Photo: iStock
Eric Hendriks
31/05/2024 13:26
The same goes for states and empires. How do the two largest bureaucratic empires on earth, the EU and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), see their future?
China
During a job interview, China will surely have the quickest answer, for it has an official theory of the future at the ready. Of course, among a billion Chinese, there are many different views; though yue lai yue hao, “things are getting better and better,” has been a common refrain, not everyone will be so optimistic. But the Communist Party (CPC) promotes and has constitutionally enshrined an official doctrine of the future: Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.
In the New Era, China will gain “Cultural Self-Confidence,” develop sustainably under the Party’s leadership, and integrate Taiwan into the PRC. This “Great Restoration of the Chinese Nation,” set to be finished in 2050, will perfect Chinese socialism while underpinning a “Community of Common Destiny” internationally. Nations and civilizations will co-exist harmoniously.
What does this future vision imply about the present? That the present stands on the threshold of a new world. “Profound changes unseen in a century” are upon us: the centuries of Western hegemony are ending, and a fundamentally better future is near.
The time for dreams has come because China’s hard preliminary modernization work has now been completed. China has lifted itself to xiaokang, the “moderately prosperous” level, in the first century of the CPC’s existence. The CPC was founded in 1921; in 2021, China officially reached xiaokang. This term, introduced into CPC speak by Deng Xiaoping in 1979, is ancient, but it draws on Kang Youwei’s reception of the famed Li Yun chapter and therefore (in ways I cannot elaborate here) carries the suggestion that xiaokang is a step toward datong, universal harmony. In this vein, Xi explained in 2012, “China’s development is itself the greatest contribution to the world.”
The EU
In contrast, EU ideology looks forward not to a utopian future but to an ever-extending, intensifying present. This is the Federalist ideal of an “ever-closer union.” European Unification is already there; it must only be further intensified.
Despite the ubiquitous bitching about Fukuyama, this is simply his “end of history” ideology. History cannot produce something fundamentally better than the present liberal order. We can merely have more of the good things that already exist: more liberal democracy, more NGOs, more EU.
So, while both EU federalism and Xi Jinping Thought eternalize certain parts of the present—according to their ideologies, the EU and the PRC will exist forever—the EU is frozen in an eternal present, while China hopes that the future will open up a higher moral existence.
The author is a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute
