Xi Jinping: 5 Events That Shaped China’s President’s World View

China it is a world power, something hardly imaginable just a few decades ago.

Its power sometimes comes from cooperation with the rest of the world, such as with the signing of the Paris climate agreement, according to the BBC.

Or sometimes it means competing against it, like the New Silk Road initiative, a network of construction projects in more than 60 countries that has brought investments to many nations that do not borrow from Western powers.

However, there is also a very conflicting tone in much of China’s global rhetoric.

Beijing condemns the United States for trying to “contain” China through the new Aukus (Australia-United Kingdom-United States) pact for the manufacture of submarines. Or it warns the UK that there would be “consequences” for granting British residency to Hong Kongers who oppose its decrees.

And more recently he told Taiwan that it should prepare to join mainland China.

President Xi Jinping it has put China on the world stage with much more force than any of its predecessors, since Mao Tsetung, China’s supreme leader during the Cold War.

However, other elements of his rhetoric draw on much older sources, looking back at his own history, both ancient and more recent.

Here are five of these recurring themes.

1. Confucian ideas

For more than 2,000 years, the norms of Confucian thought shaped Chinese society.

Confucius (551-479 BC) built an ethical system that combined hierarchy – where people know their place in society – with benevolence – the idea that those in higher positions take care of their inferiors.

Much adapted over time, this system of thought sustained China’s dynasties until the 1911 revolution, when the overthrow of the last emperor sparked a backlash against Confucius and his legacy from radicals, including the newly created Communist Party.

One such communist, Mao Tsetung, was deeply hostile to traditional Chinese philosophy during his years in power (1949-1976).

But in the 1980s, Confucius’ ideas were back in Chinese society, praised by the Communist Party as lessons from someone brilliant educating contemporary China.

Today, China celebrates “harmony” (hexie) as a “socialist value”, although it has a very Confucian air.

And a hot topic in Chinese international relations is the question of how the term “benevolence” (ren) can shape Beijing’s relations with the outside world.

Professor Yan Xuetong of Tsinghua University has written about how China should seek “benevolent authority” rather than “dominance”, in contrast to what he sees as the unkind role of the United States.

Even Xi Jinping’s idea of ​​a “world community with a common destiny” has a traditional philosophical flavor. The president has been where Confucius, Qufu, was born and has quoted his sayings in public.

2. The century of humiliations

The historic confrontations of the 19th and 20th centuries still deeply shape Chinese thinking about the world.

The Opium Wars of the mid-19th century saw Western merchants use force to slam open the doors of China.

Much of the period from the 1840s to the 1940s is remembered as a “century of humiliation,” a shameful time that showed China’s weakness in the face of European and Japanese aggression.

During that time, China had to cede Hong Kong to the United Kingdom, a territory in the northeastern region of Manchuria to the Japanese, and a whole range of legal and commercial privileges to a number of Western countries.

In the postwar era, it was the Soviet Union that tried to gain influence on China’s borders, including Manchuria and Xinjiang.

This experience has created a deep suspicion of the intentions of the outside world. Even gestures such as China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 were based on a cultural memory of “unfair treaties” when China’s trade was controlled by foreigners, a situation that today’s Communist Party has vowed not to leave behind. never happen again.

In March this year, a Chinese-American negotiation in Anchorage, Alaska, saw the Chinese accuse their hosts of “condescension and hypocrisy.”

Xi’s China does not tolerate the idea that foreigners can look down on their country with impunity.

3. Forgotten ally

However, even terrible events can generate more positive messages.

One such message comes from Chinese involvement in World War II, when it fought Japan after the 1937 invasion and before the Western Allies joined the Asian war at Pearl Harbor in 1941.

During those years, China lost more than 10 million people and retained more than half a million Japanese soldiers in mainland China, a feat widely commemorated in history books and on film and television.

Today China presents itself as part of the “anti-fascist alliance” made up of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, filling itself with morality by reminding the world of its place among the victors against the Axis powers.

China also draws on its historic role as the leader of the Third World in the Mao era (for example, at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and on projects such as the construction of the TanZam railway in East Africa in the 1970s) to polish its credentials as a leader in the non-western world.

Modern history remains a key part of how the Chinese Communist Party perceives its own legitimacy.

However, elements of that story, particularly the terrible famine caused by the disastrous economic policies of the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962, are hardly mentioned in China today.

And some modern wars can be used for more contentious purposes.

The last year of rocky relations between the United States and China has seen new films commemorating the 1950-1953 Korean War, a conflict that the Chinese remember by a different name: “the War of Resistance to the United States.”

4. Marxism

The historical trajectory of Marxism-Leninism is also deeply rooted in Chinese political thought and has been very actively revived under Xi Jinping.

Throughout the 20th century, Mao Tsetung and other important communist political leaders participated in theoretical debates about Marxism, which had immense consequences.

For example, the notion of “class struggle” led to the deaths of a million landowners in the early years of Mao’s rule.

Although “class” has fallen out of favor as a way of defining society, China’s political language today is still shaped by ideas such as “struggle,” “antagonism,” and conceptions of “socialism” as opposed to “capitalism.” ”.

Major publications, such as the theoretical body of the Communist Party, Qiushi, regularly debate the “contradictions” in Chinese society in terms that are largely based on Marxist theory.

Xi’s China defines the competition between the United States and China as a struggle that can be understood in terms of Marxist antagonism.

The same is true of the economic forces of society and their interaction: difficulties in growing the economy and maintaining that growth properly “green” are interpreted in terms of contradiction.

In classical Marxism an expected result, or synthesis, is reached, but not without first working through often painful and prolonged “antagonisms”.

5. The history with Taiwan

Beijing maintains that the unbreakable destiny of the island of Taiwan will be its unification with mainland China.

However, the history of Taiwan in the last century shows that the question of its status comes and goes in Chinese politics.

In 1895, after a disastrous war with Japan, China was forced to surrender Taiwan, which then became a Japanese colony for the next half century.

It was then briefly unified with the mainland by the Nationalists from 1945 to 1949.

Under Mao, China lost the opportunity to unify the island; The US probably would have let Mao take it, but Beijing joined the North Koreans in invading South Korea in 1950, sparking the Korean War and suddenly making Taiwan a key Cold War ally.

Mao launched attacks off the coast of Taiwan in 1958, but then put aside the idea of ​​reclaiming the territory for the next 20 years.

After the United States and China reestablished relations in 1979, there was an agreement that all parties recognized that there was only one China, but they never agreed on whether the regime in Beijing or the one in Taipei was really the legitimate republic.

Forty years later, Xi Jinping insists that unification must come soon, while aggressive rhetoric and the fate of Hong Kong have led the people of Taiwan, now citizens of a liberal democracy, to become increasingly hostile to a relationship. closer to mainland China.