China Open Source Observatory

The Cultural Code of National Security

China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations

January 1, 2021

国家安全的文化密码

中国现代国际关系研究院

The Cultural Code of National Security国家安全的文化密码

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Originally Written By
China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations中国现代国际关系研究院
Publisher
Current Affairs Press时事出版社

Chapter One

第一章

The Cultural Code of National Security

国家安全的文化密码


“The fortunes of culture are bound to the fortunes of the state; the pulse of civilization beats in time with the pulse of the nation.” This phrase concisely and accurately reveals the intimate connection between culture and the rise and fall of states, the security of nations, and the survival of political regimes. This holds true across the board: from the Western suppression and conquest of other civilizations during the colonial era, to the ideological contest between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to the competition among states in the post-Cold War era concealed beneath such banners as the “End of History,” the “Clash of Civilizations,” “Democratic Peace Theory,” and “humanitarian intervention.”

From the perspective of national security, culture encompasses a state’s cultural sovereignty, the cultural characteristics of its nation, its political institutions, and its ideology. It is distinctly national, political, and of its time. Against the backdrop of the Great Changes Unseen in a Century, we can build a solid cultural shield for national security only by integrating our approach to culture and other security factors, balancing the national character of culture with its universal dimensions, and steadfastly upholding both the political and developmental attributes of culture.

Clash of Civilizations? Or Convergence of Civilizations?

On April 29, 2019, Kiron Skinner, then Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, publicly characterized U.S.-China relations as a “clash of civilizations,” declaring that the United States was formulating a China policy based on the “Clash of Civilizations” framework. This caused a great stir. Although Skinner was fired not long after making these remarks, the State Department did not deny the substance of what she had said. Given the series of highly ideologically charged statements made by U.S. military and political officials in recent years—statements that advocate waging “political warfare” against China—Skinner’s remarks were likely not without basis. Clearly, an ideological encirclement campaign against China, led by the United States, is gathering like a storm on the horizon.

About half a month later, on May 15, 2019, China successfully hosted the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations. In his opening remarks, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized: “Humanity is divided only by differences in skin color and language; civilizations differ only in their varied hues and forms, but none is superior or inferior to another.” He further stated: “The belief that one’s own race and civilization are superior, and the desire to remold or replace other civilizations, is foolish in its conception and disastrous in its execution.” The conference also adopted the Beijing Consensus of the 2019 Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations, calling for “mutual respect, inclusiveness, and mutual learning among different civilizations … to jointly compose a civilizational symphony in which each civilization shines in its own right while all shine together.” In contrast to the “Clash of Civilizations” theory promoted by some U.S. officials, China advocates the concept of a Community of Common Destiny in which each civilization shines in its own right while all shine together. Against the backdrop of the Great Changes Unseen in a Century, and in the face of geopolitical competition, “de-globalization,” populism, and the shocks of non-traditional security threats such as sudden public health emergencies, China and the United States have offered two diametrically opposed prescriptions for making the world more peaceful and prosperous: “convergence of civilizations” versus “clash of civilizations.” Which is right and which is wrong needs no elaboration. Nevertheless, both sides have emphasized the important role of civilization and culture in managing international relations, and both have implied that civilization and culture are core components of national interest, intimately connected to national security.

In fact, the relationship between civilization or culture and national security is not a new topic. Human history is, in a certain sense, the history of different civilizations colliding, rising, and falling. In his book A Global History, Leften Stavros Stavrianos observed: “Before 1500, human societies were in varying degrees of mutual isolation, but 1500 marks an important turning point in human history.” After the Age of Discovery, contact, exchange, and collision among different civilizations increased. Over the course of several centuries of Western colonial expansion, Western civilization unceasingly squeezed, invaded, and even destroyed other civilizations, plunging many states and peoples into a crisis of national extinction and cultural annihilation. Under Western “civilizational expansion” and “cultural colonialism,” the civilizations of the Andes and Mesoamerica were destroyed, while Indian civilization, Islamic civilization, and Chinese civilization all fell into profound cultural crises amid shock and defeat. Even within Western civilization itself, the confrontation and conflict among different sovereign states was extraordinarily brutal—the First and Second World Wars were triggered by conflicts within the West, representing cultural clashes within a single civilizational system. After World War II, the world entered the Cold War configuration of U.S.-Soviet confrontation, in which ideology became the most important variable governing relations among states. Ideology cannot be equated with culture, yet it is precisely where the political character of culture resides.

After the Cold War ended, the influence of culture on international relations and national security became even more pronounced. On one hand, the intense U.S.-Soviet confrontation during the Cold War had “suppressed” contradictions in other spheres; the collapse of the bipolar configuration eliminated this suppressive effect, allowing “suppressed” contradictions rooted in religion, ethnicity, and other factors to be released—like the lid of a pressure cooker suddenly lifted at high temperature, with steam rapidly gushing out. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, which triggered intense military conflicts in the relevant regions—including the Chechen Wars, the Bosnian War, and later the Crimea crisis—are typical examples. On the other hand, the end of the confrontation between the capitalist and socialist blocs greatly facilitated the movement of people around the world, driving the rapid development of globalization and a sharp increase in contact among different cultures. But globalization exacerbated inequality among different states and groups; combined with the proliferation of issues such as immigration and refugees, “identity politics” became increasingly prominent, and anxiety over the question of “who am I” intensified. The result was that the rifts among groups of different cultural backgrounds did not appear to narrow—in many cases they actually widened. At the same time, the Western world celebrated its Cold War victory and actively promoted its so-called universal values of liberal democracy around the world. In fact, from the end of the Cold War to the present day, whether one looks at “Democratic Peace Theory,” the “End of History,” the “Clash of Civilizations,” “neo-interventionism,” or the rise of strongman politics and the surge of populism in recent years, all have been driven by powerful cultural forces operating in the background.

Chapter One

Can a State Exist Without Culture?

国家可以没有文化吗?

To answer the question of the relationship between culture and national security, one must first answer the question of what culture is. The earliest discussion of culture in the Chinese language may be traced back to the Book of Changes, which speaks of “observing the patterns of heaven to discern the changes of the seasons; observing the patterns of humanity to transform and civilize the world.” Here, culture carries the meaning of “civil governance and moral education.” The English word “culture” derives from the Latin “colere,” whose original meaning was “tilling the land and cultivating crops.” Since then, the connotations and extensions of culture have continuously evolved, and academic definitions of culture have become numerous and varied. In 1952, American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in their book Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, catalogued 164 definitions of culture found in academic literature between 1871 and 1951, encompassing descriptive, historical, normative, psychological, structural, and genetic categories. Chinese scholars also hold differing understandings of culture. Some consider culture to be “a complex whole comprising knowledge, belief, art, moral law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”; others view culture as “a mode of thinking and acting expressed through the activities of a people—a mode that distinguishes that people from others”; still others simply equate culture with “socialization.”

As the social sciences have continued to develop and the study of culture has deepened, discussions of culture’s connotations and extensions have grown increasingly rich. The march of the times has also continuously given rise to all manner of “subcultures,” such as “internet celebrity culture,” “anime culture,” and “meme culture.” Broadly speaking, a relatively comprehensive definition of culture is “the totality of all material and spiritual activities through which human beings in social practice come to know, grasp, and transform the objective world, together with all the material wealth, spiritual wealth, and social institutions they create and preserve, considered in terms of their level, degree, and quality of development.” In plain terms, culture is the sum total of what human society thinks and does. At the level of the state, the connotations of culture have already surpassed the dimensions of “moral education” and “learning.” We can say that a particular individual “has no culture,” but we can never say that a particular state “has no culture,” because every state has its own culture. Moreover, culture is not limited merely to the realm of “ideas” as many people assume (such as language and writing); it also encompasses “material artifacts” and “institutions”—for example, ethnic dress, India’s caste system, and the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

From the perspective of national security, culture encompasses a state’s cultural sovereignty, the cultural characteristics of its nation, its political institutions and ideology, and its mainstream national values. Culture is both an important component of national security alongside economic and social factors (such as the security of language and writing, and the security of political institutions), and an important means of influencing and realizing national security (such as cultural hegemony and the relationship between culture and national and ethnic cohesion). Major powers such as the United States, Japan, Russia, France, and Germany all strive on one hand to preserve the independence and distinctiveness of their own cultures, while on the other hand implementing numerous cultural industry support policies to expand their cultural influence globally, treating “cultural diplomacy” as an important instrument of foreign policy. Napoleon once said: “There are only two forces in the world: the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.” America’s Hollywood, Japan’s anime, France’s Alliance Française, and China’s Confucius Institutes all serve the same purpose by different means. Everyone knows that the India-Pakistan conflict runs deep, yet the cultural ties between the two countries are also very close. When then-Indian Foreign Minister Mukherjee (who later served as President of India) visited Pakistan in 2008, he brought four sets of the music disc Bollywood: 60 Years of Romance, which played a positive role in easing bilateral relations.

Furthermore, culture has a distinctly national character, a political character, and a character shaped by its era—characteristics that also determine its close relationship with national security. The national character of culture refers to the cultural traits that a people possesses and that distinguish it from other peoples—what might be called the “character of a nation.” We reject the notion that some nations are superior or inferior to others, but the cultural characteristics of different peoples do indeed differ greatly, and to a large extent influence the degree of security enjoyed by a state and its people. The Jewish people endured nearly 2,000 years of diaspora, yet ultimately achieved the restoration of their state through the appeal and cohesive power of Jewish culture; the Romani people, another wandering nation, remain to this day rootless and adrift in foreign lands. Among many Arabs in the Middle East, identification with the tribe exceeds identification with the state, severely undermining national cohesion. China’s ideas of “every citizen bears responsibility for the rise and fall of the nation” and “great unification” are the cultural genes of China’s “centralized authority” system, and have ensured that the Chinese nation has endured through countless hardships and continued to this day. India, which possesses an equally ancient civilization, has by contrast developed a political culture of “weak state, strong society” due to the powerful role of the caste system and village community organizations in maintaining social order. Clearly, the national character nurtured by culture is directly related to the cohesion and centripetal force of a state and its people.

The political character of culture refers to the fact that culture possesses strong ideological characteristics, which bear on the survival of a state’s political institutions. Since culture depends on human activity, it inevitably reflects the values of those who create it. Comrade Mao Zedong said long ago: “Culture is a reflection of political and economic struggle, but it can in turn guide political and economic struggle.” Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis once attracted many adherents, with many people believing that the post-Cold War world would see Western ideology reign supreme. But the “universal values” advocated by the West are dominated by Western culture, formed on the basis of Western historical experience and national conditions, and subordinated to Western national interests. In the 1980s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began pursuing “pluralism in guiding ideology,” which weakened the dominant position of socialist ideology and ultimately led to the tragic disintegration of the Soviet Union. The increasingly acute contradictions between the West and the Islamic world after the Cold War, while having historical roots, were also to a large extent the result of a backlash in the Islamic world against the West’s promotion of “universal values.”

The temporal character of culture refers to the fact that culture is a product of a specific era, while also needing to adapt to the development of that era. Only culture that can adapt to the development of the times can maintain its vitality and contribute to national security. Culture that cannot adapt to the development of the times—or that even obstructs it—is dross culture, doing more harm than good to national security. The sovereignty crisis China faced from the late Qing dynasty onward was, to a large extent, a cultural crisis. The policy of isolation, the arrogance of the “Celestial Empire,” and the traditional culture that valued agriculture over technology left the Chinese nation to suffer a “century of humiliation” under the assault of Western gunboats. The Chinese nation’s struggle for survival and salvation was also a process of continuous reflection and transformation within Chinese culture. It was not until the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the establishment of the ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics that the Chinese nation set out on the path of national rejuvenation. Similarly, looking around the world, many states that achieved national independence after World War II have largely been unable to achieve genuine political independence and economic prosperity precisely because they failed to carry out timely cultural transformation in keeping with the times.

As the Land, So the People

There is an old Chinese saying: “The land and water of a place nurture the people of that place.” The “land and water” here refers both to the geographical and the cultural dimensions. When we speak of a particular people, the first thing that comes to mind is that people’s distinctive character—the shrewdness of the Jews, the romanticism of the French, the warmth of Latin Americans, the tenacity of Russians, the rigor of Germans, the collectivism of the Japanese, and so on. There is also the saying “character determines destiny,” which holds that character shapes an individual’s fate more than learning or appearance. What is true for individuals is equally true for states. Some states blessed with abundant natural resources have ultimately fallen into the “resource curse,” while others with limited resources have found that necessity is the mother of invention, achieving strong national development. The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019 and subsequently spread across the globe illustrated, through the lens of “whether or not to wear a mask,” the relationship between culture, national character, and national security.

After COVID-19 broke out in their respective countries, East Asian states such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore swiftly adopted strict epidemic prevention and control measures, including encouraging or requiring people to wear masks in public places. Western countries and regions, by contrast, failed to take timely measures, resulting in very high infection rates and death tolls. Compared with many developing countries, developed nations possess relatively sound public health systems, yet they still failed to withstand the assault of the epidemic—a fact that merits deep reflection. Although health experts repeatedly emphasized that wearing masks was an important measure for epidemic prevention and control, some members of the public in Western countries remained unwilling to wear masks, and some leaders even opposed doing so. In fact, the question of whether or not to wear a mask reflects different cultural perceptions: many people in Western countries believe that “only sick people need to wear masks,” while people in East Asian countries generally believe that “wearing a mask helps prevent illness.” Clearly, in a moment of crisis, different cultural perceptions of the mask have had a significant impact on national security.

From the perspective of national security, “character determines destiny” can be broadly summarized in three propositions. The first is that culture shapes political character, which bears on the political cohesion of a state and its people. The second is that culture shapes economic character, which bears on the economic development drive of a state and its people. The third is that culture shapes diplomatic character, which bears on a state’s external strategic culture. It must be emphasized that stressing the relationship between culture and national character is not an advocacy of so-called “cultural determinism” or “cultural hierarchy.” On the contrary, different cultures are not ranked in any order of superiority or inferiority, and culture is not immutable. While culture influences national character and national destiny, it also undergoes a process of being shaped and transformed, achieving self-development through reform and the critical inheritance of what is valuable.

At the level of political character, culture influences the political cohesion of a state and its people. Political cohesion is the foundational guarantee for a state to realize national security; it is difficult to imagine a state that is a sheet of loose sand being able to effectively safeguard national security. For this reason, many states attach great importance to cultivating a shared cultural identity for the state and nation, thereby strengthening political cohesion. Although the United States is a multi-ethnic state, it places great emphasis on cultivating its own cultural distinctiveness and sense of superiority. From the speeches of American leaders to the publicity of American cultural products—”the American Dream,” “the American spirit,” “American values”—these serve not only to promote American culture abroad but also to sculpt a national cultural identity and reinforce national identification among the domestic population. Thomas Paine declared in his landmark work Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Concepts such as “Manifest Destiny,” “God’s chosen people,” “city upon a hill,” “the melting pot,” and “American exceptionalism,” along with the practice of American presidents concluding nearly every major speech with “God bless America,” all continuously reinforce American national cohesion. According to incomplete statistics cited in the article “Winning Without Fighting: America’s Global Public Opinion War,” the U.S. Department of Defense and Hollywood have jointly produced more than 700 films, including well-known titles such as Patton, Saving Private Ryan, First Blood, and Pearl Harbor. A large proportion of Hollywood war films, spy thrillers, and even science fiction films take “national security” as their subject matter. An important purpose of these films is to sculpt the heroic image of American soldiers defending their homeland and embodying humanitarian values, so as to inspire patriotic sentiment among the public. Thus, whether in World War I, World War II,

the Cold War, or the September 11 attacks, the United States has been able to generate powerful national cohesion in the face of crisis.

Germany and Japan are also nations with very strong national cohesion. The German people historically existed for a long time in a state of “having a nation but no state,” and the poet Goethe even lamented: “Germany, where is your homeland?” In the early nineteenth century, “German nationalism” gradually rose, until in 1871 the Kingdom of Prussia unified the many German states—excluding Austria—to establish the “German Empire,” greatly strengthening German national consciousness and national cohesion. Although in the subsequent course of history, influenced by contradictions among the great powers and by domestic chauvinism, Germany participated in the First World War and instigated the Second World War, bringing catastrophic suffering to humanity. Yet Germany’s ability to rapidly re-emerge as a world power from the ruins of war is inseparable from the role of its culture in unifying the national will. A similar example to Germany is Japan. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan placed particular emphasis on national consciousness, stressing the subordination of the individual to the collective and of subordinates to superiors, and highlighting “group consciousness” and “shame culture,” which gave Japan an exceptionally strong national cohesion.

China is the only country in the world whose civilization has never been interrupted and whose political unity has been maintained at a high level. The British historian Arnold Toynbee once marveled: “For thousands of years, the Chinese have succeeded in uniting their people politically and culturally more successfully than any other people in the world, demonstrating this remarkable capacity for political and cultural unity.” “Standardized carriages, standardized writing, standardized conduct”—these ensured that the Chinese nation, through five thousand years of wind and rain, has always maintained the unity of the state and the continuity of its civilization. Moreover, the Confucian spirit of the scholar-official who aspires to “govern the state and bring peace to all under heaven,” and

the political culture of “great unification” nationalism, endowed centralized strong government with deep cultural genes and made China exceptionally precocious in “state-building.” The American scholar Fukuyama argued: “China was the first to create a modern state in the meaningful sense … China is defined by a common written language, classical texts, a tradition of bureaucracy, a shared history, a nationwide educational system, and values that govern elite behavior at the political and social levels. Even when the state disappeared, this consciousness of a unified culture remained intense.” Thus, the history of the Chinese nation is a history of ethnic integration; Chinese culture possesses strong unity and continuity, and a shared culture has nurtured a powerful nationalism. Although some people, by magnifying certain historical episodes or individual events and taking them out of context, have attacked “Chinese society as a sheet of loose sand,” history has proven and will continue to prove that the Chinese nation possesses powerful cohesion.

By contrast, India has never in its history formed a unified centralized state. Even the powerful Maurya Empire and Mughal Empire were, to a large extent, “united but not unified.” Furthermore, the hierarchical system of Hinduism constitutes a vast social network; the organizational impetus for social order is provided by Hinduism, without needing the state’s assistance. The hierarchical system centered on the caste system has greatly constrained the formation of Indian national consciousness, leaving India in a long-term situation of “weak state and strong society.” The pluralization and fragmentation of political power explains why British colonizers adopted a dual administrative system of “British India” and “princely states” for India; why British colonizers were so successful in practicing “divide and rule” among India’s different political forces; why the contradictions between Hindus and Muslims remain so difficult to resolve to this day; and why local political families continue to occupy a pivotal position in Indian politics. In the 17th Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) elections in 2019, members of parliament from political families accounted for as high as 30% of the total number of members—a historic high—and in some regional parties the proportion was even 100%. No wonder some say that a politically unified India did not exist before British colonial rule. Indian citizens have a strong sense of identification with their own ethnic group and region; even after decades of state-building following independence, diverse ethnic groups, religions, languages, tribes, sub-castes, and other factors continue to influence the construction of national identity, and national parties must rely on local political forces to govern effectively.

A comparable example can be found in Israel and the Arab states of the Middle East. Is-

＞ Archaeological excavation at the ancient walls of Jerusalem uncovers a seal bearing a Hebrew name from 2,600 years agorael is the product of Zionism; the soul of its birth and growth is Jewish culture. Jewish culture possesses the characteristic of “unity of religion and ethnicity”: Jewish religious rituals, cultural texts, and the Hebrew language have reinforced Jewish national self-identification and constitute the cultural foundation that allowed the Jewish people to remain spiritually cohesive even as they were physically scattered across nearly 2,000 years of diaspora. Looking at the Arab states of the Middle East, by contrast, the “tribe” occupies an extremely important position in the political structure of Arab states, weakening national identification to varying degrees. The eminent American political scientist Samuel Huntington argued: “In the Arab world, the legitimacy of existing states is questionable, because most of them were created arbitrarily (if not capriciously) by European imperialism, and their borders often do not even coincide with ethnic boundaries … These states have divided the Arab nation. On the other hand, a pan-Arab state has never been realized.” Some have even described certain Arab states as nothing more than “tribes with flags,” adhering to “small cliques and great faith”—the small cliques being tribes and the great faith being Islam—while identification with the nation-state has remained persistently absent. This characterization is not entirely accurate, but it vividly reveals the confusion over “who am I” in the construction of Arab identity.

In terms of economic character, culture influences the economic development drive of a state and its people, and affects the resources and means available for safeguarding national security. Economic strength and national security do not necessarily correlate positively. During the First Sino-Japanese War, China’s GDP exceeded Japan’s, and China possessed the Beiyang Fleet, reputed to be “the strongest in Asia,” yet was defeated by Japan. The oil-producing states of the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are awash in wealth, yet depend to a large extent on American security guarantees to effectively counter external security threats. From another angle, however, we must also acknowledge that the level of economic development directly affects the resources and means a state has available for safeguarding national security. The Great Depression was an important factor in triggering the Second World War; the stagnation of economic development, which undermined the legitimacy of Communist Party of the Soviet Union rule and provoked social discontent, was an important cause of the Soviet Union’s disintegration; and the political turbulence and fragmentation of India in the 1970s and 1980s was also related to the weakness of domestic economic development at the time, which exacerbated contradictions among different groups. Simply put, “money isn’t everything, but without money you can do nothing.” “Money” does not necessarily convert into “guns,” but “guns” require “money” to be produced. In a situation where large-scale military conflict among great powers (especially those that actually possess nuclear weapons) is virtually impossible, the contest of economic strength is of paramount importance to national security.

The correlation between cultural national character and economic development is very strong. The German thinker Max Weber argued: “If we can learn anything from economic history, it is that culture makes all the difference.” In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he proposed that the rationality, diligence, and strong sense of time characteristic of Protestants promoted the flourishing of modern capitalism. The collective rise of East Asian economies beginning in the 1970s, and the pivotal role of overseas Chinese in the economic life of Southeast Asia, prompted reflection on the relationship between Confucian culture and economic development. In 1968, the Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal published Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, a work that had taken him ten years to complete; one of its conclusions was that “cultural factors deeply influenced by religion are the main obstacles to modernization in South Asia.”

Discussions of economic and social development in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa have also frequently attributed outcomes to cultural factors. For example, in 1979, Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel laureate in literature, argued that whether or not a country had undergone religious reformation—and the political and social transformations that followed from it—was an important reason for the different rates of development between North American and Latin American countries. Even within a single country, different ethnic groups with different cultural backgrounds exhibit different levels of development. In the United States, for example, Hispanic Americans and African Americans occupy disadvantaged positions in terms of social status, income, and access to higher education. Lawrence Harrison, a Harvard professor who served as an advisor to USAID on Latin American and Asian affairs and authored works including Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind, The Pan-American Dream, and The End of Multiculturalism, cut to the heart of the matter: after decades of America’s “Great Society” vision and “War on Poverty,” why does poverty persist? Why do 30% of Hispanic Americans and 27% of Black Americans still live below the poverty line? His answer: cultural values. David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, argued that if one takes cultural factors into account, one should not be surprised by the economic achievements of postwar Japan and Germany. Of course, many factors influence the level of economic development of different states and peoples. We acknowledge that different cultures influence different levels of economic development, but we do not simplistically or mechanically equate culture with economic development levels, and we must not fall into the trap of “racial hierarchy” promoted by certain countries. Highlighting the relationship between culture and the economic character of a nation is intended to emphasize “cultural genes” while also calling for “critical cultural inheritance”—preserving what is valuable and discarding what is not—so as to maintain the currency and progressiveness of culture.

In terms of diplomatic character, cultural characteristics determine the strategic culture of different states and peoples, and influence foreign policy and national security. Looking across the history of American foreign policy, “expansionism” or “exporting values outward” is one of its defining features. Its cultural genes can be traced back to the cultural construction of “God’s chosen people” and “American exceptionalism” that took shape after American independence, which has given its foreign policy a strong sense of “religious mission.” From the “Monroe Doctrine” of the nineteenth century to “Wilsonianism” after World War I, to “leader of the free world” after World War II, and then to the increasingly prominent human rights diplomacy and humanitarian intervention of the post-Cold War era, the United States has consistently cast itself as a “savior nation” and a “model” for the peoples of other countries. In 1941, Henry Luce—founder and owner of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines—declared: “America is the source of the ideals of freedom and justice; on the premise that only America knows what is best for other peoples, America will function as a benevolent hegemon, or a paternal authority.” Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also observed that no country is as prone as the United States to “wishfully believing that American values are universally applicable.” However, this American strategic culture of diplomacy, while endowing its foreign policy with a strong sense of values and moral appeal—and in certain historical periods establishing its position as the world’s hegemon—has also, through its hegemonic conduct of imposing on others what others do not want, provoked resentment in many countries and even triggered regional conflicts, affecting the national security of both the United States itself and other countries. The most glaring examples are the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War: what the United States brought to those countries was not “peace and prosperity” but conflict and internal strife.

Culture has also had a profound influence on Russia’s external strategy and national security. Huntington described Russia as a “torn country.” The powerful influence of Byzantium, the long Mongol domination, the proletarian ideology of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Slavic national pride are all intertwined and mutually influential, giving Russia a distinctive strategic culture. The Russian scholar Nikolai Berdyaev observed in his book The Russian Idea: “Russia is an extraordinarily special country, combining the two great worlds of East and West. In the Russian spirit, Eastern and Western elements are forever locked in struggle.” Russia’s coat of arms features a sharp-eyed “double-headed eagle,” which vividly captures Russia’s gaze and choices between East and West. Moreover, the historical memory of invasion by foreign peoples, combined with the messianic spirit of Eastern Orthodoxy, has given Russian external strategy a strong sense of crisis and expansionism. This also explains why the military and other power ministries have always occupied an important position in Russia’s power structure: as the “barrel of the gun” and the “handle of the knife,” the power ministries are an important force for Russia whether in resisting foreign enemies or in external expansion. Furthermore, the Russian people demonstrated remarkable endurance and resilience in resisting the iron heel of Napoleon and Hitler, yet were unable to prevent the thunderous collapse of the Soviet Union. As Likhachev lamented in Reflections on Russia: “The Russian people are a people of extremes, capable of swiftly and suddenly swinging from one end to the other. This is a people whose history is unpredictable.”

Why Must the Red Flag Not Fall?

On December 25, 1991, in the depths of winter on Moscow’s Red Square, the hammer-and-sickle flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics slowly descended from the flagpole of the Kremlin, replaced by the white, blue, and red tricolor of the Russian Federation. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had “founded the state” with more than 200,000 members, “defended the state” with more than 2 million members, yet collapsed with more than 20 million members. The once-superpower Soviet Union exited the stage of history in such a tragic manner, leaving people to sigh with sorrow.


＜ Moscow citizens commemorate the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution

On the same day, U.S. President George Bush issued a statement declaring: “The United States welcomes and supports the historic choices made by the new Commonwealth of Independent States nations in favor of freedom … Although these events may cause instability and chaos, they clearly serve our national interests.” In this ideological struggle, the United States had achieved ultimate victory. The American scholar Fukuyama even advanced the “End of History” thesis, arguing that “Western liberal democracy has achieved final victory, and no ideological force can any longer challenge Western liberal democracy.”

The disintegration of the Soviet Union dealt a fundamental blow to the international configuration, and can be said to be one of the most important “national security events” of the twentieth century. Many explanations have been offered for the causes of the Soviet Union’s collapse—economic, religious, and ethnic. But there is no doubt that the United States’ sustained ideological offensive against the Soviet Union played a very important role. The American scholar Berkowitz observed in his book The Politics of American Foreign Policy: “It can be said with confidence that almost every major American foreign policy decision in the postwar period was a response to some perceived or actual communist threat.” A Chinese scholar put it even more pointedly: “The United States is one of the most ideologically driven countries in the contemporary world, and communist doctrine and values represent the most complete and powerful ideological challenge the United States has encountered since its founding. Therefore, from the perspective of national survival, the American response to the communist movement and its ideology has been more sensitive, more intense, and at times even more hysterical than that of other capitalist countries.”

From the perspective of the ideological sphere, what is the relationship between culture and national security? At the end of the eighteenth century, the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy first coined the term “ideology,” whose original meaning was “the science of ideas.” In the early nineteenth century, ideology gradually became linked to national security. Some scholars have found that when Napoleon’s military campaigns ran into difficulties and his position at home and abroad was weakened, he would blame the influence of “ideologues,” criticizing them as “destroyers of order, religion, and the state.” Subsequently, many political scientists and philosophers assigned different definitions to ideology, giving rise to various “isms” such as liberalism, fascism, chauvinism, and Marxism. Ideology transformed from an originally “neutral term” into a term carrying strong political coloring. Collisions, confrontations, and conflicts among various ideologies intensified, intertwined with ethnic and class contradictions, and their relationship with national security grew ever closer.

During World War II, U.S. President Roosevelt declared that “our security depends on our ability to speak to other nations and win their support,” and promoted the establishment of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, the Voice of America, and the Bureau of International Information and Cultural Affairs, among others, to strengthen the promotion of American values abroad. After World War II ended, some right-wing scholars advanced the so-called “end of ideology” to attack the socialist ideology that was then very attractive internationally; works such as The Captive Mind and The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties were representative of this period. These arguments aimed to “strangle” ideological debate and highlight Western liberal institutions as the ultimate institutions of human society—a point entirely consistent with the “End of History” thesis that emerged after the Cold War. Hans Morgenthau wrote in his 1948 book Politics Among Nations: “The aspiration for power on the part of nations is cloaked in the guise of ideology.”

The ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was extremely intense—a struggle over the life and death of political systems. On this point, the United States saw things very clearly. In the American view, the combination of ideological fervor and military strength made the Soviet Union a grave threat to Western Europe, and the United States should “rescue the world from totalitarianism.” In March 1947, Truman delivered the speech that marked the birth of the “Truman Doctrine,” declaring that the world faced “a choice between two ways of life”: “The first way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.” President Reagan, in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament, called for “launching a crusade for freedom against Soviet totalitarianism,” and subsequently publicly described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Nixon, in his book 1999: Victory Without War, argued that “in the end, it is ideas rather than weapons that determine history,” and that “if we lose the struggle in the ideological sphere, all our weapons, treaties, trade, foreign aid, and cultural exchanges will be meaningless.”

So how did the United States use cultural weapons to gradually undermine Soviet ideology? The former Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, Ryzhkov, in his book The Great Tragedy: The Causes and Consequences of the Soviet Union’s Disintegration, exposed how the United States used means such as fomenting ethnic contradictions, supporting the Catholic Church, backing dissidents, smearing Soviet leaders, and spreading political rumors to tarnish the image of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union among the Soviet people. The British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders, after conducting an in-depth investigation, published The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, exposing how the CIA conducted sustained ideological infiltration of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European socialist allies through establishing non-governmental organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funding anti-communist publications, sponsoring scholarly visits, and organizing seminars. The CIA focused on identifying and cultivating disillusioned and frustrated left-wing intellectuals, particularly those who had joined the communist movement and later left it—such as George Orwell, whose works Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were even made into films with CIA funding. Michael Waller observed in The Public Diplomacy Reader: “Books are like ships, with the hardest armor, the longest cruising range, and the most powerful firepower.”

Most alarming of all, however, was the United States’ success in “brainwashing” Soviet intellectuals and even some leaders with decision-making authority. Allen Dulles, who later became CIA Director, said as early as 1945: “The human brain, human consciousness, can be changed. As long as we muddle the brain, we can imperceptibly change people’s values and force them to believe in a set of substituted values. We must find within the Soviet Union people who share our ideology, people who will be our allies.” Between 1963 and 1964, a series of hearings by the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs were compiled into a volume titled Winning the Cold War: The U.S. Ideological Offensive. The report argued: “Through the medium of communications technology and tools, it is possible to reach important and influential segments of other countries’ populations, thereby conveying messages to them, influencing their attitudes, and even successfully inducing them to take certain decisive actions. These groups then have the capacity to exert considerable influence on their governments.”

Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 provided the United States with an ideal opportunity to “brainwash” the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev first proposed the concept of “comprehensive reform” in 1986, and in November 1987 simultaneously published English and Russian editions of Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, marking the shift of his reform drive from the economic sphere to the political sphere. Driven by Gorbachev’s “humane, democratic socialism,” a powerful wave of historical nihilism swept through Soviet society. Certain forces, under the banner of “reassessing history,” questioned, distorted, and repudiated the history of Marxism and the Soviet socialist revolution and construction, triggering ideological confusion throughout Soviet society. The Russian scholar Sergei Kara-Murza pointed out in his book Manipulation of Consciousness that the West “invaded” the “cultural core” of Soviet society, bewitching it into doubting and gradually repudiating the legitimacy of the socialist system; some leaders tolerated and even directly advocated pluralism in guiding ideology, further exacerbating ideological confusion within the Party. As a witness and participant in the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the former Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, Ryzhkov, lamented: “Without an internal fifth column that actually pursued the goals set by the Soviet Union’s enemies, no external force alone could have done anything to our country.” Yet “(Gorbachev’s) reform sent the message to the people that the entire Soviet system was to be condemned, as if Soviet ideology were the enemy of reform; Gorbachev even actively asked the West to help the Soviet Union carry out reform.” From the collapse of ideology to the loss of state power, the Soviet Union’s disintegration confirmed Marx’s words: “The dissolution of a particular ideology is sufficient to bring down an entire era.”

After the Cold War ended, the ideological struggle did not cease. The West continued to promote its values and ideas globally, and many developing countries copied and blindly transplanted Western institutions, developing a “culture shock syndrome” that was out of step with their own stage of development and divorced from their own national conditions. In some countries, indigenous forces resisted Western values and institutions, leading to political fragmentation and increasing political instability. Huntington argued: “The West is and will continue to try to maintain its predominance and protect its interests by identifying its interests with those of the ‘world community.'” But “what is universalism to Westerners is imperialism to non-Westerners.” Although the “Clash of Civilizations” that Huntington described is intertwined with ideological conflict, banners such as “human rights,” “democracy,” “religious freedom,” and even “counter-terrorism” have all become slogans used by the West to politically promote its universal values. From Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” to Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip Revolution,” and the turbulence in West Asia and North Africa triggered by Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution,” the various color revolutions are a vivid illustration of the intensity of the current struggle in the ideological sphere.

In the eyes of many right-wing conservative forces in the West, socialist China is a political “alien” and a “thorn in their side.” As Comrade Deng Xiaoping pointed out: “Perhaps one Cold War has ended, but two others have already begun. One is directed against the entire South, the Third World; the other is directed against socialism. Western countries are waging a Third World War without gunpowder. ‘Without gunpowder’ means they want socialist countries to undergo peaceful evolution.” After the Cold War, successive U.S. administrations, though varying in their methods, have never abandoned the policy of “peaceful evolution” toward China and attempting to “change China.” After the Trump administration came to power, the U.S. government explicitly designated China as a “revisionist state” and “strategic competitor” in official documents, adopting a whole-of-government strategy to contain China across diplomatic, economic, techno-scientific, military, and even cultural and people-to-people spheres. The RAND Corporation’s April 2018 research report Modern Political Warfare went so far as to call on the United States to wage effective “political warfare” against China in order to achieve “ultimate victory” in the ideological contest. Against this backdrop, certain anti-China forces in the United States have used various pretexts—religion, human rights, and others—to exploit issues related to Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to interfere in China’s internal affairs, intensifying ideological infiltration and regime-subversion activities against China. Political turbulence and regime change can happen overnight, but the evolution of thought is a long-term process. The painful lesson of the Soviet Union’s disintegration—caused by its failure to hold the ideological line—remains vivid in memory, and the ideological offensive of anti-China forces must be guarded against.

The Invisible Border

In the 1993 Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, in response to American demands that Europe open its market to cultural products, France formally advanced the principle of “cultural exception,” emphasizing that cultural products should be excluded from trade negotiations—a position that won the support of all EU member states. The backdrop was that, as France’s composite national strength declined, France faced not only the diminishing status of the French language internationally but also the impact of American culture on its domestic culture, arousing intense concern among thoughtful people across French society. Media reports at the time indicated that American films accounted for nearly 80% of the French domestic film market. As the heartland of the European continental Renaissance, France has always placed great importance on preserving and promoting its own culture, treating this as an important means of safeguarding French sovereign independence, integrity, and unity. In fact, it is not only France—all the world’s major powers attach great importance to protecting the independence of their own cultures. China, the United States, Russia, Germany, Japan, and South Korea have all formulated corresponding cultural protection and promotion policies.

This touches on the concept of “cultural sovereignty.” Cultural sovereignty is an important component of state sovereignty—the expression of state sovereignty in the cultural sphere. Culture is the foundation of national identity; only by safeguarding cultural sovereignty can one provide a powerful spiritual core for state sovereignty. The state is the carrier of cultural sovereignty; without national unification, how can cultural sovereignty be properly maintained? Therefore, only with cultural independence can there be national independence and state independence. If a state loses its cultural sovereignty, no matter how developed its economy or how powerful its military, it is nothing more than a “clay-footed giant without a soul.” Max Weber observed in “The Nation State and Economic Policy”: “The nation-state is by no means merely a superstructure, merely the organization and ‘fiction’ of the ruling class; on the contrary, the nation-state rests on deep psychological foundations. These foundations exist among the broadest strata of the population (including those who are economically and politically oppressed). It is just that under normal circumstances this political instinct is only deposited in the unconscious layer of the masses. … For this very reason, the special function of the economic and political leadership class is to become the bearer of national political consciousness.”

Throughout history, the expansion of power has always brought cultural aggression, and there are many examples of states losing national security and even state sovereignty as a result of losing cultural sovereignty. The French author Alphonse Daudet’s “The Last Lesson,” well known to Chinese readers, is a fine example. Written from the perspective of a truant schoolboy, it tells the poignant story of schools in French territories ceded after the Franco-Prussian War being forbidden to teach French. As one scholar has noted, “the rise and fall of a state is often accompanied by the rise and fall of its language and writing. The decline and destruction of a state is often accompanied by the decline and destruction of its language and writing.” In the course of Western colonial expansion, many colonized states and peoples lost their cultural sovereignty, with lasting negative consequences that persist to this day. Many colonized states achieved political independence but failed to win cultural independence; the colonizers’ influence in religion, language, and education proved impossible to shake off, and the colonizers’ languages remain the official languages of many formerly colonized states. This inevitably creates a gulf between the elite groups who have absorbed the colonizers’ culture and the broad masses of the people who have absorbed indigenous culture, which is not conducive to long-term stability and order. Take our neighbor India, for example: English, as an official language, is widely used among the elite, which, while providing the convenience of “connecting” with the West, has also created a vast psychological gulf between the Westernized elite and the indigenous elite, and between the Westernized elite and the broad masses of ordinary people who do not know English.

Taking China as another example: the crisis of state sovereignty that China experienced from the late Qing dynasty onward was, to a large extent, a crisis of cultural sovereignty. Under what Li Hongzhang described as “great changes unseen in three thousand years,” China was assailed in its political, economic, and cultural dimensions by the great powers. The traditional civil service system, the system of ritual and law, and the educational system all came under fierce assault, with an impact exceeding that of any dynastic change in history. One Chinese scholar argued in the book Cultural Sovereignty and State Cultural Soft Power: “Compared with political crises and social crises confined to a particular time and place, this crisis of cultural identity was undoubtedly far more profound. The historical pattern in which dynasties changed but culture endured was clearly no longer sustainable; even the practice of distinguishing political identification from cultural identification—whereby one might not identify with a particular dynasty yet still identify with the tradition of Chinese culture—was no longer viable, because the legitimate foundations for the existence of ‘Chinese culture’ had ceased to exist.” “When this cultural hierarchy (the West strong, we weak) was internalized into the subconscious of the Chinese people, China could no longer find the image of the highly self-confident Tang dynasty culture; moreover, as the ‘New Culture Movement’ unfolded, the critical thrust of wholesale repudiation and abolition of the Chinese cultural tradition represented, more than anything else, the historic loss of China’s cultural soft power and self-confidence, and even the comprehensive collapse of China’s cultural sovereignty.” In the first half of the twentieth century, as the movement for national salvation and survival reached its peak, this debate over China’s cultural sovereignty reached its climax, concentrated in the contest between the paths of “wholesale Westernization” and “indigenous culture.” Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Chen Duxiu, and others were all representatives of the “New Culture Movement.” In his 1929 essay “Cultural Conflicts in China Today,” Hu Shi wrote: “We must acknowledge that we are inferior to others in every respect—not only in material technology and machinery, not only in political institutions, but also in morality, knowledge, literature, music, art, and physical constitution.” “Do not fear losing our own culture.”

Chapter One

This debate ultimately moved toward a path of seeking a synthesis of Chinese and Western elements, and with the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the independence and integrity of state sovereignty powerfully guaranteed cultural sovereignty, while the establishment of cultural sovereignty in turn helped safeguard the independence and integrity of state sovereignty.

After the Cold War ended, under the impact of globalization, informatization, and social media, the status of “state sovereignty” was for a time weakened. The cultural sovereignty of nation-states was undermined to varying degrees and even faced existential crises, with some scholars even speaking of the arrival of “the twilight of sovereignty.” But decades have passed, and the sovereign state remains the most important participant in international affairs, with cultural sovereignty still constituting an important component of state sovereignty. Although on the surface the struggle over cultural sovereignty appears less intense than the struggle over political sovereignty and economic sovereignty, the struggle over cultural sovereignty is in essence also a contest of political sovereignty and power among states. Under certain historical conditions, the struggle over cultural sovereignty can even manifest in very sharp and intense forms. From the perspective of national security, the struggle over cultural sovereignty is clearly expressed at two levels: how to respond to the impact of external cultures and resist “cultural hegemonism”; and how to maintain the unity of multi-ethnic states and prevent “ethnic separatism.”

The relationship between “cultural sovereignty” and “cultural hegemony” is reflected both in developing countries’ resistance to “cultural invasion” by developed countries, and in developed countries’ defense of the primacy of their own cultures. On one hand, the advantages accumulated by the Western developed countries represented by the United States in language, information, capital, and power enable them to promote their values and way of life more forcefully to developing countries around the world, and even to create value symbols that serve their political purposes. From the low politics of food, clothing, entertainment, and film and television, to the high politics of political concepts and social institutions, developing countries are all subject to the influence and impact of the dominant cultures of developed countries. Particularly in the information age, cultural elements have been informatized, networked, and digitized, making the advantages of developed countries in cultural dissemination and cultural infiltration even more pronounced.

Of course, in the face of the “cultural hegemony” of developed countries, developing countries are by no means “sitting ducks.” Comrade Deng Xiaoping long ago emphasized: “Some Western countries use pretexts such as human rights and the alleged illegitimacy of the socialist system to actually undermine our state sovereignty,” and “state sovereignty is far more important than human rights.” For if a state loses its “state sovereignty,” how can it speak of political independence and economic development? Therefore, many developing countries, after their own economic and techno-scientific strength has grown, or after attempts to adopt Western values and institutions have failed, turn toward protecting and revitalizing their own traditional cultures, giving rise to various forms of “traditional cultural revival fever.” The British historian Michael Howard argued: “One Western assumption is that cultural diversity is a particular historical phenomenon that is rapidly being eroded by a common, Western-oriented, English-based world culture that shapes our basic values … But this assumption is fundamentally untrue.” Even Huntington, while worrying that “Asian self-assertion” and “the Islamic resurgence” might affect Western hegemony, was compelled to acknowledge that “it is immoral to insist that non-Western peoples adopt Western values, institutions, and culture,” and that “in the coming era, to avoid a civilizational war, core states should refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations. But the fact is that some countries, especially the United States, will undoubtedly find this unacceptable.”

Furthermore, cultural competition exists even among developed countries. Non-English-speaking countries in particular strive to defend their own “cultural sovereignty” and avoid excessive erosion by English-language culture. Taking France as an example: externally, France upholds the “cultural exception” principle in trade and investment negotiations, restricts the import of American cultural products, and actively promotes the French language and French culture through the Alliance Française, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, the Académie française, and Radio France Internationale, as well as by subsidizing the export of French books and films. Domestically, France was the first country in the world to adopt legislation protecting historic buildings; through laws such as the French Museums Act and the pilot law on the decentralization of historic buildings to the provinces, it protects its national historical and cultural heritage. France has also enacted the Freedom of Communication Act, the Act on the Use of the French Language, and the Broadcasting Quota Act, among others, to expand the use of French as the national language. Under relevant laws, at least 40% of songs broadcast on French radio must be in French; the use of foreign languages in radio and television programs (other than foreign-language programs) is prohibited; and publications within France must include a French-language summary. Former French President Chirac once criticized the United States for “spreading characterless cultural garbage around the world,” warning that “if there is only a single language and a single culture, humanity will face a genuine cultural ecological catastrophe.” It has also been reported that, at the initiative of the United States, Poland hosted a conference in 2000 attended by representatives of 107 “democratic countries” on the theme of “Toward a Community of Democracies,” which adopted the Warsaw Declaration promoting democratic values. France, however, refused to sign the declaration and criticized the United States for treating democracy as a “religion” and “trying to force other countries to convert to this religion.” France was of course not opposed to the so-called democratic system; it simply did not wish to become an American “sidekick.” Similar to France are other developed countries whose mother tongue is not English, such as Japan and Germany. Japan proposed as early as the 1980s the concept that “cultural security construction is closely related to national strategy,” against a backdrop that included the enormous impact of American cultural “individualism” on Japan’s traditional “collectivism”; former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, in Globalization and the Reconstruction of Morality, argued: “Protecting one’s own linguistic tradition is a matter of life and death … Europeans and Germans must proceed with caution to prevent globalization from eroding our own language and culture.”

Also related to “cultural sovereignty” and national security is the problem of “ethnic separatism,” which severs the relationship between “ethnicity” and “the national people.” This encompasses both the problem of certain ethnic minorities within multi-ethnic states excessively exaggerating the cultural distinctiveness of their own ethnicity and pursuing ethnic autonomy or ethnic secession, and the pan-nationalist activities of certain trans-state ethnic groups seeking to break through the boundaries of existing sovereign states.

Within multi-ethnic states, due to long and complex historical reasons, the political, economic, and social status of different ethnic groups may differ, and even the geographical environments in which they live may not be the same; many issues require coordination and balancing at the state level. However, some ethnic groups excessively exaggerate the cultural distinctiveness of their own ethnicity, refuse to recognize the “cultural sovereignty” of the sovereign state, stir up the cultural differences and antagonisms between themselves and other ethnic groups, and even advance demands for “national self-determination,” threatening national security. In the 1950s and 1960s, a high tide of national independence movements emerged internationally, with many Asian, African, and Latin American countries winning national independence movements against colonial rule—movements that were undoubtedly progressive in significance. But the so-called “national self-determination” wave after the Cold War was entirely different: many of these movements used the banner of “national self-determination” to pursue ethnic secession, posing a serious threat to the security of state sovereignty. After the Cold War ended, contradictions among ethnic groups within sovereign states that held different religious beliefs and possessed different cultures erupted in concentrated fashion. According to incomplete statistics, between 1990 and 2007, ethnic separatism gave rise to 25 internationally recognized new states, causing major changes to the world map. Other scholars estimate that more than 5,000 ethnic groups worldwide aspire to become national peoples, and more than 260 non-sovereign or non-dominant ethnic groups hope to establish nation-states. If every ethnic group were to pursue self-determination, would the world not descend into utter chaos?

Taking the Soviet and Eastern European region as an example: the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave rise to Chechen separatist forces. Chechen separatist armed groups drafted a “Chechen Declaration of Independence” in June 1991 and refused to sign the treaty joining the Russian Federation in March 1992. In December 1994, Russia launched a full-scale military offensive against Chechnya; the subsequent Chechen Wars consumed enormous political, economic, and diplomatic resources, and Chechen terrorists even carried out multiple major terrorist attacks in Moscow and other large cities, severely damaging Russian national security. Taking Yugoslavia as another example: once an important member of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77, it fell into conflict and turmoil triggered by ethnic fragmentation after the Cold War ended, splitting into six states—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia—and giving rise to the Bosnian War and the Kosovo War. Even European countries outside the Soviet and Eastern European region, such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain, face separatist demands from different cultural groups within their borders—for example, the Scottish question in the United Kingdom, the contradictions between the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking regions of Belgium, and the Catalonia question in Spain. On October 1, 2017, the Catalan regional government held an “independence referendum,” and on October 27 of that year declared independence, causing an international uproar. China also faces separatist forces that repudiate the “cultural sovereignty” status of the Chinese nation, exaggerate the distinctiveness of language, religion, and ethnicity, seek support from external forces, and have even become accomplices of the United States in interfering in China’s internal affairs and undermining China’s national security.

Furthermore, “pan-nationalism” that crosses the political boundaries of sovereign states also constitutes an infringement on a state’s “cultural sovereignty” and national security. “Pan-nationalist” elements attempt to use shared cultural memories of language, religion, and history to unite the same ethnic group scattered across several states or a particular region into “one body,” with the aim of reviving old empires or establishing new political unions—in practice causing the fragmentation of existing sovereign states. A highly representative example is “Pan-Turkism.” Pan-Turkism advocates uniting the Turkic-speaking peoples within Turkey, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, China, and the Central Asian states into a single entity to establish a “Greater Turkestan.” This current of thought took shape in the early twentieth century, spread widely in Turkey and Central Asia during World War I, became a variant of fascism in Turkey during World War II, and during the Cold War served as a geopolitical weapon for the West against the Soviet Union. After the Cold War ended, Pan-Turkism was revived, eagerly seeking to fill the ideological and geopolitical vacuum in Central Asia. Turkey promoted a Turkic states summit in 1992, and the then-Turkish leader publicly declared: “We have common roots; we are branches of the same great tree. If we can seize this historic opportunity and avoid mistakes, we can turn the twenty-first century into the century of the Turkic peoples.” Because culture and politics are difficult to fully separate, this “pan-nationalism” that transcends sovereign states inevitably endangers national security. The political and academic circles of Central Asian states, as well as ordinary citizens, have a base of support for Pan-Turkism, but the leaders and thoughtful members of society in these countries remain vigilant toward it. The combination of Pan-Turkism with Pan-Islamism in particular poses a challenge to the national security of various states. After the “color revolutions” of 2005, relations between Central Asian states and Turkey cooled for a time.

Only When Culture Flourishes Can the State Be Secure

The world today is in the midst of the Great Changes Unseen in a Century, with geopolitical competition, populist politics, non-traditional security threats, and technological development all intertwined. The connotations and extensions of national security are growing ever richer. We must firmly establish the Total National Security Paradigm, learn from history and from the experience of others, properly handle the relationship between culture and national security, and actively advance the building of a socialist cultural power.

First, we must integrate our approach to culture and other security factors. Comrade Deng Xiaoping once astutely observed: “Whether China can withstand the pressure of hegemonism and power politics and uphold our socialist system depends crucially on whether we can achieve a relatively fast rate of growth and realize our development strategy.” General Secretary Xi Jinping has also emphasized: “We need both hard power and soft power. We must earnestly do the central work well and provide a solid material foundation for ideological work, while also earnestly doing ideological work well and providing a strong guarantee for the central work. We must neither neglect ideological work because of the central work, nor allow ideological work to drift away from the central work.”

Culture is an important component of a state’s soft power, complementing and dialectically unified with hard power such as military and economic strength. Culture always follows power: a state or people that has lost its cultural sovereignty and lacks national spirit, no matter how heavily armed or how wealthy, will find it difficult to stand tall among the world’s peoples. But culture that lacks the support of hard power will also see its appeal weaken, making it difficult to effectively safeguard national security. The global advance of socialist thought after World War II was inseparable from the Soviet Union’s great victory in the war and its rapid postwar economic development; the Soviet Union’s disintegration was also related to the weakening of ideological appeal caused by its sluggish economic development. The new wave of Islamic revival that began in the 1970s was driven in part by the “petrodollars” of the oil-producing states of the Middle East; but for many Islamic states, without sustainable economic development and improved state governance capacity as a foundation, their religious revival can easily “go off the rails,” and the potential threat to national security should not be underestimated. The global spread of American culture is also backed by powerful military, financial, and techno-scientific strength.

Second, we must integrate our approach to the national character of culture and its universal dimensions. Culture has a very strong national character, but excessive emphasis on the national character of culture may lead to narrow nationalism or chauvinism. Culture has a certain universal dimension, but using the banner of “universal values” to advance a self-serving political agenda will also provoke international disputes. Against the current backdrop of rising “de-globalization” and populism, we have a particular need to properly handle the relationship between the national character and the universal dimensions of culture. As early as 1944, Comrade Mao Zedong said: “Our attitude is to critically accept our own historical heritage and foreign thought. We are opposed to both blind acceptance and blind rejection of any thought. We Chinese must use our own heads to think and decide what can grow in our own soil.”

On one hand, we must continue to uphold and promote excellent traditional culture, and strengthen cultural self-awareness and cultural self-confidence. A people that abandons or betrays its own historical culture will not only fail to develop, but may very well stage a historical tragedy. On the other hand, we must also persist in “opening our eyes to the world” and in learning from and drawing on the world’s advanced cultures. We must abandon the “ostrich policy” and “isolation,” and instead, with broad-mindedness and steadfast self-confidence, not forget our origins, absorb what comes from outside, and face the future—developing and strengthening ourselves through openness. Wang Guowei once said: “Chinese and Western learning flourish together and decline together; once the winds of exchange have opened, they mutually promote each other.” The Dutch scholar C.A. van Peursen also observed in Cultural Strategy: “Both biological and human historical experience has shown us that all closed systems inevitably become outdated; therefore, in the present era, cultures must become open systems.”

Third, we must uphold the political character of culture and properly safeguard cultural sovereignty and ideological predominance. There is no culture in the world that is pure and untainted; culture is connected to specific historical contexts, political institutions, and national consciousness. Edward Said observed in Culture and Imperialism: “Culture is a theater where various political and ideological forces contend. Far from being a placid realm of Apollonian gentility, culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another.” The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the upheaval in Eastern Europe are painful lessons in “not speaking politics” in the cultural sphere. Many developing countries, because they blindly placed their faith in Western ideology and social institutions, found that the transplanted political institutions suffered from “culture shock,” resulting in political turbulence, economic stagnation, and even ethnic conflict. France’s “cultural exception” and Russia’s reconstruction of “the Russian idea” are both steadfast defenses of their own cultural sovereignty.

China possesses a culture that is ancient, widely disseminated, and systematically complete, and upholds the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics—something that is bound to cause psychological discomfort in certain quarters. Both the “China threat theory” and the “China collapse theory” reflect this anxiety, suspicion, and even fear. After the United States designated China as a “strategic competitor,” certain anti-China forces in the United States have further hyped up the “contest of systems” between China and the United States, advocated “political warfare” against China, and vigorously advanced ideological infiltration of China. For this very reason, we need to steadfastly defend cultural sovereignty and ideological predominance through measures such as promoting excellent traditional culture, protecting cultural heritage, developing cultural industries, fostering the flourishing of philosophy and the social sciences, and strengthening Core Socialist Values. We must absolutely not “revere everything foreign,” “find beauty only in the foreign,” or “follow only the foreign.” We must absolutely not be enamored of “de-ideologization,” “de-valorization,” “de-historicization,” “de-Sinicization,” or “de-mainstreaming.” We must absolutely not engage in historical nihilism.

Finally, we must uphold the developmental character of culture and adapt to the practical needs of national security. Culture has a very strong temporal character; only culture that continuously develops and innovates is culture with vitality, and only such culture can better promote national security. China was once the world’s most advanced civilized state, but the late Qing government’s cultural conservatism and blind arrogance led to a cultural crisis and a sovereignty crisis—a century of humiliation. Standing at a new historical starting point, we need both to draw nourishment from the excellent traditional culture of the Chinese nation, providing rich cultural sustenance for the building of a modern state, and to cultivate and strengthen a culture suited to the development of the times. For example, we need to confidently summarize the achievements of reform and development since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,

enrich and deepen the connotations of socialist culture; we need to adapt to the developmental characteristics of the internet age and cultivate a cyber ideology conducive to national security; and we need to combine the development of the times with China’s contributions, steadily enhancing China’s discursive power on the international stage.

Chapter One

References

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