China’s civilising mission

Last week, a distinguished Chinese thinker arrived in Oxford University to give a talk. His mission was audacious: to explain to Britain’s brightest young things that far from being a repressive or unhappy place, China is in fact pretty perfect. More to the point: now that Europe is on the rocks, China will be the next great world-shaping civilisation. He began boldly: ‘China is a unique country,’ he said. ‘It is the world’s longest continual civilisation. It is like the Roman Empire, but as if the Roman Empire had continued to this day! The western media presents China as insecure, as if the people are unhappy and the leadership afraid, but it’s not true. The Chinese are happy. We have greater justice and fairness, and now many countries look to us for rescuing.

The speaker was Zhang Weiwei, author of the book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, a bestseller in China. Zhang’s been on something of a world tour, promoting his book and his country, but it’s not just his idea. He’s just one of the growing number of Chinese thinkers — increasingly strident on the global stage — who propound the idea of the ‘Chinese way’: a path of economic, political, social and cultural progress that is different (and better) than that of the West.

For Zhang and the gang, China is not repressive place at all — it is a storehouse of ancient wisdom and enlightened moral values. Even the food is better, they say. At a pretty high-level discussion in London this year, Zhang declared that French cooking couldn’t compete with the tasty and varied food available in China. This might be a boast too far, but what is true is that with the US mired in debt and the EU on its knees, there’s no better time to push this message than now.