The idea of the “civilizational state,” which in Chinese can be alternatively translated as “civilization-type state” (文明型国家) or “civilizational entity-state” (文明体国家), first emerged in a 1990 essay for Foreign Affairs by American political scientist Lucian Pye. Seeking to explain why the Western world was so consistently disappointed by China, Pye famously wrote that “China is a civilization pretending to be a state,” while we, the West, he argued, fail to adequately engage with China due to our understanding of it as a nation-state. The British academic and political commentator Martin Jacques took the notion a step further when he referred to China as a “civilization-state” in his 2009 book When China Rules the World, arguing that China’s long history and deep connection to the past is incomparable to that of any other society.

While the notion of the “civilizational state” is absent from official party discourse, it has been promoted strongly by several thinkers with close ties to the leadership over the past decade. One of the main proponents of the term has been Zhang Weiwei (张维为), director of Fudan University’s Institute for China Studies, who in May 2021 led a collective study session of the Politburo on the country’s external communication and who has urged the building of a distinct “Chinese discourse and narrative system.”  

Zhang’s interest in the civilizational frame dates back at least to his 2011 book The China Wave: The Rise of a Civilizational State, in which he sought to explain what makes China distinct from other states. The modern Chinese “civilizational state,” he wrote, integrates the strengths of both “civilization states” (文明国家) and “nation states,” (民族国家) and is characterized by the “four supers” (四超) and the “four uniques” (四特) — referring in the first case to China’s massive population, vast territory, long historical tradition, and deep cultural wisdom; and in the second to its unique language, politics, society, and economics.

All of China’s 56 peoples, Zhang argued, had remained unified under “harmony in diversity” (和而不同) rather than “collapsing” as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had into smaller nation-states. Urging against the adoption of the “Western model” as opposed to the “China model” (中国模式), Zhang said that the abandonment of the latter would mean losing “the greatest advantage of our ‘civilizational state.’” Three years later, in a speech at Oxford University that was republished in the Guangming Daily, a newspaper directly under the Central Propaganda Department, Zhang argued that China’s “civilizational state” was a fusion of an ancient, unbroken 5,000-year civilization and a modern superpower.

Since the civilizational discourse became central to the CCP’s construction of political legitimacy under Xi Jinping in 2022, Zhang has combined the “civilizational state” argument with prevailing political discourse claiming that China, under the CCP and drawing on ancient traditions, has arrived at “a new form of human civilization” (人类文明新形态) that is meant to enrich the world under Xi Jinping’s “Global Civilization Initiative” — offering historical-cultural support on the rhetorical level for China’s bid for international leadership.

The idea of a distinct civilizational history asserted by the notion of China as a “civilizational state” reflects the country’s determination to resist what it sees as Western notions of “democracy” and “human rights” — partly, perhaps, out of a desire to forge its own path, but also substantially out of a need to define the legitimacy of the ruling CCP outside of democratic values that are seen as a potential threat.

Furthermore, this narrative benefits China’s claims over Hong Kong and Taiwan. As both had historically been part of Chinese civilization, the argument goes, the Taiwanese may eventually naturally accept the concept of “one country, two systems,” as has already happened in Hong Kong. “Their conception of sovereignty is separate from the Western nation-state perception of sovereignty,” Jacques argued in 2011. “For the Chinese, sovereignty is separate from system.” Hong Kongers who watched their system crumble after 2019, and did not exactly accept the arrangement, may beg to differ.

Zhang may claim that the civilizational state idea is catching on internationally – particularly in Russia and India – because the world moving past nationalism. But the narrative fails to explain why other nations which have historically been part of the “Sinosphere,” namely Korea, Japan and Taiwan, have chosen the paths of liberal democracy as opposed to China’s system of “democratic dictatorship.” Importantly, as the Chinese and Russian “civilizational states” seek to assert their historical inheritance over Taiwan and Ukraine, Taiwanese and Ukrainian national identity only grow stronger in response.

And of course, China’s history is far less continuous and unified – and its relations with minority peoples far less harmonious – than Zhang may like to admit. China was twice conquered by foreign regimes, the Yuan and the Qing, the latter governing Han China as only one part of its empire and maintaining boundaries between its major ethno-cultural groups, scholars have argued.

Yet today, as Dutch historian Frank Dikotter wrote in 1996 — referring to the mythical emperor credited as a paragon of culture and statecraft — all the peoples of China are “increasingly represented as the descendants of the Yellow Emperor.” This is why Dikötter characterized contemporary China as “not so much a ‘civilization pretending to be a state,’ in the words of Lucien Pye, but rather an empire claiming to be a nation-race.”