagnosis to Martin Jacques's inversion, from the editing of five thousand years to the counter-evidence of India, from the bills of the Tianxia order to the foundry of discourse power, from the civilizational immune system to the silence of 1.4 billion people—this judgment is now a conclusion.

The entire effort of the "Civilizational State" narrative is an attempt to let "civilization" replace the "state" as the source of legitimacy. The materials of these nine chapters prove that this substitution has never succeeded: every time "civilization" is pushed to the front, the machinery of the "state" is working behind the scenes to do the real work. The voting continues, the censorship continues, stability maintenance spending grows, and the firewall upgrades. Civilization is the curtain; the state is the stage.

The ultimate tragedy of this performance is not the loss of the audience. The departure of international audiences, the 67% negative rating in Pew polls, and the critical digestion by the academic community are all external feedbacks, and external feedback can be blocked. The real tragedy is that when a narrative runs long enough, the boundary between producer and consumer begins to blur. Officials cite scholars' papers, scholars cite officials' speeches, and the media cites both as "consensus." When this cycle spins fast enough, no one remembers what the original input was.

The performers have ultimately deceived themselves. In the empty theater, there is no applause, no booing, only echoes—narratives citing narratives, concepts nested within concepts, a sophisticated closed system in perpetual motion within its own logic. And outside the theater, the real lives of 1.4 billion people continue to unfold in the cracks between "civilization" and the "state," requiring no labels and waiting for no naming.