Attempting to categorise the political economy of China in its post-Mao avatar is challenging for those schooled in the Left-Right taxonomy of western economic orthodoxy. For most foreign analysts, the Chinese Communist Party’s self-descriptor of Socialism with Chinese characteristics evokes instant scare quotes, indicating scepticism, if not outright dismissal. But is the phrase merely a nifty rhetorical contortion that allows the party to turn Right, while signaling Left? Or does it indicate more than linguistic window dressing? In China, these so-called characteristics are widely understood as pointing to a civilisational logic that persists beneath the destabilising shifts witness to the morphing of the erstwhile Middle Kingdom from an agricultural backwater into a tech and manufacturing powerhouse.

As an outsider who has spent serious time becoming familiar with China, there are two questions I’ve grappled with that engaging with the “Chinese characteristics” part of Beijing’s self-definition goes some way in answering.

The first has to do with the logic-defying psychological resilience of Chinese people. Given the pace and magnitude of change that older Chinese have experienced within their lifetimes, how do they retain a sense of intactness? How does someone maintain a personal narrative arc that is not as violently fractured as the boarder canvas against which that life has played out?

The second, is the million Yuan question of whether, and to what extent, China is sui generis.

Regarding the former, the idea of an enduring, if instrumentalised, Chineseness marinated in the Confucian classics helps to make an otherwise incoherent world intelligible – a lesson heeded by the gamut of modern leaders from Mao Zedong through Xi Jinping, via Deng Xiaoping.

As for the latter, it would indicate that China’s success is indeed, at least is part, to do with deeply embedded cultural history that complicates, if not invalidates, the idea of an exportable China model. Cultural explanations are often, and with good reason, treated with suspicion. Orientalist essentialising developed spurious taxonomies of entire peoples on the basis of their “primordial” cultural traits – an outcome of the discursive power imbalances inherent in colonialism.

And yet, the idea that culture has no place in analysing political economy is also wrong-headed. Cultural tropes are indeed commonly deployed by governing elites towards political ends, but the very fact that they lend themselves to easy instrumentalisation points to their profound influence on how people understand themselves and their environment. In the United States, for example, the idea of “freedom” serves as a dog whistle for all manner of policy directions. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s appeal to the Hindu ideal of “Ram Rajya” was able to mobilise mass participation in anti-colonial agitations because of its cultural resonance. In China, the equivalent ideal is the Confucian concept of tianxia (天下), one that has been used across centuries by ruling elites as a legitimising framework.

Tianxia, which translates literally as “all under heaven,” refers to a moral political order in which governance is aimed at harmonising the interests of peoples as part of a single, interconnected world. Legitimate rule within this framework arises from the virtues of the ruler, making his (no women leaders in the Confucian ideal) authority universal not by coercion, but by ethical and just practice.

I recently read an essay by Princeton University anthropologist, Yanping Ni, From socialism to “Chinese characteristics,” that describes the manner in which tianxia and associated ideas have been activated by the Chinese Communist party, thereby enabling them to render discordant policies intelligible. They have been able to do this because the Chinese, as a people, are culturally primed to respond to these ideas. To the culturally distant analyst in the West the allusions to tianxia in political discourse tend to come across as mendacious and obfuscating. But to those who are culturally near, such tropes can feel like self-evident truths.

The Communist Party in China has certainly cherry picked its appropriation of Confucian concepts. It has utilised them to serve its own political ends, specifically cementing its legitimacy. But at a deeper level the Chinese state (under both imperial, communist and red capitalist rulers) is an embodiment of the idea of tianxia internalised as the country’s intellectual heritage. China’s centralised authority and rule by bureaucracy are not new constructs, consequent of the communist revolution. They predate communism and transcends historic periodisation.

As Yanping Ni’s essay elaborates, modern iterations of tianxia components took shape in the pre-communist era when late imperial thinkers began grappling with the relevance of Chinese classical thought for modern society. Amongst these was the reformist intellectual Kang Youwei (康有為, 1858–1927) whose influential work, Datong shu (Book on the Great Community), brought the concept of “datong” into vogue. Datong is the end point of a three-stage theory of progress in human history elaborated in Confucian texts like the Liji (Book of Rites). These are: the Age of Disorder (luanshi), the Age of Ascending Peace (xiaokong), and finally, the Age of Universal Peace (datong).

Mao Zedong sought to synthesise the tianxia framework with communist principles by promising that datong (the age of lasting peace and order where all contradictions are harmoniously resolved under a single, benevolent rule) would be achieved via communism. In 1949, on the eve of the PRC’s founding, Mao explicitly invoked datong as the party’s ultimate goal in his seminal, “On the people’s democratic dictatorship.” And in the coming years he continued to espouse this ideal, even as he rejected Confucianism itself. Under Mao, the tianxia framework became secularised, detached from its Confucian roots – a process that enabled its cooption into the idiom of an explicitly atheist political party.

Even the Cultural Revolution – the antithesis of Confucian order and hierarchy – was made sense of using Confucian tropes. “First great disorder under heaven (tianxia), then great order under heaven,” was the slogan Mao used to justify the violent upheavals unleashed by him across Chinese society. The chaos was defended as the means to the end of utopian reorganisation. And it was made intelligible to people via invoking classical messaging – luanshi before datong.

Under the great pragmatist, Deng Xiaoping, the party’s messaging shifted to align with the “reform and opening” up of the Chinese economy; its partial embrace of capitalist modes of production and the shift away from revolution and class warfare to individual responsibility and prosperity. Deng navigated these tricky shifts by pressing Confucian philosophy into his service, as well. But he shifted the spotlight from datong, to xiaokang or the Age of Rising Peace. This intermediate stage was perfectly attuned to justify the evolution of a “balanced” system that avoided the extremes of luanshi and datong; communism and capitalism. It was a made-to-fit trope for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the various slogans that have accompanied it, including China’s stated goal of achieving a “moderately prosperous society.”

As Yanping Na points out, Deng’s reforms were inconsistent with Marxism, but cohered with xiaokang and tianxia concepts that emphasised collective prosperity, but also individual development and cultivation. Herein lies at least part of the answer to how people continued to believe in the government despite suffering the whiplash of the working class suddenly being demoted from the heroes of the proletariat revolution to the “downstream of global supply chains,” set adrift in a world of alien values. But because of the persistence of Confucian imagery these values were less alien that a culturally distant analyst might be forgiven for assuming.

Under Xi Jinping, Confucian imagery remains very much upfront in much of the party’s stated goals and declarations. For example, many of the concepts that underly Xi’s recently presented Global Governance Initiative, outlining China’s vision for foreign policy, are rooted in Confucian thought. This involves a lot of talk about harmony, stability and benevolence which to the outside ear sounds wholly disingenuous. But for a domestic audience they are cognitive shortcuts, in the way talk of freedom and democracy works in much of the Western world. They hold within them deeper wells of meaning.

To truly understand China, it is imperative to engage with the “Chinese characteristics” part with an open mind. Something much of the world seems reluctant, or simply unable, to do.

Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With 'Writing on the Great Wall', she places her eye on China's economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.

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