Under its national-conservative government, Hungary has built the best relations with China of any EU country, despite China’s significant otherness in terms of political system and political thinking. But how different is Chinese political thinking really? Vastly different. Still, my impression from my years working at Peking University and my studies of Chinese political thinkers is that with the ideological differences, there is something familiar in the unfamiliar, and vice versa.
Most strikingly, Chinese social and political thought is dominated by culturalist thinking readily recognizable to European conservatives. In the predominant Chinese view of society, individuals and families are deeply embedded in national cultures, which, in turn, are part of larger civilizational blocs, with each nation and civilization consisting of an organic cultural diversity internally. This cultural emphasis makes Chinese political thinkers and social scientists seem retro, even conservative.
With Chinese Characteristics
The Chinese emphasis on culture is surprising because a Marxist-Leninist party state governs China. At first glance, you would expect an economic or ‘materialist’ rather than a culturalist orientation. After all, the Marxist-Leninists, at least in their early phase in the Soviet Union, sought to spread a political-economic model globally, across all cultural and national boundaries. Political-economic uniformization in the name of World Revolution was placed far above the multiplicity of ethnicities, nations, and cultures. Everything was to become communist; the same model was to be applied everywhere. Under Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Chinese communism attempted to erase cultural elevation and individuality.
But even Mao’s Cultural Revolution, though mainly just destructive in practice, was already fought in the name of a national proletarian culture (in solidarity with the proletariat of other nations). And under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, China’s official state doctrine became ‘a socialism that has Chinese characteristics’ (You zhongguo tese de shehui zhuyi), which eventually transformed into ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ (zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi), with both slogan and concept placing increasing emphasis on the ‘Chinese characteristics.’ And those characteristics, though elusive and open to interpretation, are Chinese culture; that much is clear.
So, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today presents its socialism as embedded in Chinese culture. From a position of ‘cultural self-confidence’ (wenhua zixin), China contributes to a harmonious world of cultures and civilizations, CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping insists. In this context, Xi last year launched his ‘Global Civilizations Initiative,’ which the CCP’s Information Office defines as a call to ‘respecting the diversity of civilizations, advocating the common values of humanity, valuing the inheritance and innovation of civilizations, and strengthening international person-to-people exchanges and cooperation.’ Civilizations are thought of here in the culturalist, plural sense: ‘Diversity has been a prominent feature of civilizations.’
China sees itself as a civilizational nation, the prime carrier of the East Asian world region, in a pluralistic world of nations, civilizations, and cultures.
This pluralistic-civilizational thinking is also leading in Chinese universities, where scholars conceive intercultural communication as the central challenge of globalization. A prominent school of New Confucian philosophers prophesizes the advent of a new ‘tianxia,’ a harmonious world order in which all nations, cultures, world regions, and civilizations accept each other’s otherness and integrity.
Left-wing Ideologies in the West
This culturalistic worldview—this assumption that the world consists of cultures, especially national cultures, and civilization blocs, which should respect each other—conflicts with leftist and liberal ideologies in the West. In the West, the left still adheres to a socioeconomic model; it understands societal problems as deriving from socioeconomic inequality and seeks solutions in social policy. When cultural issues arise—intercultural tensions, let’s say—the left gets confused. For example, social-democratic Sweden, equipped with one of the best welfare states on earth, did not know what to do in 2015 when uncontrolled mass migration from the Islamic world disrupted the fragile cultural ecosystem in Swedish cities. A cultural ecosystem? That Sweden had such a thing only became apparent to many left-wing Swedes when ethnic gangs took over the streets.
Meanwhile, Western left-liberals argue for a model of individuals under formal, supposedly culturally neutral institutions. Large cultural collectives that are deeply meaningful and claim members’ loyalty, give them the creeps. Don’t those collectives hold the individual captive? Isn’t it essentialist or even racist to speak of national cultures or civilizations?
Subcultures are OK for liberals, but only because they have little ethical substance or actual community. Think of Pokémon GO players or salsa dancers; subcultures of enthusiasts form around such hobbies and sports. Of course, leisure activities are essential for human well-being. But membership in a nation and national culture, for example, the Hungarian or the Dutch one, goes much deeper and also brings responsibilities; you have to help defend your country in wartime, in the extreme. That is precisely why such deep, more comprehensive identity belongings are scary in the eyes of liberals.
When liberal social scientists or journalists classify individuals into groupings, they prefer abstract constructs around a specific shared characteristic: constructs such as ‘Asian Americans’ or ‘LGBTIQ+.’ These are abstractions and not concrete communities or cultural groups with their own meeting places, customs, and habits. Look, you do have Korean communities in San Francisco and gay communities in Berlin; those things are real. But there is no ‘Asian American community’ or ‘LGBTIQ+ community.’ In English, you can add the word ‘community’ to whatever you like, but that does not mean it refers to an actual community of people.
This discarding and denigration of substantive communities and cultures by left-liberals in favour of quasi-communities and thin subcultures is part of the grand strategy of liberal thought: to emancipate the individual from supposedly stifling cultural traditions and groups; to create a world of ‘freed up’ individuals who associate freely under the aegis of ‘culturally neutral’ laws and state institutions. Thus, both Western liberalism and leftism have strong anti-cultural tendencies.
Conservatives
In the West, it is conservatives who think in terms of larger cultural collectives—the nation, the region, Christianity, Europe, the West—and attach most importance to the concrete customs, traditions, and rituals that renew these collectives and render them meaningful to people. This is also why conservatives are more concerned than liberals and social democrats about uncontrolled mass migration from other cultural world regions: it could come at the expense of the cultural cohesion of European societies.
Thus,
Western conservatism and mainstream Chinese political thought share an important characteristic: a culturalist worldview that recognizes what is culturally one’s own
and, from this basis, acknowledges and accepts the otherness of Others in a pluralistic world of cultures and civilizations. This is a particular form of cosmopolitanism; one may call it conservative. It is the cosmopolitanism of the acceptance of self and others. It differs from the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of leftists or liberals who declare their favoured political model universally valid and seek to overwrite cultural specificities and differences.
Seen in this light, it is not surprising that national-conservative Hungary gets along well diplomatically with the new, culturalistic China. Precisely because the two countries see themselves as carrying specific cultural traditions, they can recognize and accept the otherness of the other and cooperate in a spirit of conservative cosmopolitanism.
