E016. East Asian Analysis III: Iso-Modernities of China

The Structural Parallels Between European and Chinese Intellectual History, and What External Powers Miss About Xi Jinping's China

I. The Question

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a confident European answer existed to the question of why China had "failed" to become modern. Hegel had announced that China lay "outside the World's History"; Marx had filed it under the "Asiatic mode of production"; Weber had diagnosed an absent Protestant ethic; Wittfogel had reduced it to hydraulic despotism. The "stagnant Orient" was less a finding than a methodological commitment — a constitutive feature of how the West theorized its own ascent.[^1]

The diagnosis has not survived recent scholarship. Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence (2000) demonstrated that as late as 1750, life expectancy, consumption, market efficiency, and ecological pressures in the Lower Yangzi were broadly comparable to those of Northwest Europe; the divergence after 1800 was driven by coincidence (English coal seams, New World ecological windfalls), not by deep civilizational superiority.[^2] Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient(1998), R. Bin Wong's China Transformed (1997), and the broader "California School" have reinforced the case. The Kyoto School of Japanese sinology had argued as early as Naitō Konan that the Song dynasty already exhibited features of "early modernity" — urbanization, monetization, civil-service meritocracy, print culture, commercial integration — without external prompting from Europe.[^3]

But the material-historical revisionism is only half the story. The deeper question is intellectual. If late imperial China was not stagnant — if it possessed its own dense, accumulating, self-critical tradition of textual scholarship, philosophy, and political theory — then what does that tradition actually look like? And what relation does it bear to the European trajectory that was treated, by Europeans, as universal?

This essay argues three things.

First, that European and Chinese intellectual history exhibit a striking structural isomorphism: each civilization passes through a recurring sequence of (1) canon formation, (2) accumulated exegesis, (3) inward-subjective revolt, (4) evidential-philological critique, and (5) eschatological reinterpretation — a pattern that is not coincidence but the predictable trajectory of any text-based civilization scrutinizing its own foundations.

Second, that nineteenth-century European modern historiography systematically could not see this isomorphism, because its categorical apparatus was built to detect "absences" relative to a European template rather than presences on their own terms.

Third, that the rapid success of Marxism in China — and the still more striking durability of the contemporary Chinese-Communist synthesis under Xi Jinping — is intelligible only if one understands that Marxism, as transmitted and transformed in China, did not displace traditional intellectual structures but reoccupied their slots. The contemporary substratum of Chinese political thought is therefore not an aberrant deviation from "real" Marxism, nor a thin veneer over an authoritarian state, but a sophisticated layered synthesis in which classical Confucian-Legalist structures, late-Qing reformist eschatology, Maoist voluntarism, and Dengist pragmatism are held together as a working political theology.

The essay closes with an epistemological coda for external observers. If China is currently undertaking a project to make explicit, recover, and weaponize this layered substratum as the foundation of an alternative claim to civilizational universality, then the analytic frameworks that diagnosed nineteenth-century China as "non-modern" are the same frameworks that will misread twenty-first-century China as "merely authoritarian." A new diagnostic vocabulary is required.

II. The Engine: Why Two Civilizations Traced the Same Curve

The conventional way to read parallels between European and Chinese intellectual history is comparativist — to set them side by side and note resemblances. But the deeper claim is structural. Any civilization that establishes a textual canon backed by political power, and that accumulates commentary on that canon over centuries, generates the same internal pressures. These pressures resolve in a predictable sequence:

1. Canonization. A body of texts is invested with sacred or quasi-sacred authority by political consolidation. (For China, the establishment of the Wujing 五經 as state doctrine under Han Wu-di and the boshi 博士 system; for Europe, the closing of the biblical canon under Constantine and the patristic absorption of Greco-Roman classics.)
2. Exegetical accumulation. Commentary multiplies. Glosses on glosses. Authority is mediated through interpretive professionals. (Han xungu 訓詁 scholarship of Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, the Song yishu 義疏 tradition; the patristic-scholastic glossa ordinaria, the summae of Aquinas and others.)
3. Inward-subjective revolt. When the accumulated apparatus begins to feel calcified, a generation revolts inward, locating truth in the immediate experience of the individual mind or conscience rather than in textual mediation. (Wang Yangming's 王陽明 doctrine of liangzhi 良知 and "unity of knowledge and action" 知行合一; Luther's sola scriptura and freedom of conscience; further back, German mysticism — Eckhart's Seelenfunken — and Quaker "inner light.")
4. Evidential-philological critique. The inward turn produces, in its wake, a counter-reaction toward rigor. Where the inward school is felt to have collapsed into subjectivism, a new generation insists on textual evidence, philological precision, and the empirical reconstruction of original meanings. (Qing kaozheng 考證: Gu Yanwu 顧炎武, Yan Ruoju 閻若璩, Dai Zhen 戴震, Duan Yucai 段玉裁; Renaissance humanism: Valla, Erasmus; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Wissenschaft: F. A. Wolf, Niebuhr, Strauss, Wellhausen.)
5. Eschatological reinterpretation. The cumulative effect of textual criticism is corrosive to traditional authority. To prevent total disenchantment, an intellectually ambitious reading of the now-criticized canon is mounted — one that reads sacred history as the unfolding of a developmental, often utopian trajectory of which the present moment is the threshold. (Kang Youwei's 康有為 reading of Confucius as suwang 素王 and reformer, fitting the Chunqiu into a "Three Ages" 三世 model culminating in datong 大同; Joachim of Fiore's three ages of Father, Son, and Spirit, transmitted through Lessing, Schelling, Hegel, Comte, and Marx as a stage-theory of historical development.)

The two paths are not derivative; one did not learn from the other. They are structurally entailed by the dynamics of textual civilizations confronting their own foundations.

Two variables, however, differentiate the outcomes.

The absorption of foreign systems of thought. China absorbed Buddhism through a long sequence — xuanxue 玄學 of the Wei-Jin period, geyi 格義 Buddhism, the Tiantai and Huayan syntheses, Chan 禪, and finally the Song neo-Confucian re-absorption of Buddhist metaphysics into lixue 理學. The result was a digestion: Buddhism was domesticated within a state ideology. Europe absorbed Greek philosophy in a parallel sequence — patristic synthesis, scholasticism, Renaissance humanism — but at the Renaissance and Reformation the Greek philosophical inheritance began to detach itself from theology and form an autonomous secular tradition. Wang Hui has argued that this absorption-versus-detachment difference is decisive: where Europe produced independent philosophy and science as separable institutional fields, China produced an integrated state-classical synthesis whose authority was inseparable from the imperial order.[^4]

The structure of the polity. Chinese shi 士 — the literate class — became state officials through the examination system. Their intellectual labor was thereby integrated into imperial governance. In Europe, by contrast, intellectual labor was distributed across competing institutions: papacy, universities, municipal authorities, princely courts, monastic orders, and (after the Reformation) confessional states. This pluralism was the institutional condition that allowed Luther's inward turn to become a political schism, where Wang Yangming's analogous inward turn was either absorbed by the imperial system or, in its more radical Taizhou 泰州 manifestations (Li Zhi 李贄), suppressed. The structural isomorphism of ideasdid not produce identical political outcomes, because the institutional containers differed.

III. Five Concrete Isomorphisms

Consider each layer of the parallel in more concrete detail.

A. Canon and Patristics

Han Wu-di's establishment of the Wujing boshi in 136 BCE created an institutional framework in which a closed corpus — the Five Classics — was tied to state legitimacy and to the recruitment of office-holders. Three centuries later, the consolidation of the Christian canon at Carthage (397 CE) and the patristic synthesis under Augustine and Jerome performed the analogous function in the Roman world. In both cases, the canonized texts ceased to be merely revered writings and became foundational legal-political instruments. Subsequent centuries of intellectual labor were committed to commentary, harmonization, and pedagogical transmission.

B. Exegesis: 訓詁 and the Glossa Ordinaria

The Han exegetical tradition produced massive commentarial structures — Zheng Xuan's annotations to the Three Rites, the dense zhang-ju 章句 method, and the eventual yishu 義疏 syntheses that became the textbook tradition of the Tang and Song. These were not merely textual aids: they were structures of authority. To dispute the yishu was to dispute the order it underwrote.

In Europe, the glossa ordinaria (begun under Anselm of Laon and others, c. 1100) functioned identically. Marginal and interlinear commentary on the Vulgate became the operative form in which scripture was taught and cited; the high scholastic summae extended the form into systematic theology. As in China, the apparatus eventually became the object — interpreters interpreting interpreters — and the original text receded behind an architecture of mediation.

C. The Inward Turn: Wang Yangming and Luther

The structural similarity between Wang Yangming (1472–1529) and Martin Luther (1483–1546) — near-exact contemporaries — has been remarked on, but its full force is often understated. Wang's central doctrines — the xin ji li 心即理 ("mind is principle"), the zhi liangzhi 致良知 ("extending innate knowledge"), and zhi xing he yi 知行合一 ("unity of knowledge and action") — constitute a systematic attempt to relocate the seat of truth from external authority (the canonical text, the bureaucratic interpreter, the master-disciple chain) to the immediate moral consciousness of the individual.[^5] Luther's parallel moves — sola scriptura read alongside the freedom of conscience, the priesthood of all believers, the rejection of mediating institutions — perform the structurally identical operation.

The Wang Yangming-Luther parallel is not a casual analogy. Both arose from a sense that institutionalized scholarship had become a substitute for personal moral seriousness — what Wang criticized as susu zhi xue 俗學, "vulgar learning." Both placed the locus of judgment in the unmediated subject. Both produced radical successors: Wang's followers in the Taizhou school, especially Li Zhi (1527–1602), pushed the implications to genuinely heterodox conclusions and were politically suppressed; Luther's radical successors — Müntzer, the Anabaptists — likewise faced violent reaction. The structural potential of the two movements was identical; the institutional outcomes differed because the imperial Chinese system absorbed and contained what European confessional pluralism allowed to fracture.

D. Evidential Criticism: Lorenzo Valla and Yan Ruoju

If one wants a single, dramatic illustration of the isomorphism, consider Lorenzo Valla and Yan Ruoju.

In 1439–40, Valla composed De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, in which he demonstrated, on philological grounds — anachronistic Latin diction, factual impossibilities, terminology not yet in use in the fourth century — that the Donation of Constantine, the document underwriting the papacy's claim to temporal sovereignty over the Western Empire, was a forgery.[^6] The implications were vast. Valla had used a method (textual criticism) to dismantle a political authority (papal supremacy). He is widely treated as a precursor of the Reformation and as the founder of historical-critical method in Europe.

In the early Qing, Yan Ruoju (1636–1704) performed an exactly analogous operation on the Guwen Shangshu 古文尚書 ("Old Text Documents") chapters of the Shangshu 尚書 / Book of Documents. Through eight chapters of Shangshu guwen shuzheng 尚書古文疏證 — by some accounts, the foundational work of Qing evidential scholarship — Yan demonstrated that the "Old Text" chapters, accepted as authentic since the Eastern Jin and integrated into Cheng-Zhu neo-Confucian orthodoxy, were post-Han forgeries.[^7] The implications were comparably vast: many of the textual foundations on which the Song-Ming neo-Confucian moral cosmology rested turned out to be philological inventions of a later age. Benjamin Elman's From Philosophy to Philology (1984) treats this and related work as constituting "an empirical revolution" — a methodological transformation comparable in form, if not in immediate political consequence, to the European turn from scholasticism to philology.[^8]

The temporal gap is roughly 250 years. The methodological signature is the same: doubt as a starting point, philological evidence as a tool, the demonstration that texts assumed to be ancient bear the linguistic and conceptual markers of a later age, with the resulting de-legitimation of an authority structure that had rested on those texts. Yan Ruoju and his successors — Hui Dong 惠棟, Dai Zhen, Duan Yucai, Wang Niansun 王念孫, Wang Yinzhi 王引之 — built the kaozhengedifice on these foundations, and by the high Qing, evidential scholarship was a major intellectual mode. Yu Ying-shih has argued for continuities with neo-Confucianism; Elman has emphasized the rupture. But on either reading, Qing China possessed an indigenous philological revolution whose rigor and methodological self-consciousness were comparable to those of contemporary European Wissenschaft.

E. Eschatological Reinterpretation: Kang Youwei and the Joachim-Hegel-Marx Lineage

The fifth and most consequential isomorphism appears at the threshold of modernity proper. Once a textual canon has been subjected to evidential criticism — once it has been shown that the "original" texts are themselves layered, edited, sometimes forged — a question arises: what is the meaning of these texts now? One answer is disenchantment: the texts are interesting historical artifacts. Another answer is reinterpretation: the texts are reread as the encrypted record of a developmental historical process, with their hidden meaning (weiyan dayi 微言大義, "subtle words and great meanings") finally revealed as the doctrine of a coming transformation.

Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) was the European prototype of this move. Joachim divided history into three ages — of the Father (Old Covenant), the Son (the historical Church), and the Spirit (a coming age of love, freedom, and dispensation beyond institutional Christianity).[^9] His scheme was suppressed by orthodox authorities but persisted as an underground tradition. Across the early modern and modern periods, the basic shape — periodized eschatology, immanent historical fulfillment, the present as the threshold of the final age — was secularized and absorbed by Lessing, Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, Comte, and Marx.[^10] Hegel's Oriental-Classical-Germanic, Comte's theological-metaphysical-positive, and Marx's primitive-feudal-bourgeois-socialist-communist schemata are all structural descendants. Modern philosophy of history is, in this respect, secularized Joachim.

Kang Youwei (1858–1927) accomplished a structurally identical move within the Confucian tradition. Drawing on the Gongyang Zhuan 公羊傳 commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals — and specifically on the doctrine of the san shi三世 ("Three Ages": ju luan shi 據亂世, sheng ping shi 升平世, tai ping shi 太平世, that is, the ages of Disorder, Approaching Peace, and Great Peace) — Kang argued that Confucius was not a transmitter of ancient norms but a reformer-prophet (Kongzi gaizhi 孔子改制) who had encrypted, in the Six Classics, a doctrine of historical progression toward a universal-utopian condition.[^11] His Datong Shu 大同書 ("Book of Great Concord," composed in the 1880s-1900s) elaborates this terminus: the abolition of states, races, families, and private property in a future global commonwealth.[^12]

The structural identity of Kang's project with nineteenth-century European philosophy of history is not coincidence and is not mere imitation. Kang drew on Huxley, Spencer, and other Western sources, but the Gongyang materials were ready to hand and had been undergoing revival in the Changzhou 常州 school since Zhuang Cunyu 莊存與 and Liu Fenglu 劉逢祿 in the late eighteenth century, well before extensive Western influence.[^13] What Kang did was to fuse an indigenous late-Qing eschatological tradition with imported evolutionary categories, producing a synthesis structurally identical to those of his European contemporaries — and arguably preceding by several decades the most radical European utopian socialisms.

IV. Why European Modern Historiography Could Not See This

The structural symmetry between European and Chinese intellectual history was occluded for nineteenth-century European thinkers — not because they were prejudiced (though many were) but because their analytic categories were built to detect European trajectories and to register the absence of those trajectories elsewhere as civilizational deficiency. Six features of nineteenth-century historiographical practice produced this systematic blindness.

The universalization of European stage-theory. Hegel, Comte, Marx, Spencer, and Tylor each projected an internally derived European sequence as the universal trajectory of historical development. By definition, societies that did not exhibit the European sequence were classified as arrested, primitive, stagnant, or "Asiatic." Hegel's notorious formulations — "China and India lie, as it were, still outside the World's History"; "With China and the Mongols — the realm of theocratic despotism — History begins" only in the sense that they constitute the prehistorical matter that World-Spirit will eventually transcend — encoded this commitment in the most influential philosophy of history of the nineteenth century.[^14] Marx's "Asiatic mode of production" recapitulated the same gesture in materialist register.[^15]

The deficit-diagnosis. Comparative sociology, especially after Weber, defined Chinese civilization through what it lacked: the Protestant work ethic, the autonomous city, the legal-rational state, the bourgeois public sphere, the scientific revolution, full capitalism.[^16] Each absence was registered as the absence of modernity tout court, not as the absence of one particular European route to a particular European modernity. The methodological commitment to defining a society by its lacks rather than its possessions is, in retrospect, an extraordinary intellectual choice — equivalent to defining Europe by its absence of kaozheng, of meritocratic civil service examinations, or of imperial multi-confessional governance over a multi-ethnic landmass. The asymmetry of the comparison is rarely interrogated.

The neglect of intellectual history in favor of material indicators. From Ranke forward, professional historiography privileged state archives, diplomatic records, economic statistics, and military events. The dense sphere in which intellectual life actually operated — commentaries on the classics, academy disputations, philological treatises, examination essays — was treated as ornament rather than substance. Qing kaozheng scholarship, comparable in rigor and methodological self-consciousness to contemporary German philology, simply did not register on the European measuring instruments. Elman has argued that one of the major scholarly tasks of the late twentieth century was the recognition that this intellectual world existed and had its own internal dynamic.[^17]

Territorial-nation-state methodology. Nineteenth-century European historiography assumed the nation-state as the natural political unit. The Chinese imperial form — tianxia 天下, a unified hierarchical order across multiple ethnicities, religions, and cultural zones, with the emperor functioning simultaneously as Confucian Son of Heaven, Manchu khan, Tibetan reincarnation of Manjushri, and so forth — was registered as anomaly, deficiency, or "empire" in opposition to "nation-state."[^18] Wang Hui has made the case that this binary is itself the product of European parochialism; the Chinese political form is not failed nation-state but a different kind of political organization with its own logic.[^19]

The universalization of European periodization. The Renaissance-Reformation-Enlightenment triad was treated as the universal threshold of modernity. Civilizations that did not exhibit these specific events were definitionally pre-modern, regardless of whether they had undergone structurally analogous transformations under different names (late-Ming Wang Yangming explosion, Qing kaozheng, late-Qing Gongyang revival). The very vocabulary of "modern" was thus tautologically constructed to apply to Europe.

The systematic neglect of contingency. Pomeranz's most decisive contribution may be the demonstration that key elements of European industrial divergence after 1800 — coal deposits located near population and water transport, the ecological windfall of the New World silver and plantation economies — were contingent, not the necessary expressions of European superiority.[^20] When contingency is allowed back into the picture, the story of Europe's "rise" becomes less the manifestation of a deep civilizational virtue and more the working-out of geographically fortunate accidents. The European confidence in self-explanation thereby dissolves.

These six features cohered into a kind of analytic machine that produced its own conclusions. China was diagnosed as non-modern because the diagnostic apparatus was calibrated to register only European modernity. The error was not so much empirical as methodological: a category mistake that became invisible by being built into the categories.

V. Marxism in China as Structural Reoccupation

When Marxism arrived in China in the late 1910s and 1920s, it landed on intellectual terrain that had been prepared, in the structural sense outlined above, for many centuries. This is not to make the trivial claim that "Chinese already had a kind of communism" (the datong concept is sometimes pressed into this service, but the claim is too crude). The deeper point is that Marxism could occupy slots that had been built and shaped by the indigenous tradition. Five such slots are worth distinguishing.

The slot of eschatological history. Kang Youwei's Three Ages had already established within the contemporary intellectual repertoire a developmental philosophy of history in which the present age (sheng ping, "Approaching Peace") would give way to a future utopian condition (tai ping, datong). Marxism's five-stage scheme — primitive-slave-feudal-capitalist-communist — mapped onto this with minimal resistance. The young Mao read Kang in his youth and the affinities have been documented by intellectual historians for decades.[^21] What looks like exotic European philosophy from one angle looks like a familiar Confucian historical eschatology from another.

The slot of canonical authority. The jingxue 經學 tradition required a closed corpus of authoritative texts to be transmitted, commented on, and protected from misreading. Marxism arrived with its own canon — the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and (in due course) Mao and his successors — and with its own exegetical traditions. The form of jingxue, the chain of commentary, the function of orthodoxy in legitimating political authority, persisted intact. The Cultural Revolution's recitation of the Mao Zhuxi Yulu 毛主席語錄 was, in formal structure, the recitation of a canon. Subsequent "thought" additions — Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, Xi Jinping Thought — extend the chain in exactly the manner of a Confucian daotong 道統 (the orthodox transmission of the Way).[^22]

The slot of inward moral cultivation. Wang Yangming's zhi liangzhi and the broader gongfu 工夫 tradition of disciplined self-cultivation provided a vocabulary and a habitus for the conversion of political loyalty into a moral practice. Maoist zhengfeng 整風 ("rectification") and the systematic self-criticism (ziwo piping 自我批評) of the Yan'an era and beyond reoccupied this slot. The form of the practice — the ritual articulation of personal failings before a moral community, the cultivation of correct disposition prior to correct action — is recognizably continuous with Confucian self-examination. Jiang Shigong has explicitly drawn the equation: "the spirit of communism... is what Wang Yangming called the learning of the heart 心學... linking Wang Yangming's innate knowledge 良知 to Maoist voluntarism."[^23]

The slot of the sage-king. Kang Youwei's reading of Confucius as suwang 素王 — the "uncrowned king" who reorganized the world through the encrypted meaning of the classics — provides a template for understanding charismatic political authority that does not depend on hereditary legitimacy. Maoist personality, and now Xi Jinping's reconcentration of authority, draws on this template, not (or not only) on Soviet Leninism. The leader is the meta-sovereign who interprets and embodies the doctrine that legitimates the political order.

The slot of the orthodox transmission. Han Yu's 韓愈 doctrine of the daotong — the lineage of the Way from Yao and Shun through Confucius — provided a model for understanding ideological succession in which each transmitter both inherits and adds something to the doctrine. The Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist-Three-Represents-Scientific-Development-Xi-Jinping-Thought sequence is, formally, a daotong in modern dress.

The result is that twentieth-century Chinese Marxism is not best understood as a foreign imposition on a hostile substrate, nor as a thin cosmetic over an enduring Chinese essence. It is rather a sophisticated synthesis in which classical structures persist under modern names. The Sinification of Marxism (makesi zhuyi Zhongguo hua 馬克思主義中國化), officially proclaimed since Mao and intensified under Xi, is in part a self-conscious recognition of this fact.[^24]

It bears emphasis that this analysis does not validate the political content of either Maoism or Xi Jinping Thought. The structural argument is descriptive: it explains how a foreign ideology was domesticated and made durable. It does not say whether the domestication was good or bad for China or the world. The categories of "structural fit" and "political legitimacy" are distinct from the category of "moral evaluation."

It also bears emphasis that intellectual continuity is not by itself the cause of post-1978 economic growth. The Maoist period was, on most measures, economically destructive (Great Leap Forward; Cultural Revolution). China's economic dynamism dates from the partial dismantling of Maoist policy under Deng. The causal sources of the boom are conventional: late-developer advantages, demographic dividend, integration into global supply chains, the East Asian developmental-state model already pioneered by Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and (controversially) the basic state capacity — literacy, infrastructure, public health — built up during the Mao era. What intellectual-historical continuity explains is not why China grew, but why the Party retained legitimating power throughout the transformations and why its current synthesis is durable.

VI. The Contemporary Cartography

Within Chinese intellectual life today, a number of distinct schools coexist, often in tension and often in tactical convergence. A brief cartography:

The official orthodoxy. Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought-Deng Xiaoping Theory-Three Represents-Scientific Outlook on Development-Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. The formal lineage structure here is, as noted, daotong-shaped. The doctrinal content has evolved enormously across the sequence, but the form — each leader transmitting and adding to the doctrine — is constant.

The New Left (新左派). Wang Hui (汪暉) is the dominant figure. His four-volume Xiandai Zhongguo Sixiang de Xingqi現代中國思想的興起 (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought, 2004; partial Harvard translation 2023) is the most ambitious recent attempt to construct a counter-narrative to Eurocentric modernity, locating the origins of "Chinese modernity" in the Song-era epistemic shifts around li 理, wu 物, and shi 勢, and tracing them through to the early twentieth century without rupture.[^25] Wang's work is influential well beyond China — he was listed among Foreign Policy's top public intellectuals in 2008 — but it is also politically domestic, defending a reading of China that legitimates a strong central state and is broadly compatible with current Party orientations. Other New Left figures: Cui Zhiyuan (崔之元), who has reread Maoism as "petit-bourgeois socialism"; Gan Yang (甘陽), who proposed the influential tong san tong 通三統 ("unifying the three traditions") synthesis in 2005, arguing that Confucian elitism, Maoist egalitarianism, and Dengist marketization should be merged into a single integrated civilizational line.[^26]

Mainland New Confucianism (大陸新儒家). Distinct from the earlier "Overseas New Confucianism" of Mou Zongsan 牟宗三, Tang Junyi 唐君毅, and Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 (Taiwan- and Hong-Kong-based, Kantian-inflected), the mainland school takes a more politically ambitious stance. Jiang Qing (蔣慶, b. 1953) is the most radical exponent. His "Political Confucianism" (zhengzhi ruxue 政治儒學) draws on the Gongyang tradition and proposes a tricameral parliament (Tongru Yuan 通儒院, "House of Confucian Scholars"; Shumin Yuan 庶民院, "House of the Commoners"; Guoti Yuan 國體院, "House of the National Essence") as an alternative to liberal democracy.[^27] Chen Ming (陳明) advocates Confucianism as a civic religion; Kang Xiaoguang (康曉光) advocates explicit Confucian state-religion status.

The liberal camp. Qin Hui (秦暉), Xu Jilin (許紀霖), and the late Li Zehou (李澤厚) are leading figures. They draw on Hayek, Mill, and the broader May Fourth liberal tradition. Qin Hui's argument that Confucianism in imperial practice was effectively a moral cover for Legalist state coercion (rubiao fali 儒表法裏, "Confucian on the outside, Legalist on the inside") is among the sharpest contemporary critiques of any romanticization of Chinese traditional political thought.[^28]

The Tianxia school. Zhao Tingyang (趙汀陽), philosopher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has revived the classical tianxia concept ("all under Heaven") as a candidate for a new theory of world order. His Tianxia Tixi 天下體系 ("The Tianxia System," 2005) and subsequent English-language work argue that the Westphalian state system has failed to provide a basis for genuine global cooperation, and that a tianxia-derived hierarchical-coexistence model offers an alternative. Critics — including Western commentators and some Chinese liberals — have read this as ideological cover for Sino-centric ambition, though Zhao himself denies the imputation.[^29]

The Schmittian-Straussian current. Liu Xiaofeng (劉小楓) and Jiang Shigong (強世功) form the most intellectually distinctive recent development. Liu has been the major translator and interpreter of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in Chinese, and the broader "Sino-Schmittian" project has used German conservative political theory to construct an indigenous theoretical defense of the Party-state form, sovereignty, and Chinese political exceptionalism.[^30] Jiang Shigong is a constitutional law scholar at Peking University; his 2018 essay Zhexue yu Lishi 哲學與歷史 ("Philosophy and History: Interpreting the 'Xi Jinping Era' through Xi's Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP") is widely treated as the authoritative intellectual articulation of Xi-era ideology, presenting Xi Jinping Thought as the synthesis of Marxism, Chinese civilization, and the lessons of the international communist movement.[^31]

These schools are not mutually exclusive. Substantial cross-pollination occurs. The New Left and the New Confucians, once antagonists, have moved toward convergence under Xi. The Tianxia school provides international-theoretical material for both. The official orthodoxy increasingly speaks in the vocabulary of all of them.

VII. The Xi Synthesis as Layered Substratum

The most striking feature of contemporary Chinese political-intellectual life is the explicit, top-down project of integrating these layered traditions into a single ideological package. This is sometimes called the "two combinations" (liang ge jiehe 兩個結合): the combination of Marxism with China's "concrete realities" and with China's "fine traditional culture."[^32]

Six layers can be distinguished in the resulting structure.

The deep layer: Legalist-Confucian imperial governance (neifa waiyu 內法外儒). The operating system of Chinese empire from Qin-Han onward: Legalist administrative technique (bureaucracy, surveillance, codified law, mobilization) clothed in Confucian legitimating language (benevolence, ritual, hierarchy as natural). This pattern is older than any of the doctrinal contents above it and persists across regime types. Qin Hui's critique is that this operating system has never been replaced and that contemporary Chinese governance is its most recent iteration.

The early-modern layer: Da Yitong (大一統) and Daotong (道統). The unity of the empire as a sacred political value, and the legitimate transmission of doctrine as the basis of authority. Both are pre-modern but adapt smoothly to modern Party-state forms.

The late-Qing layer: Gongyang, Datong, Jingshi. Kang Youwei's eschatological reformism, Datong utopianism, and the jingshi zhiyong 經世致用 statecraft tradition. These provide the developmental-utopian frame within which both Maoist revolution and current "national rejuvenation" rhetoric (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing 中華民族偉大復興 — "The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation," operationalized as the Zhongguo meng 中國夢, "China Dream") are intelligible. The China Dream is, formally, the taiping shi mapped onto the twenty-first century.

The May Fourth layer: anti-traditionalism, science, democracy, Marxism. This layer is in partial eclipse but not deleted. The CCP's formal lineage runs through May Fourth; the radical-iconoclastic energy of the 1910s-1920s remains usable when the Party needs to position itself against "feudalism" or against external enemies.

The Maoist layer: mass line, self-criticism, the everyday-isation of political struggle. Largely suppressed under Deng and Jiang, partially revived under Xi (the "mass line education campaign" qunzhong luxian jiaoyu 群眾路線教育 of 2013-2014; the recurring anti-corruption campaigns as performative rectification).

The reform-era layer: pragmatism (shishi qiushi 實事求是, "seek truth from facts"), economic experimentation, the "feeling-stones" Dengist epistemology. The technocratic spine of the developmental state. Foundational to growth but ideologically deflationary if pursued in isolation, hence its current pairing with the upper layers.

Xi Jinping's project — pursued through cadre education, through party historiography, through the explicit promotion of Confucian-classical motifs, and through theoretical articulation by figures such as Jiang Shigong — is to hold all six layers together as a coherent system. The internal contradictions are real: classical Legalism is in tension with classical Confucianism's moral idealism; Maoist egalitarianism is in tension with Dengist marketization; nationalism is in tension with tianxia universalism. But the form in which they are held together is precisely the one we have been describing: a layered substratum in which each element occupies a structurally available slot, and the synthesis is held by political will rather than logical consistency.

This is what makes the current Chinese ideological formation simultaneously fragile and durable. Fragile, because the contradictions can be activated and disrupt the synthesis. Durable, because each layer has independent historical depth and can be activated as needed when the others are under strain. When Xi invokes Confucian language at one moment, Marxist language at another, tianxia at a third, and "Chinese characteristics" at a fourth, this is not opportunistic incoherence; it is a layered repertoire whose plurality is itself a strategic resource.

VIII. The Epistemological Coda: How External Powers Should Read China

The preceding analysis has implications for how external powers — Washington, Brussels, Tokyo, Seoul, New Delhi, Canberra — should think about contemporary China. Several lines of inference follow.

First: drop the "modern/non-modern" question. It is the wrong frame. Twentieth-century arguments about whether China was modernizing on the European model, lagging behind, catching up, or developing a distinctive non-modernity were all variations on a question that assumed the European trajectory as the standard. The structural-isomorphism analysis suggests instead that China traversed a parallel sequence and is now in a position to construct its own claim to civilizational universality on its own terms. The relevant question is not "is China modern?" but "what kind of civilizational synthesis is China constructing, and what does it aspire to be universalized as?"

Second: read the synthesis as ideology, not as a strategic plan. External analysts trained in security studies are accustomed to reading state behavior as the output of interests, capabilities, and strategy. The structural analysis suggests that an additional dimension — ideology proper, in the sense of a layered substratum of inherited and reinterpreted political-theological materials — has significant causal weight in Chinese state behavior. Reading Xi Jinping's speeches as if they were Henry Kissinger memos is a category error. They are best read as jingxue documents — texts whose function is the maintenance and elaboration of orthodoxy, in which seemingly redundant invocations of Marxism, Confucianism, and national renaissance perform the work of ideological integration. This work is neither sincere in the liberal-democratic sense (private conviction expressed in public statement) nor cynical in the realist sense (mere cover for interest). It is ritual-doctrinal: it constitutes the political reality it describes by repetition and by elaboration. Underestimating this dimension — assuming Xi "doesn't really believe" the rhetoric — is an analytic mistake.

Third: recognize that the "lack" diagnoses of nineteenth-century historiography recur in twenty-first-century policy. When contemporary analysts describe China as lacking the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, civil society, transparency, and so on, they are repeating the structural move of nineteenth-century European comparative sociology — defining China by what it does not possess relative to a European-derived template. This may be normatively defensible (one may, on liberal grounds, wish that China possessed these things) but it is analyticallymisleading. It conceals what China does possess — the deep layered substratum sketched above — and what that substratum makes possible. A theory of Chinese politics built only on the negation of liberal-democratic categories cannot predict Chinese state behavior.

Fourth: distinguish the universalist claim from the imperial claim. Zhao Tingyang's tianxia project, Jiang Shigong's elaboration of Xi-era ideology, and the official invocation of the "community of common destiny for mankind" (renlei mingyun gongtongti 人類命運共同體) all advance, at the discursive level, a claim to universal applicability. This is a claim about the kind of world order China prefers, not (in the first instance) a claim about Chinese territorial expansion. External analysts often conflate the two, dismissing the universalist claim as "merely" ideological cover for the imperial claim. The structural-historical analysis suggests that the universalist claim is substantive and should be engaged on its merits. It also suggests that the universalist claim can be challenged — but only by analysts who understand the materials from which it is constructed (Confucian tianxia, Gongyang eschatology, the Daotong structure of doctrinal transmission, the Wang-Hui-style critique of Western nation-state parochialism), not by analysts who simply re-assert the universality of Western liberal-democratic forms.

Fifth: take Chinese intellectuals seriously as intellectuals, not as propagandists or dissidents. Wang Hui, Gan Yang, Jiang Qing, Zhao Tingyang, Liu Xiaofeng, Jiang Shigong, Qin Hui, Xu Jilin — these are figures of substantive intellectual achievement whose work deserves engagement at the level of argument. The English-language reception of contemporary Chinese thought has been distorted by the binary of "official mouthpieces" versus "dissidents persecuted by the regime." Most of the interesting thinkers fall into neither category; they are engaged participants in the construction (or critique) of the contemporary Chinese synthesis. The project of "Reading the China Dream" (David Ownby et al.) has done much to make their work accessible to anglophone readers, and is essential reading for any serious analyst.[^33]

Sixth: recognize the stakes of the current project. What Xi Jinping is attempting, with intellectual support from figures like Jiang Shigong, is to convert the layered substratum from an implicit working synthesis into an explicit and exportable model of civilizational modernity. If successful, this would constitute the most ambitious ideological project of the early twenty-first century: not the assertion that "Chinese civilization is great," but the construction of a non-European universalism — a claim that the categories and trajectories of Chinese intellectual history offer a viable alternative to those of the European Enlightenment, valid not just for China but in principle for everyone.

The project has obvious weaknesses. The contradictions of the layered substratum are real and may surface. The intellectual quality of official propaganda is not always equal to that of the underlying scholarly work. The export-readiness of the model is dubious; even within East Asia, neither Japan nor Korea nor Vietnam shows much appetite for it. And the historical record of the Party — including the catastrophes of the Mao era, ongoing repression of minorities, the recent regression in personal freedoms — places severe constraints on the moral plausibility of the synthesis.

But it also has resources. The structural analysis suggests that the project is not an artificial graft on a hostile substrate, and not mere window-dressing for great-power competition. It draws on genuine materials from a genuine intellectual tradition, and the depth of those materials has been systematically underestimated by external analysts whose categories were calibrated, more than a century ago, to register only one shape of modernity.

External powers that want to understand the twenty-first century — to compete with China, to cooperate with it, to manage rivalry without catastrophe, or to defend their own values in a world where Chinese civilizational claims are taken seriously — need to begin by re-examining the categories with which they have been seeing. The Hegel of 1820 is still operating, often invisibly, in the policy memo of 2025. Until those categories are made explicit and revised, even the most accurate empirical reporting on contemporary China will be filtered through a frame that produces predictable misperceptions.

The structural-isomorphism reading does not predict that China will win, that liberal democracy will lose, or that the twenty-first century will be Chinese. It predicts, more modestly, that the conventional Western analytic apparatus is undersized for the task at hand. To handle the situation, the apparatus must be enlarged — and the first step in enlarging it is to recognize that there have always been at least two intellectual modernities running in parallel, and that the one Europeans recognized was only ever one of them.

REGNIS publishes occasional essays at the intersection of historical analysis and institutional intelligence. The views expressed are those of the author.