The Story of China: A portrait of a civilisation and its people

by Michael Wood

The memo was condemned by one Chinese commentator as a ‘stunning retrogression in ideology’.

Politically, therefore, the absolute power of the Communist Party has been reaffirmed. China today, we might say, is a hybrid Confucian–Leninist state with a market economy enriching its middle-class support.

It is an apparatus of control of a size and complexity unmatched in human history, but one that has so far been accepted by the mass of the people in exchange for stability, prosperity, good public services, leisure and jobs.

The new dynasty founded by Mao, if we may call it that, for now seems relatively secure.

The next stage of national revival will have three main planks; the continued pre-eminence of the party, the sustaining of economic growth, and a major push to assert the historic greatness of Chinese civilisation and identity.

So far, the general public have accepted that imbalance in exchange for better governance, management, public services and infrastructure, and less corruption. But the party must continue to deliver these in order to be seen as legitimate.

China spends more money on internal security than on external defence, and certain minorities will be repressed even more harshly: whether Xinjiang Uighurs, Tibetans, or religions deemed to be ‘non-Chinese’.

Such enormous numbers will change Chinese attitudes more than previous generations could ever have imagined.

Hence President Xi’s commitment to the Davos climate accords, and his stated ambition for China to develop an ‘ecological civilisation’, is serious. Here too the party believes that only a centrist one-party state can mobilise the resources to tackle the massive and rapid changes needed in the next thirty years to save the environment.

If the planet is to be saved from climate breakdown, then China will have to be in the forefront.

Over the past three centuries, the era of Western colonialism and imperialism has wrought both dynamic change and immense destruction across the world, rubbing out cultures that have often taken millennia to evolve. The great traditional civilisations of China, India and Islam, whose peoples make up the bulk of the population of the planet, have responded in different ways to the traumatic impact of colonialism and the challenges of modernity, with its new technologies and new ways of seeing.

By then, no doubt, the path of the next cycle of history will have become clear – for China, as indeed for the entire world.

Despite current pessimistic views of the short term, then, it would be foolish in the long term to underestimate the Chinese people. Their traditional civilisation, ‘this culture of ours,’ was above all else in its ideals a moral order. And as Confucius said long ago, an order that is not moral will, in the end, lose the allegiance on which all effective governance depends.