The Rise of Civilizational States: China, India, and the Quest for Cultural Identity
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Nowhere more than in Asia do states and their rulers tend to think they represent not just, say, defined territories or peoples with a shared language, but rather whole civilizations, often cosmically ordained. Strongmen running Central Asian states erect monuments to themselves as heirs to ancient empires. In Cambodia the autocrat, Hun Sen, collects innumerable titles for himself in emulation of the former god-kings of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. And in Japan, the emperor is supposedly a direct descendant of the goddess of the sun. Just being a simple nation-state is not always enough these days.
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No country plays up the idea of representing a civilization more than China does. Visitors to Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, are rarely spared a lecture on how, uniquely, China is an “ancient civilisation with over 5,000 years of history”. Lucian Pye, a sinologist, called China a civilisation masquerading as a state, which helps explain the modern autocratic state’s durability in the face of many predictions of its demise. China’s affairs of state are conducted in near-total secrecy in Zhongnanhai, with dark scandals always present. Yet the projected grandeur of government gives all Chinese, as Pye put it, a right to pride and dignity. China’s sense of itself as a glorious civilisation encompasses a long history, a vast geography, a huge population and the incorporation of lesser cultures and peoples.
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India offers many parallels, and it is no surprise that notions of a civilizational state are on the rise there, too. In particular, they are embraced by the current prime minister, and the supporters of his political party, for whom the ancient scriptures of Hinduism represent the glory and essence of India. The Hindu nationalists decry the Western rationalism and universal values embraced by Jawaharlal Nehru and his political heirs. In China enthusiasts of a civilizational state go further, and credit it with the country’s development success. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University in Shanghai argues that the Communist Party’s pragmatism and its gradual approach to reforms are rooted in an ancient awareness of China’s vast size and complexity, and in a hard-wired imperial aversion to chaos. Arguments like these provide a convenient primordial imprimatur for all manner of abuses, from the suppression of civil liberties to the rejection of any external criticism.
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But history is messy. Those trying to maintain a civilizational mindset must willfully debase big portions of it. In India, it is not just colonialism that has distorted the true culture in the eyes of Hindu nationalists. They also resent earlier waves of Muslim conquest and seek to expunge their legacy. Though undoing 800-odd years of Islamic influence is impossible, the Right has used the idea as a successful organizing principle. The Chinese government, too, often chooses to disregard inconvenient episodes. The violent upheaval of the Cultural Revolution sits awkwardly with the claim that the Communist Party is upholding China’s time-honoured preference for stability. The reformist movement of 1919, which gave birth to the Communist Party itself, was profoundly critical of Confucianism and other conservative aspects of Chinese culture.
