China, civilization and political discourse

The EU–China Summit on 24 July 2025 marks fifty years of diplomatic relations between the two powers, and should not be seen as a mere dialogue between two economic and political actors, but also as a meeting between two of the world’s oldest extant civilizations.

In both Europe and China, academic debates over the notion of cultural civilization reveal a similar tension: the concept is acknowledged for its analytical relevance but is approached with caution. Among political elites, however, European leaders’ reluctance to use the term ‘civilization’ is not shared by their Chinese counterparts.

Xi Jinping readily employs it to assert China’s identity – justifying his policies and anchoring his legitimacy in an ancient history – and to mirror Europe’s. When they meet the US, the Chinese see a power, when they meet Europe, they see a civilization. During his visit to Greece in November 2019, Xi Jinping emphasized that Greece and China are two ancient civilizations, referring to Confucius and Socrates as ‘two masks that covered the same face of human logic’.¹

Controversy

On the European continent, ‘civilization’ is almost considered a dirty word. It has been tainted through its association with political figures, most notably from the far right, who invoke it to defend a purportedly endangered European or Western identity and root the term in an essentialized and homogenized vision of culture. More profoundly, the term is burdened by its colonial legacy, having served Europe to legitimize imperial domination under the guise of a civilizing mission, including in China.

During what is referred to as the ‘Century of Humiliation’ (1839–1949), China endured foreign invasions, unequal treaties and territorial concessions imposed by European powers – events that continue to influence the Chinese national identity and fuel a deep-seated mistrust of the West. In the permanent exhibition in the National Museum of China on Tian’anmen Square, ‘The Road of Rejuvenation’, opened by Xi in 2012, these episodes are central elements.

In general, the collective sense of humiliation – whether genuine, instrumentalized or both – returned the notion of civilization to the centre of contemporary political discourse, but it is imbued with the sweet scent of revenge.

China, by choosing to place its destiny within civilization’s long timeframe, reduces this century of humiliation to a detail of history, even while drawing strength and energy from it. The economic breakthrough of recent decades and the stability of its political model have become the logical continuation of an historical arc as a form of the ‘end of history’.

China: civilization as narrative

The discourse about Chinese civilization rests on three main pillars: history, politics and philosophy.

China presents itself as one of the few civilizations to have endured for over 5,000 years. In 1996, the Chinese state launched a large-scale, state-funded initiative as part of its Five-Year Plan: the ‘Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project’, followed in 2001 by the ‘Project for the Exploration of the Origins of Chinese Civilization’ to substantiate the idea of an unbroken historical continuity stretching back to ancient times.

Sinologist Anne Cheng points out that continuity was partly founded on a mythical past, as the historical existence of the Xia dynasty remains unconfirmed. But the historical accuracy of such longevity matters less than its symbolic power. Reinscribing history with myth is a defining feature of civilization itself.

Her argument, however, lies elsewhere, as becomes clear:

Beyond the aim of fostering an ultra-nationalist sentiment by reviving the memory of a past – real or imagined – of power and glory, the deeper objective is to underscore the ‘otherness’ of these so-called ‘civilizations’, thereby conveniently exempting them from engaging with human rights as defined by the European Enlightenment as universal and inalienable.²

This brings us to the second civilizational pillar of politics. In China, the state and civilization function as a unified entity, as what the Chinese political scientist and international relations theorist Zhang Weiwei has conceptualized as a ‘civilization state’³. According to Zhang, the Western conception of human rights, liberal democracy and the separation of powers is ill-suited to China’s historical and cultural context. Chinese civilization, he argues, is grounded in a tradition of stable bureaucratic meritocracy, which stands in contrast to the Western emphasis on electoral politics.

A successful civilizational construction always requires philosophy, the final pillar, to justify politics, which in turn is justified by a glorious past. After the Maoist decades during which they were banned, Confucius’s teachings on the importance of virtue, social harmony and ethical governance are today frequently invoked by the CCP leadership.⁴ They serve to justify the fact that China has, in a fundamental way, built itself upon the model of the common good (if not communism) rather than individualism.

Zhang Weiwei does not deny that Europe was once a great civilization, but he contends that it is now in moral and institutional decline, undermined by extreme individualism and plagued by a crisis of democratic legitimacy. To paraphrase Zhang: The centre of gravity has shifted; the world is increasingly made elsewhere, namely in Asia with China at its heart.

What if the centre of the world was no longer in Delphi?

No discussion of civilization can escape the obsession with centrality. China famously conceptualized its own centrality by naming itself the Middle Kingdom, just as Europeans once projected theirs by mapping the world with Europe placed squarely at its centre. This is reflected in the ancient Greek myth in which Zeus sends two birds from opposite ends of the earth to locate its centre; unsurprisingly, they meet at Delphi – which was then regarded as the ‘navel’ of the world.

In his novel Civilizations (2019), Laurent Binet imagines an alternate history in which Christopher Columbus’s expedition fails, and the Incas conquer Europe in the sixteenth century – putting Europe in the position of the Other.⁵ Today reality approaches this fiction; we are now living in a world in which Europe increasingly occupies the role of the Other and, physically, lies at the periphery. Europe is coming to realize that the world is being restructured into civilizational blocs, while it remains institutional, normative and culturally disarmed.⁶

Europe had already held this peripheral status in relation to China long before the ‘Century of Humiliation’. A well-rehearsed anecdote illustrates the point. In the summer of 1793, following a nine-month sea voyage from England, a British diplomatic mission led by Lord Macartney arrived off the coast of China and prepared to commence its overland journey to the Imperial court in Peking. Appointed as King George III’s ambassador, Macartney was charged with delivering a personal letter from the king to the Qianlong emperor. The letter requested permission to station a permanent British representative at the imperial court and to expand trade opportunities beyond the existing, tightly controlled system limited to the southern port of Canton. Such a proposal was without precedent and, from the perspective of the emperor, entirely unacceptable: ‘Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce’.

Amin Maalouf, widely recognized for his contribution to world literature through a body of work that bridges Eastern and Western narrative traditions, quotes this missive in his most recent book, Le Labyrinthe des égarés.⁷ The notion of an unbroken Western hegemony is a historical fable and this letter is a sobering reminder of that fact.

Our accustomed ways are increasingly shaken, especially as China’s success challenges the Western narrative by showing that an authoritarian regime can deliver growth, stability and global influence. However, the issue is not about who wins, ‘[i]t is not the clash of civilizations that threatens the world, but the collapse of civilization itself. ... The goal is no longer to save a particular civilization, but civilization as such.’⁸

Amin Maalouf offers here a direct rebuttal to Samuel Huntington’s influential ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis. In a certain sense, as long as civilizations continue to exist, Maalouf sees the possibility of preventing their missteps and excesses. However, today we stand on the brink of a darker horizon – the erosion of civilization itself, which tends to be identified with history. This resonates profoundly with Europe’s current predicament. The Chinese rhetoric of civilization reminds Europe not that it has lost the war in the so-called clash of civilizations, rather, that it has abandoned the very concept of civilization itself, wary of its ethnicist and neo-colonial connotations.

It is possible to use the term civilization without falling into the trap of identity-based retrenchment, provided it is accompanied by a capacity for civilizational self-critique and an understanding that civilizations have not emerged in opposition to alterity, but rather through contact with others.

This holds true for both Europe and China. For instance, the Chinese thinker Wang Hui, a distinguished professor in the humanities at Tsinghua University in Beijing, advocates for a more plural and fluid conception of civilization for his country – one that does not dismiss the term but seeks to reframe it beyond essentialist boundaries.

Civilization is not a dirty word

In Europe, where we may be embarking on our own ‘century of humiliation’, the use of the term civilization could provide an opportunity for collective reengagement, prompting us to reflect on our territory, our model, our raison d’être and what it would be vital to fight for.

The world has been sustained through oral tradition, and the need for narratives, if only to understand who we are and where we come from, is sufficient reason not to cede the term ‘civilizations’ to those who employ it for nefarious gain.

In Europe, the term has been hijacked by nostalgics. Viktor Orbán frequently invokes the notion of a European Christian civilization in opposition to Muslim migration, which he presents as a threat to European identity: ‘The gravity of the situation – the gravity of the situation of European civilization – has been revealed by the migrant crisis.’⁹ Under Jarosław Kaczyński, the Polish Law and Justice Party (PiS) has also used the term ‘civilization’ to defend traditional Christian values in opposition to the LGBTQ+ community. The word has recently been deployed in Europe more in the cause of identity retrenchment and of a fantasized singularity than in its true meaning.

Emmanuel Macron deserves recognition for having reinvested in the notion of European civilization, both in his 2017 Sorbonne speech and again in April 2024: ‘Paul Valéry said, at the end of the First World War, that we now knew our civilizations were mortal. We must be clear-eyed about the fact that our Europe today is mortal.’ This civilization, which President Macron describes as being structured around ‘a certain relationship with freedom, justice and knowledge’, is showing signs of frailty. It is weakened by a lack of investment in its own defence, by the growing unpredictability of the transatlantic alliance, and by an increasingly fragile economic model. But above all, it is threatened by the erosion of the legitimacy of Europe’s claim to this relationship with freedom and justice. In other words, we may be the only ones still convinced that we are on the right side of history.

In the context of the EU–China summit, framing the encounter in terms of civilization repositions Europe within a world of narrative that it has largely left behind since the creation of the European Union.

The voice of a political body gains depth when it is not confined to the technical vocabulary of institutions, but is enriched by the myths, history and political utopias rooted in its cultural soil. The more disciplines and imaginaries a voice draws upon, the easier it becomes to find common ground with others. To speak in the name of European civilization thus becomes, at the same time, a way for China to take its interlocutor seriously and to recognize it as a peer.