China Watch Vol. 3, No. 28, November 2023
What Building China into a Strong, Civilized Nation Means
Xin Xiangyang
The report of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to the 19th National Congress (2017) pointed out that the overall task of upholding and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics consists of realizing socialist modernization and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. On the basis of comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, we shall take a two-step approach—building a prosperous, strong, and democratic civilization, as well as a harmonious, beautiful, socialist, modern country, by the middle of this century.
In his speech at the Central Conference on Talent-related Work in September 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: “It is necessary to cultivate and create a large number of philosophers, social scientists, artists, and other talents in various fields.” If China wants to become a civilized power in the contemporary world, it must begin in two areas: first, more comprehensively promoting the dissemination of Xi Jinping’s thoughts on China’s governance to the rest of the world; and second, vigorously developing philosophy and the social sciences, and cultivating a large number of scholarly thinkers who have learned both Chinese and Western Marxist theories. China must not only have its own academic and discourse systems, and its own system for philosophy and the social science disciplines, but also its own “soft power theory,” “theory of civilizations,” “human rights theory,” “common values,” “whole-process people’s democratic theory,” “theory of development patterns,” and so on.
A strong, civilized country is exemplified by the comprehensive prosperity of its cultural undertakings and the rapid development of its cultural industries. This is a requirement for advancing Chinese-style modernization. An important aspect of Chinese-style modernization is coordinating the promotion of both material civilization and spiritual civilization, because an important feature of Western modernization has been an excessive expansion of materialism. First, we should optimize the allocation of urban and rural cultural resources, increase financial investment, and promote the integrated construction of urban and rural public cultural service systems. Secondly, we should expand the supply of high-quality cultural products and implement the strategy to digitize the cultural industry.
A strong, civilized country is exemplified by the abundant richness of its people’s spiritual world and the bourgeoning ascendance of their spiritual strength. This is an inherent requirement for achieving common prosperity. When we talk about common prosperity, we mean prosperity that the people enjoy in both material and spiritual life, not just material life. Common prosperity in spiritual life should have three basic dimensions: first, a society that can provide people with the conditions for a spiritual life; second, an increased degree of individuals’ enjoyment of their spiritual lives; and third, a consistency between the national spiritual condition and individual spiritual pursuits. From the social group perspective, common prosperity in spiritual life means being able to maintain a positive and healthy social mentality; society’s moral order can function well, the entire society has correct standards for evaluating values such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and so on, and can rationally and peacefully look at the negative problems that exist in reality.
A strong, civilized country is exemplified by the continuous enhancement of its cultural communication power, which is an important component of its cultural “soft power.” It is necessary to establish institutionalized channels in order to strengthen external cultural exchanges and multi-level cultural dialogues and to develop activities on “perceiving China,” “reading through China,” and “seeing and hearing China,” on telling Chinese stories well, explaining China’s theories clearly, spreading China’s voice well, and promoting people-to-people ties. It is necessary to establish a strong Chinese and Chinese-language communication platform, and to build a global communication system for Chinese language and culture, as well as an international Chinese education standard, so that more people can read and speak in Chinese and think about Chinese issues with Chinese thinking.
A strong, civilized country requires the realization of human modernization. General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out that the essence of modernization is the modernization of people. In a certain sense, Chinese-style modernization takes the modernization of people as an important logical starting point and mainline. China’s modernization drive, in the final analysis, seeks to modernize all of its people and promote their all-round development. Human modernization is the shaping of people’s civilized qualities. In particular, we must have two visions: one is a vision that embraces the world and is not biased in favor of one’s own vision, one that requires a kind of inner breadth, an idea or sentiment that “the world is contained within me.” The other is a vision of mutual help and friendship, the ability to “befriend one another whether at home or abroad, and help one another in keeping watch.”
It is necessary to continuously promote the coordinated development of the “five major civilizations”—material civilization, political civilization, spiritual civilization, social civilization, and ecological civilization—and to achieve comprehensive improvement of all five by the middle of this century. A strong, civilized country is not one that has a single highly developed aspect, but one that has developed itself comprehensively in all aspects. A well-developed material civilization means a high level of productivity, leading science and technology, high-quality industrial structure, and so on. It also means that it has sound production relations and organizational structures, effective ownership systems and governance methods, and can provide the material basis for the civilization’s development. A highly-developed political civilization means that its socialist democratic political system is very complete, its electoral and consultative democratic systems have been fully improved, and the people’s political opinions are fully reflected through extensive political participation.
An important part of Chinese-style modernization is promoting coordination between the material and spiritual civilization. This coordination, especially with respect to the development of socialist spiritual civilization, can effectively answer and solve two major dilemmas, one left over from Adam Smith, and the other raised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Adam Smith’s economic theories, there is a contradiction between the altruism of man as expounded in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 and the self-interest of man as expounded in The Wealth of Nations. And one of Rousseau’s questions was, “Will the revival of science and art help to improve morals, or corrupt morals?” Both dilemmas are basically reflections of basic contradictions in capitalist society and cannot be fundamentally resolved within its institutional frameworks. The highly developed socialist spiritual civilization that China is building is intended to solve these problems. When building the “five major civilizations,” we must pay attention to the cultivation of spiritual civilization, and emphasize thorough instillation of mainstream moral values when improving the socialist system with Chinese characteristics and the national governance system.
The author Xin Xiangyang is Deputy Dean, Researcher, and doctoral supervisor of the Institute of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Dean of the School of Marxism, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Vice President of the Chinese Society of Historical Materialism. His primary research focuses are Marxist theory and the theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.