China as a “Civilization-State”: A Historical and Comparative Interpretation

Abstract

Thanks to the publication of Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World, the notion of China as a “civilization-state” has gained wide currency in China studies. This essay revisits his reading of Chinese civilization from a historical and comparative perspective. Historically, despite its exceptional longevity and continuity, Chinese civilization has gone through major changes, especially since China's entrance into the modern world. In fact, modern China, while consciously or unconsciously abolishing and retaining different aspects of its traditions, has embraced some basic components from Western modernity. Hence the transformation of China into a modern nation – first by Sun Yat-sen's ephemeral bourgeois revolution, and then by Mao Zedong's decisive socialist revolution. Contemporary China continues to be shaped by the interaction between the remaining fragments from Chinese traditions and global, mainly Western, forces. Comparatively, the Western dichotomy between tradition and modernity simply does not apply to China. In many ways China has been modern (by Western standard) since ancient times. For instance, a largely secular state, a meritocratic bureaucracy, a highly self-governed civil society, a written language accessible to both literati and laypeople, a stratification system based on achieved rather than ascribed status, a cohesive culture open to multiculturalism, the idea and practice of educational equality, etc., which are fundamental to the formation of Western modernity, have long existed in China. On the other hand, Chinese society, premodern or modern, distinguishes itself by its, among other things, Confucian values, family morality in particular. Indeed, even today, Confucian familism (in forms of paternalism, nepotism, groupism, personalism, communalism, authoritarianism, etc.) is crucial to the operation of China's power system, market economy, and everyday life. Therefore, as a function of its civilization, China is both similar to and dissimilar from the West. In defining China as a civilization-state or, more specifically, in identifying the role of Chinese civilization in contemporary China, we need to decipher Chinese civilization in both its continuity and discontinuity in Chinese history, and in both its similarities with and differences from its Western counterpart.