On November 6, 2024, the People’s Daily front page featured an article headlined: “Continuing the Lineage of Chinese Culture Through the Two Creates” (在“两创”中赓续中华文脉). According to the piece’s byline, it was written by Ren Ping (任平), a homophonic pen name for “People’s Daily Commentary” (人民评论), assigned to important articles meant to represent the views of CCP’s Central Committee.

According to “Ren Ping,” the “Two Creates” (两创), which refers, respectively, to “creative transformation and innovative (creative) development” (创造性转化和创新性发展), is closely linked to two other Xi-isms: “soul and root” (魂和根) and the Two Combines (两个结合), both of which have to do with the melding of Sinicized Marxism and Chinese traditional culture. The “Two Creates” is essentially the means by which — according to the CCP’s reconceptualizing under of Chinese history since the early 2010s — China’s culture has endured for thousands of years. It is through these “Two Creates” that traditional Chinese culture is still around to serve as the “soul and root” and realize the Two Combines in the New Era ushered in by Xi Jinping.

Despite only recently emerging as a set tifa (提法), or official framing device, promoted more widely in the official state media, the phrase appears to originate from a speech Xi Jinping gave at a collective study session of China’s Politburo back in February 2014. At the time, Xi stressed the importance of innovating traditional culture to integrate it more closely with social values — a prerogative of the Two Combines. The concept was stressed again by Xi on May 4, 2018, as he delivered a speech to celebrate the 200th birthday of Karl Marx the next day, and from that point increased in use in the state-run media.

Since that time, the People’s Daily has emphasized that transformation and innovation are themselves Chinese traditions. The continuity of Chinese culture, they argue, is not a sign of its stagnation but the fruits of ongoing adaptation that has enabled China’s culture to survive for so long. The idea that Chinese culture needs to change, therefore, is in fact a form of continuity — traditions have to change, but change is traditional. This article came in the wake of a Politburo study session in late October 2024 on how to “build a culturally strong country” (文化強國). Xi stressed the need to blend Chinese culture with both Marxism and the latest tech to make it relevant in this day and age.