Cultural plurality is the playing field of international affairs. Ignoring this fact runs the risk of continuous communication failure. Concepts and the terms used to express them have connotations that are rooted in their native context. Often there are cultural equivalents in other cultural contexts that share these connotations. In that case, there is less risk of communication failure. But often enough, the equivalents do not exist, or the connotations do not coincide. In this case, the risk of communication failure is greater.
In the context of China’s “taking center stage” in international affairs, Chinese President Xi Jinping has launched a series of policy initiatives, beginning with a Global Security Initiative (全球安全倡议 Quanqiu anquan changyi) in 2021, followed in 2022 by a Global Development Initiative (全球发展倡议 Quanqiu fazhan changyi), and a Global Civilization Initiative (全球文明倡议 Quanqiu wenming changyi) in 2023. Xi defines the development initiative as a strategy for achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals by 2030, prioritizing worldwide economic development through a “people-centered” approach that guarantees mutual benefits for all, based on results (not on ideology), with the Belt and Road Initiative as a concrete example. The security initiative stresses cooperation, respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, honoring the UN Charter, respecting every country’s security concerns, and resolving both traditional and non-traditional security disputes through dialogue. The civilization initiative promotes respect for civilizational diversity, people-to-people exchanges, and respecting diverse paths toward modernization.
Opinion makers in the Western press have tended to dismiss these initiatives, Foreign Affairs seeing the security initiative as a disguised attempt to alter and dominate the world order, while The Economist sees the development initiative as an economic threat and the civilizational initiative as an attack on Western values. These hostile analyses run the risk of misunderstanding and/or misconstruing the connotations of the original terminology in Chinese. It was typical during the Cold War for hostile Western analyses to subtly or subliminally alienate their readership from Soviet terminology by spinning or skewing Soviet keywords through apparently innocent translations or through non-translations. The head of government was a “Premier”, because “Prime Minister” might imply systemic similarities (even today, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have “First Ministers”, not “Prime Ministers”). Perestroika and glasnost were never translated, even though they referred to such common Western liberal democratic concepts as “reform” and “transparency”. The term “civilization” may be a similar case when it comes to the rhetoric of Chinese government policy.
Xi Jinping is calling for “a new form of human civilization” (人类文明新形态 renlei wenming xin xingtai.) It is important to understand what these terms mean in their original context if we want to avoid misreading them in a cross-cultural context. In 2016, he spoke of a transformation of civilizational forms” (文明形态变革 wenming xingtai biange), because “every leap forward in human society is accompanied by a philosophical change” (人类社会每次跃进都离不开哲学的变革 renlei shehui mei ci yuejin dou li bu kai zhexue de biange.) There are echoes here of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (大跃进 dayuejin), on the one hand, and of Karl Marx’s Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an sie zu verändern, “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it,” on the other. There is a certain ambiguity about whether, in classical Marxist terms, a change in the material base leads to a change in philosophy, or whether, in classical Maoist terms, a voluntarist reform in thinking could change the material base. Either way, Xi thinks Chinese culture could be the driver of such change based on its inherent 和合 hehe nature, saying, “The first ‘he’ indicates harmony, peace, and balance. The second ‘he’ indicates convergence, unity, and cooperation.”
His explanation lays bare a fundamental aspect of the Chinese language and the way it expresses thought. The same Chinese term could be a noun or a verb, an adjective or an adverb, depending on the context. As a result, keywords, the words encoding the concepts that structure a society and its value system, combine both the concept and its practice. This results in a form of “resonance” (感應 ganyin), wherein the values encoded in a concept reverberate throughout society in the form of practice. In classical Chinese thinking on the nature and function of language, this leads to “form and name” (形名 xingming), a kind of categorical imperative in which a proper understanding of the term leads automatically to acting accordingly. This was reinforced in public life by a system of rewards and punishments. A “general” wins battles. Therefore, a general should win battles. If so, he would be rewarded for being true to his name or title. If not, he would be punished for assuming his name or title under false pretenses. Similarly, a Minister of Public Works, responsible for maintaining the dikes and avoiding floods, would be rewarded if no floods occurred but punished if they did.
In Xi’s formulation of hehe, the proper understanding of 和 he “harmony, peace and balance” requires 合 he, “convergence, unity and cooperation.” A corollary meaning would be that the lack of “convergence, unity and cooperation” reveals a failure to understand “harmony, peace and balance,” a lack of Western cooperation indicates Western incomprehension of peace. This gives us a context for understanding what Xi means by “a new form of human civilization.” A failure to understand his terms in their own context could lead to a communication failure that risks misunderstanding their implications in international affairs.
I witnessed this recently in a meeting with a high-level Chinese delegation in a think tank in Spain. The delegation spoke Chinese, the hosts spoke Spanish, and an official Chinese interpreter translated both ways. When it came to the keyword 文明 wenming, the interpreter hesitated between “civilización” (civilization) and “civismo” (civility, civics). His hesitation revealed the cross-cultural dilemma of communicating not just the semantics of keywords, but also their pragmatics, their being put into practice. An example would be “Xi Jinping Ecological Civilization Thought” (习近平生态文明思想 Xi Jinping shengtai wenming sixiang.) If we translate shengtai wenming as “ecological civilization,” it has very little meaning beyond that of an abstract concept, but if we translate it as “ecological civics,” it means putting ecology into practice.
Xi’s shengtai wenming is the latest in a series of keywords that structure both the ideology and the policies of the Communist Party of China, following on the heels of Deng Xiaoping’s “material/economic civilization/civics” (物质文明 wuzhi wenming) and “spiritual/ideological civilization/civics” (精神文明 jingshen wenming), Jiang Zemin’s “political civilization/civics” (政治文明 zhengzhi wenming) and Hu Jintao’s “social civilization/civics” (社会文明 shehui wenming.)
Deng’s “material civics” referred to macroeconomic policy, to “reform and opening up” (改革开放 gaige kaifang,) where “reform” meant liberalizing the economy and “opening up” meant abandoning autarky in order to allow Foreign Direct Investment. The bare literal translation of these terms makes them abstract and opaque for the foreign reader while their connotations are clear for the Chinese reader. Deng’s “spiritual civics” was a response to the disqualification of radical Maoism. Mao had declared Confucius to be China’s “Number One Enemy” and Confucianism to be a reactionary ideology, doing everything possible to get people to abandon it. With Mao and Confucius both disqualified there was an ideological and values vacuum that needed filling, a process the Party is still trying to guide. Jiang’s “political civics” meant the co-option of the private sector by liberalizing property rights and recruiting private business representatives into the Party. Hu’s “social civics” underlined the need for a “harmonious society” (和谐社会 hexie shehui), the need for social justice and a better redistribution of the wealth that resulted from Deng’s and Jiang’s reforms.
Xi’s “new form of human civics” is transformational in intent. It recognizes that in order to carry out the Global security initiative and the Global development initiative, a new or reformed set of values must be integrated into international affairs because the world order defined by the Westphalian nation-state and Bretton Woods international institutions that want to maintain a status quo favorable to the West is inimical to the interests of the rest, and that this change must be pacific, consensual. The EU and the US are opposed and refer to this as “systemic rivalry,” but China’s status in a Global South that has not been able to benefit fully from the existing order is enhanced by these initiatives, even while recognizing that China itself benefits greatly from the changes it proposes to bring about. This “new form of human civics” refers to long-range goals to be achieved through respect for civilization diversity, people-to-people exchanges, and exploring diverse paths toward modernization.
To understand why Xi Jinping might think that this initiative could become effective, we need to understand that from the very beginning of Chinese political thought there has always been a rivalry between two concepts of political power: “military force” (武 wu) and “cultural power” (文 wen). The coercive power of military force is obvious. The power of culture might best be understood with reference to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” or the practice of technocracy. Terms in Classical Chinese are very polysemic and wen meant both “culture” and “writing” (the means of encoding culture). Modern Chinese differentiates these terms more precisely as “culture/cultural action” (文化 wenhua), “civilization/civics” (文明 wenming) and “literature” (文学 wenxue). “Culture” and “civilization/civics” are differentiated and the choice of “civilization/civics” means that it refers to political action, not just to values.
In the nineteenth century, as a result of the colonizing strategies of Western imperialist powers, Japanese reformers translated “civilization” into Kanji as bunmei (文明). Since Kanji are the same as Chinese written characters although pronounced differently, Chinese reformers copied the translation as wenming (文明). The connotations were different from those of the existing Chinese term “culture” (文化 wenhua), however. Every people or nation in the Chinese empire had its own native “culture,” but the enterprise of the empire was to encourage everyone to assume China’s superior “civilization.” Thus, the Western concept of “civilization,” once introduced into China, echoed traditional Chinese concepts of a transformational hierarchy of a plurality of cultures subordinated to the over-arching Chinese civilization. On the one hand, the imposition of a foreign civilization threatened the very nature of China; on the other, transformation or change came about through integrating everyone else’s culture into one’s own civilization. With these connotations in mind, the connotations of Xi’s declarations become clearer, but a policy of bare literal translation of such terms, without contextualization, and perhaps with a deliberate attempt at obfuscating them, impedes any meaningful dialogue or mutual understanding, in either direction.
Cultural plurality works both ways. In a closed-door session I participated in a few years ago involving experts from a Chinese Communist Party Central Committee think tank and European experts. The working language was English with translation, but all the participants knew Chinese. At one point an internal debate broke out among Chinese experts about the term “meritocracy” that the Europeans were using in English. Several different Chinese terms were possible translations of the English term, all with different connotations, and none exactly equivalent to the English connotations. It became clear that we needed to step back and clarify in a consensual and shared way exactly what each part meant to say for each side. In practice, this requires the development of new terminology that breaks down the schemas and biases that each side brings to the debate. To truly discuss these matters in a culturally plural context, we need to look for common ground. If both sides understood each other’s underlying political philosophies and their ramifications, perhaps that could facilitate a constructive debate on how international affairs should be ordered.
Cover photo: The books written by Chinese President Xi Jinping are shown at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on June 25, 2021. (Photo by Koki Kataoka / The Yomiuri Shimbun via AFP.)
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