Peter C Perdue writes:

If you think that the People’s Republic of China is still a communist country, you are in for a shock. It is, of course, a single-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. But what is the role of the CCP today? The Party celebrates billionaires, runs a capitalist economy, and depends heavily on global trade and investment. This is far from what Mao Zedong imagined when he took power in 1949. Then, the CCP claimed to lead the proletarian classes toward socialism and eventually communism. But what now justifies Communist Party rule? In the past decade or so, the CCP has defined its role in a way that would make Mao spin in his grave. China’s president Xi Jinping has endorsed the ‘great unity’ thesis, which interprets several millennia of Chinese history as the harmonious amalgamation of diverse peoples into a single culture and state, dedicated to bringing peace to ‘all under heaven’. Inconvenient concepts like the proletariat, feudalism and modes of production have vanished. Community, continuity and Confucius now prevail over class struggle, revolution and Karl Marx.

In an address to a symposium on culture on 2 June 2023, Xi Jinping declared that the ‘outstanding unity’ of Chinese culture has persisted for 5,000 years. This unity originated with the formation of the Huaxia cultural community in the 3rd millennium BCE. In Xi’s view: ‘Political unity is the prerequisite and foundation for cultural unity.’ The Qin and Han dynasties built upon this community and developed it continuously through later dynasties and into the 20th century. China consists of multiple ethnic groups whose diversity must be respected, but all have melted into a single nation bound by spiritual ties. ‘Territorial integrity, national stability, ethnic solidarity, and the continuation of civilisation’ become a single unit, ‘concentrated and centralised’ under a single state.

Liu Yuejin, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, responded to the statement by an interviewer from the China News Service that China was the ‘only civilisation in the form of a state that has never been interrupted’ by agreeing that for ‘more than 5,000 years … all ethnic groups in China have … jointly forged the Community for the Chinese nation.’ He added that every person who is part of the ‘big Chinese family’ must embrace territorial integrity as the basic symbol of national dignity. Great unity preserves a ‘close-knit community’ that embraces a ‘harmonious and syncretic culture’. He contrasted this culture of harmony with a Western culture that ‘takes interests as the core value, emphasises man’s natural right and law of competition [sic], [and] advocates individualism.’

For these officials and scholars, the great unity thesis provides not only an explanation of Chinese history, but also a model for geopolitical harmony. [Continue reading…]