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Educational Philosophy and Theory
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20
China’s rise, the Asian century and the clash of
meta-civilizations
Michael A. Peters, Benjamin Green & Steve Fuller
To cite this article: Michael A. Peters, Benjamin Green & Steve Fuller (2022): China’s rise,
the Asian century and the clash of meta-civilizations, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI:
10.1080/00131857.2022.2032654
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2032654
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DISCUSSION
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
China’s rise, the Asian century and the clash of
meta-civilizations
Michael A. Petersa , Benjamin Greena and Steve Fullerb
aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bWarwick University, Coventry, UK
The Asian century in a post-American world
Michael A. Peters
Beijing Normal University
Western declinism and the dialectic of East/West
Declinism is back in fashion again. It is now a common and persistent source of historical
reflection that has been a constant theme since the first Christian fathers embraced revelation
and the apocalyptic belief that the end of the world is imminent. It seems that the triumph of
cultural pessimism reigns and that in the estimation of a group of writers taking their cue from
Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, the West is in a spiral of decline
and decadence. The discourse on the roots of declinism has a respected critical history and
philosophy and many authors, including Sartre and Foucault, warned of the end of liberalism,
the end of history and the end of the world.
In the medieval era philosophers held that there was a general westward movement of
events which once completed indicated the end of the world. It was a common assumption
that is exemplified in Hegel’s (1857/2001) lectures on the philosophy of history which postulated
world history as the progression, consciousness of human freedom and its realization in the
modern nation-state. Hegel’s philosophy of history was a rational process and part of divine
providence. The first phase of world history takes place in Asia. While there is rational freedom
there was no subjective freedom, no awareness or consciousness of freedom which begins with
the Greeks and comes to fruition with the Germanic nations who understand that human beings
are free by nature. The rise of Christianity is the based on the realization of the spirit (Geist) of
freedom as the very nature of human beings echoed in the nature of the state and the corre-
sponding shift from despotism to constitutional monarchy. By contrast, in China and India there
was no subjective awareness of freedom or the spirit of freedom but mere duration and stability
that characterized ‘ahistorical history’. This Hegelian eschatological history was strongly contra-
dicted by forms of economic determinism originating in the nineteenth century that tied the
decline of the West to the rise of the East (Peters, 2014).
Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) The End of History and the Last Man is a Hegelian celebration of the
ascendancy of Western liberal democracy that had proven itself to be the fundamentally better
economic and ethical global system. He followed Alexandre Kojève, the French Hegelian, who
read Hegel, focusing on the Phenomenology, through the eyes of Marx and Heidegger. He pub-
lished Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1947 combining
Marx’s concept of labour with Heidegger’s Being-toward-death, and developing it in terms of a
© 2022 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
CONTACT Benjamin Green benbo83@gmail.com Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2032654
2 M. A. PETERS ETAL.
Master-Slave dialectic that embraced the ‘end of history’ as the triumph of a socialist-capitalist
synthesis, rather than Fukuyama’s liberal capitalism. The neoconservative Project of the American
Century founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997 saw the US as the ‘world’s pre-eminent
power’ and sought to ‘shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests’.1
In the post-war era many op-ed pieces have warning of the end of the West’s global dom-
inance including Kennedy (1987) in his influential work Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the
economic shift from West to East (O’Grady, 2009; Kapila, 2012; Layne, 2014) and waning of the
liberal internationalism and world order (Ikenberry, 2018; Mearsheimer, 2019), although others
like Kagan (2012, 2021), one of the founders of the New American Century, have argued against
the inevitability of a decline of the US as a superpower.
The post-American world
The US has rolled from one crisis to the next—the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008, the
rise of the far-right and politics of insurrection under Trump, the withdrawal from the ‘forever
war’ in Afghanistan. It has been suggested that these problems pose a deepening and complex
that leads to decline and it has led a number of commentators to predict the end of American
hegemony and world power. Well over a decade ago Zakaria’s (2008) suggested the end of ‘Pax
Americana’. He argued ‘The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism’. And
he provides a sweeping world narrative that begins with the rise of western science and tech-
nology, followed by the rise of America. Zakaria’s (2008) analysis tries to demonstrate the end
of America as a sole superpower.
We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western
world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology,
commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political
dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years
of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most
powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years,
America’s superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that’s never hap-
pened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago.
During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the
driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.2
A post-American world is a relative comparison that is defined by the rise of China, India, Brazil
and Russia rather than the absolute decline of the US. As Zakaria explains economic growth is
not a zero sum game: indeed America and the west will benefit from the rise of the new growth
economies and everyone will be the winner. This means of course that in the next wave of
globalization he rise of the Asian economies, especially those of ASEAN countries but also those
of the Indo-Pacific does not mean the eclipse of the US and the West (Peters & Britez, 2012).
We have already seen some of the signs of this change in the changing template of world
order away from the Cold War bipolar system and following the collapse of the Soviet system
in 1989, the briefest period of America’s hegemony as the sole superpower to a multipolar
international system comprised of five or six large countries including China and India, with
Russia, the US, and EU. China should be seen in terms of its Belt and Road Initiative and Asia
regional trading agreements, especially with the ASEAN countries. Both China and India need
to be understood also in terms of a rapidly growing middle class that is likely to dwarf that of
US and EU combined. There are two kinds of regionalization occurring in response to one
another: first, the regional economic integration of Asia through trade and second, the regional
securitization through, for example, AUKUS, a pact between Australia, US and UK, a nuclear
strategic narrowing of the Five Eyes, but also extension of Anglo-Americanism. After Brexit,
AUKUS links the UK firmly to intelligence sharing with the US and Australia to contain China
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3
in the Asia-Pacific, referred to by AUKUS countries as ‘Indo-Pacific’. It is a post-Brexit Britain that
allies itself with the US and Australia’s anti-China nuclear national security system in the
Asia-Pacific, aimed at flashpoints in China territorial claims in the South China Sea and in Taiwan,
while at the same participating in new trade agreements, both RCTTP and RCET.
Zakaria’s analysis gave the US a false comfort zone and also failed to take account of the
complexity of the crisis of American capitalism, with its excessive class inequalities, and the
political crisis of the shift to the far-right and the politics of insurrection, the impending global
ecological crisis and its long term consequences. There are a number of compounding problems
that together indicate a deepening crisis and complexity of the US:
1. Pandemic: Trending toward a million Americans dead (more than WWII and more than
1 in 500) and massive economic and social disruption and social inequalities through
Covid-19 pandemic;
2. Rising debt: the U.S spending of some $6 trillion in infrastructure bills, and spreading
international financial instability necessitating an increase in the debt ceiling with the
warning that the US may default with irreparable damage to the US economy and global
financial markets;
3. Declining power of the US dollar system, with collapsing trade balances, a yawning
current account deficit and challenges to the US dollar research system;
4. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008: the collapse of the subprime housing market
bubble that has reportedly caused over two million foreclosures (mostly Black and Latino)
and spread to the real estate housing market and the consequent downturn in the
building industry;
5. Growth of huge economic Inequalities—’In 2018, households in the top fifth of earners
(with incomes of $130,001 or more that year) brought in 52% of all U.S. income, more
than the lower four-fifths combined’3;
6. ‘Black Lives Matter’, perhaps the largest movement in US history, protest police brutality
and racially motivate attacks on Black people as an ongoing struggle against racial
discrimination that has been a permanent civil rights movement since the end of
slavery;
7. Political division of society with the prospect of a new civil war. Culture and media that
has polarized and strengthened as a result of the rise of the far-right remolding of the
Republican party under Donald Trump that refuses to reflect on the politics of
insurrection;
8. War wariness, debt and military overreach: $3 trillion Iraq war after five years that rep-
resents opportunity cost investment in US infrastructure, health and education and an
ignominious withdrawal from the War in Afghanistan;
9. An impending global ecological collapse driven by climate warming, biodiversity loss,
megafires, and potential mass extinction.
Taken together this group of problems that overlays economic, social, monetary, and ecological
may represent the risks of a civilizational collapse as a collapse of a complex society. Certainly,
some of the crisis in the longer term are the result of a shift from an industrial capitalism based
on oil and gas and also the unsustainability of finance capitalism and processes of financial-
ization. These are interlocking social, governmental, financial and environmental systems.
The most intelligent commentators on America’s future tend to recognize its long term
advantages and deep resources but the decline theorists surf the current mania for eschato-
logical metanarratives that predict ‘rise and decline’, end-of-the-American-dream stories without
much historiography. There are many problems with metahistories that attempt to chart rise-and-
decline narratives even retrospectively. Perhaps the most famous of these attempts is Oswald
4 M. A. PETERS ETAL.
Spengler’s (1918) The Decline of the West that predicted the rise and fall of civilizations on the
basis of natural principles that governed the life of organic cultures suggested that Western
culture ended around 1800 and has since been in a period of decadence. Arnold Toynbee’s
(1934–1961) massive A Study of History rejected Spengler’s determinism suggesting that a civi-
lization survival depended upon its responses to the challenges it faced and its responses
to them.
The question of world history becomes even more complicated in view of globalization. The
more recent approach of world system theory based on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein,
Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi is essentially a post-Marxist theory of international
relations that traces the origin of the modern world-system to 16th century Europe and its
peak as a stage of imperialist capitalism in a series of Kondratiev ‘long waves’ of Braudel’s la
longue duree that promises a reversal of the center-periphery relations. In this sense world-systems
theory does share some features in common with economists like Joseph Schumpeter who
emphasized cycles, crises and the rise and fall of regions in the capitalist process.
These grand theories are difficult to assess objectively because of the in-built philosophical
assumptions that constitute the protected metaphysical core that is not open to empirical
testing or reality check. Yet it is the case that the three dominant paradigms of the political
economy of international relations in recent times have emphasized the ‘Pacific century’ (1970s),
the ‘China century’ (1990s) and the ‘Asian century’ (2000s). Scott (2008)4 cautions us about
sweeping language and claims and suggests that China’s or Asia’s rise is not inevitable (nor,
presumably, America’s decline) and as he notes all three paradigms do not take account of the
rise of Islamic radicalism post-9/11 at the sub-state level, the rise of China and India at the
state level as new Great Powers within the international system, and, at the regional level, a
significant structural ‘long-cycle’ change in the balance of power based on the emergence of
Asian economic and political dominance.
The Asian century
These speculative assertions that reflect deep historiographical assumptions require careful
scrutiny (Peters, 2021). These historical trends and future growth forecasts do not mean that
the transition to the ‘Asian Century’ is guaranteed. The very Western name ‘Asia’ disguises a
huge range of cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. It is clear that new risks concern the
growing international and intranational inequalities. There are also great differences in modes
of governance including Islamic states such as Indonesia and Malaysia, Communist governments
in China, Vietnam, and Laos as well as strong capitalist democracies like Japan, Singapore and
South Korea. Clearly, ASEAN is becoming an effective and cohesive organisation that exhibits
stond trade balance with China to define the Asian Century based on new trading agreements
including CPTPP and RCET (Peters, 2021).
On the basis of its colonial history and the imperialistic experience of European modernity
Asian critical philosophy has for some time entertained strong scepticism concerning the uni-
versalistic phrasing of Enlightenment values and challenged the central assumption that Western
modernity is ‘universal’. The Chinese critique of western modernity has registered the relatively
quick collapse of the Soviet Empire following the split between Yeltsin and Gorbachev and the
reunification of Germany in 1991, and was critical of the naked aggression of the US War on
Terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and the unsteadiness and possible financial
system collapse with the Global Financial Crisis which began in later 2007, a result of neolib-
eralism financialization of everything (Peters, 2011). Now the possibilities for new Chinese and
Asian forms of modernity or modernity with Chinese characteristics—the ‘Asian Century’—seems
a probable result following the eschatological narrative of ‘decline of the west, rise of the east’.
It is a logic that looks to the same Hegelian dialectic but one that describes the CCP as being
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5
on the side of history riding the next wave of Asian-based trade globalization that it help
to create.
But this dialectic is more complex and regional centred on an Asian Century with several
regional hubs including the dynamism of China and East China Confucian ‘tiger economies’ and
the BRI regional corridors; India’s rapidly growing middle class and South Asia; ASEAN countries,
plus five full regional members, in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP),
a free-trade agreement among the Asia-Pacific nations; and a Russian-Sino-led Central Asia, with
the Eurasian Economic Union that came into force in 2015 creating a union of states from
Eastern Europe, Western and Central Asia. It is wrong-headed to conceptualise an Hegelian
dialectic between US/China or AUKUS/China, when the free-trade agreements structure and
coordinate a new Asian Century.
Political stability: An empirical accounting of China’s continued rise
Benjamin Green
Beijing Normal University
Grand theories predicting either the rise or fall of a given nation-state is not easily open to
empirical testing. However, this hasn’t stopped would-be prognosticators from using empirical
data to undergird their Sino-centric declinist analyses. Specifically, just as previous growth
forecasts once hearkened the rise of China, so too have more recent growth figures been used
to signal the end of this meteoric rise. As an example, back in 2012 news of China’s slowing
growth rate5 was enough for The National Interest to coin one of the first among many articles
proclaiming, ‘The End of China’s Rise’ (Etzioni, 2012). Since then, predicting the end of China’s
rise seems to have become a cyclical foreign policy discourse that invariably rears its head
every few years. In 2016, Foreign Affairs picked up the mantle, stating that increasing economic
stagnation was enough to signal ‘The End of China’s Rise’ (Lynch, 2016). After almost a decade,
the writing seems to still be on the wall, with Foreign Affairs once again citing serious economic
slowdown as a harbinger for (you guessed it) ‘The End of China’s Rise’ (Beckley & Brands, 2021).
This is not to say that China does not have a date with destiny, so to speak, concerning year-on-
year GDP growth, dept-to-GDP ratio, and the complex, uneasy relationship between central
political authority and its flagship tech companies. The latter issue being most clearly evinced
by the shuttling of Ant Group’s IPO after inopportune statements regarding innovation-stifling
regulations by co-founder Jackie Ma (Chen & Liu, 2020). Furthermore, as has been seen with
the recent Evergrande Scandal, wherein it was discovered that China’s second-largest property
developer was also the world’s most indebted (expected to enter default on Oct 23rd, 2021),6
China has a long way to go concerning its domestic financial regulation apparatus. While these
instances may signal an impending economic crisis for China, political economists are well aware
that any crisis borne within China would have far-reaching global repercussions. Further, any
political economist worth their salt understands that a healthy mix of investment, trade, employ-
ment activation and the development of small firm entrepreneurship can help nations revitalize
their flagging economies.7 So if this is indeed the case, one would expect that any highly
publicized move towards these aims, such as the recently announced launch of a SME stock
exchange in Beijing on September 2nd 2021 (Daly, 2021), would ostensibly quell further declinist
fantasies from being perpetuated about China, right? In fact, given that China’s command
economy has been almost singular in its ability to weather both the 1997 and 2007/8 financial
crisis, one would have to be almost naïve to bet against China’s ability to weather bottlenecks
as encountered by most advanced economies at one point or another. Apparently not. The
reason being is that interspersed within these economic narratives of Sino-declinism is less
empirical and inherently more speculative assumptions concerning China’s domestic political
6 M. A. PETERS ETAL.
regime stability. These arguments often seek to paint domestic political initiatives/policies as
indicative that economic decline is causing China’s ruling party, the Communist Party of China
(CPC), to seek regime stability through political recentralization, or depending on whom you
ask, jackboot totalitarianism. These of course include the US/UK-maligned (protest-quelling, or
riot-quelling as it was seen within China) imposition of the Hong Kong National Security Law
on June 30th, 2020; the increasing reinforcement of CPC-approved/mandated ideological edu-
cation (to include Xi Jinping Thought) in public schools (Stanway, 2021), as recently culminated
by the banning of all foreign curricula within/foreign ownership of K-9 schools (Yang & Munroe,
2021); and the resurgence of cold-war era rhetoric surrounding the forceful reunification of
Taiwan with mainland China (Shepherd & Li, 2021). All of this may signal to some that the CPC’s
backbone of economic legitimacy is eroding, signalling an impending and long-awaited end to
China’s rise. However, while the aforementioned legal, ideological, and rhetorical moves towards
an increased recentralization of CPC control may smack up against liberal international sensi-
bilities, they do not necessarily signal an impending era of decline for China in terms of either
domestic regime stability or national geopolitical reach. Take the following analysis of political
stability as an example.
If this article was to veer towards a subjective analysis of the CPC’s aforementioned ‘offensive’
political manoeuvring, as seen with an eye towards political regime stability rather than national
decline, than the following might retain the same level of validity inherent to the aforemen-
tioned China rise-and-fall narratives. Specifically, if this article was to use a definition of political
stability provided by Ake (1975), wherein political stability is the extent to which political
structures restrict and control the flow of political exchanges, then political stability could be
understood also as the extent to which members of society restrict themselves to patterns of
behaviour that fall within these imposed restrictions. Within this definition, the imposition of
the Hong Kong Security Law could ostensibly be viewed as an appropriate measure with which
to regulate and control the political behaviour of individuals within a political structure deemed
appropriate for political stability. Moreover, as an empirical measure of this subjective assump-
tion, the fact that there have only been 117 arrests8 since the onset of this law may be used
to assess the degree to which individuals are restricting themselves to this imposed control as
a measurable increase (rather than decline) in political stability. Yet another approach to quan-
titative measurement of an inherently subjective notion of political stability is provided by
Hurwitz (1973). Specifically, he notes that political stability is seen within (a) the absence of
violence; (b) governmental longevity/duration; (c) the existence of a legitimate constitutional
regime; (d) the absence of structural change; and (e) a multi-faceted societal attribute. In relation
to the first four requirements, even the most hawkish of China scholars would be hard-pressed
to argue these points against contemporary China. As concerns the last requirement, Hurwitz
himself gave dispensation for societies such as the UK who had superimposed democratic
patterns/processes over traditional hierarchical structures. Within such societies the understanding
of democracy, to include Chinese democracy, must be understood within more nuanced assump-
tions. Such an approach has been taken by Gueorguiev (2021), whose previous works on China
governance and more recent work on democracy within China might be seen as an augmen-
tation of Ake’s assumptions regarding political control within a framework that works for China.
Specifically, Guerguiev describes an embedded process of persuasive, rather than coercive
political control within China, a soft authoritarianism which is utilized by the CPC to gain passive
acceptance of imposed political restrictions towards regime stability.9 This is to say that while
these efforts may be understood within some Western democracies as a form of democratic
backsliding, the above-mentioned societal acceptance of these impositions denotes the presence
of a political system that while hierarchical, is both legitimately democratic and, owed to these
measures, increasingly stable. Further, as described by Bermeo (2016) democratic backsliding
denotes ‘the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing
democracy’ (p. 5). While this may fit the US political situation under the Trump regime (Green,
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 7
2021), as stated by Tang (2016) the political stability of China’s democratic structure relies on
a complex mass-line ideology that bypasses traditional administrative/legal structures, weakening
social institutions while promoting strong nationalistic support for the central party. This notion
of political stability is supported by the longitudinal survey of Chinese public opinion conducted
by Harvard’s Ash Center which found that 95.5% of respondents were either relatively satisfied
or highly satisfied with the central government (Harsha, 2020). As concerns the increasing
imposition of centralized ideological constraints and impositions within China’s education system
such as has been mentioned above, let us now utilize Karl Mannheim’s definition of social
stability to understand China’s developing philosophy of education. Specifically, Mannheim
(1936/1979) states that social stability is the ‘relative fixity of the existing total structure, which
guarantees the stability of the dominant values and ideas’ (p. 75). Now let us put aside for a
minute that Trump’s Executive order on Protecting Monuments10 echoes this desire to rid society
of radical ways of thinking as a means to protect dominant Judeo-Christian ideals and values
in the US. In his Ideology and Utopia, Mannheim states: ‘As long as the same meanings of words,
the same ways of deducing ideas, are inculcated from childhood on into-every member of the
group, divergent thought processes cannot exist in that society’ (1936/1979, p. 6). Mannheim’s
understanding of ideology as a necessary obscuring of facts aimed at promoting an education
which secures both social stability and the creation of historically appropriate citizens is in line
with the Platonic assertion that there ‘… are the things that should and should not be heard,
from childhood on, by men who would honour gods and ancestors and not take lightly their
friendship with each other’ (Plato, 1968, p. 64). As is clear, the careful curation of facts as
appropriate to a specific society’s pursuit of social stability has a rich tradition stretching back
from Hellenistic Greece until today. Finally, as relates to geopolitical reach, despite China’s
sabre-rattling towards Taiwan, a convenient tactic for whipping up popular national support
that would be at home anywhere in the western world, cooler rhetoric soon prevailed as the
US and China agreed to maintain the status quo.11 While not yet certain, China’s move to join
the CPTPP12 also signals China’s desire to increase domestic political stability through liberal
international engagement with global economic partnerships that are not incumbent upon a
Sino-centric platform of development such as the BRI. In fact, as has been stated by Flint and
Zhang (2019), China’s domestic political stability is both incumbent upon and augmented
through increased, nondisruptive engagement with the status quo liberal international order.
All of this may seem to connote an apologist tone towards China’s many faults, an enumer-
ated list of which is not attempted within this article. However, what should be gleaned here
is not that China’s economic, political, or legal manoeuvring is correct or somehow indicative
of its ability to either rise or fall. What should be understood here is that a highly subjective
analysis of China is possible to accomplish, regardless of how empirical, and therefore somehow
more objective, these analyses claim to be. In specific, we return to the previous assertion that
‘the rise and fall of a nation-state is a highly speculative matter, with deep historiographical
assumptions that require careful treatment’. Needless to say, if your in-built philosophical assump-
tions aim to support a metaphysical core which seeks China’s decline, your resulting analysis,
empirical or not, will support this position, with the same being true for China’s continued
political stability and potential for continued rise. Rather than an exercise in metaphysical devil’s
advocacy, the above analysis sought to highlight that much like the rise of Critical theory as a
means to overcome the inability of vulgar Marxism to account for a lack of revolutionary move-
ment within capitalist societies, analyses concerning China’s rise or fall will require a renegotiated
conceptualization of what it means for a nation-state to truly rise or fall, one that looks beyond
the usage of thinly veiled economic empiricism to support eschatological narratives. Thusly,
similar to the popular misquote attributed to Samuel Clemens, until an appropriately empirical
measurement of national decline can be agreed upon, reports of China’s decline will continue
to be exaggerated.
8 M. A. PETERS ETAL.
The clash of meta-civilizations
Steve Fuller
Warwick University
If I had been China, at the annual Communist Party conference in May 2020, I would have
taken a decisive step to leapfrog into global political-economic supremacy by announcing a
Ten—if not Five-Year Plan to shift the nation’s energy reliance away from carbon, which would
then have forced the West (and the rest of the world) to play catch-up. Recall that this was
during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the West, when the carbon-based economy had
been laid so low that even radical environmentalists were expressing optimism that global
climate change might be reversible. China was presented in the Western media as facing its
own version of the same problem, which created a sense of spontaneous global sympathy.
(Keep in mind that this was before the hypothesis that the offending virus was produced in a
Wuhan lab had gained credibility.) Moreover, it was when the UK and other countries were just
announcing their plans to develop a vaccine, against an understanding that vaccines take long
to develop and so may not be ready in time to stave off most of the associated illness and
death. In other words, from both a strategic and a public relations standpoint, this was the
moment to strike: Carpe diem! After all, China’s state and commercial sectors are much more
interlocked than in the West, so in principle they could take the initiative in what is generally
agreed to be the direction of world-historic travel, if humanity is to survive long term on Earth.
Indeed, while the West’s rhetoric about the need to ‘Go Green’ has been much stronger than
China’s, nevertheless China’s more consolidated political economy places it in a better position
to make the rhetoric real—especially given that it has been already developing the relevant
technologies. In fact, I instructed one of my Chinese PhD students to monitor the situation at
the Communist Party conference, since I thought it might actually happen—and then we might
get the great civilizational shift that has been predicted for the past ten or twenty years
(Wang, 2020).
Of course, China failed to be me. It did not fast forward into the future, leapfrogging ahead
of the US and Europe. Perhaps that’s not so surprising because I’m looking at the state of play
differently from how a Chinese geopolitical strategist might. So, then, what’s the difference?
Westerners, not least Max Weber, have long realized that China possesses its own indigenous
form of capitalism. What distinguishes Western capitalism is what Weber called the ‘Protestant
Ethic’, which basically privileges exchange over ownership in market relations. Banks, stock and
currency markets, and venture capitalists nowadays, wouldn’t exist without this sensibility. It’s
what Marxists call ‘finance capitalism’, which eventually overtakes the entire political economy,
as everyone starts to think in terms of gaining marginal advantage across all of space-time:
How to get that extra profit, that extra efficiency saving, that extra market share. Notice that
‘profit’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘market share’ are accounting concepts. They exist first on balance sheets
and then have consequences in the material world. It is no accident that the Jesuits introduced
the balance sheet as an angelic instrument (Quattrone, 2004). Marxists have believed—’wished’
might be a better word—that capitalism’s ‘speculative’ pursuits result in a series of boom-and-
bust cycles that would eventually crash the system.
Metaphysically, what connects early Protestantism to later capitalism is the subordination of
matter to spirit. In that context, matter has value only as a vehicle for spirit. Nothing material
has value in itself: ‘All that is solid melts into air’ was Marx’s poetic way of characterizing the
negotiability of everything under capitalism. Theologically, the Protestant Ethic courted Gnosticism,
but even its more secular guises privileged risk-seeking behavior. All of this bothered Marx,
who still clung to the labor theory of value, which kept alive the idea that laborers exert some
sort of proprietary control over what they produce, even in a market environment. However,
already in Weber’s day, the labor theory of value had been superseded by economists reversing
EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9
the poles of value attribution from the producer to the consumer, resulting in a conception of
‘use value’ that is defined by price fluctuations in the marketplace.
What has always attracted the Chinese to Marxism is its residual brute materialism, notwith-
standing its officially ‘dialectical’ character, which always hinted at a spiritual dimension—and
enabled, for example, Russian Cosmism to transition with relative ease from a ‘religious’ to a
‘scientific’ doctrine (Young, 2012). But where Marx himself saw the material connection of
laborers to their products as the cornerstone of human dignity, the Chinese Communist Party
has understood it more literally as embedding the people in a distinctly Chinese earth. Indeed,
the West continues to underestimate the extent to which China upholds a ‘blood and soil’
conception of culture (Kultur) in which ‘Han’ functions as ‘Aryan’ (including the ‘organic’ role of
language), notwithstanding Sun Yat-Sen’s original vision of a trans-ethnic ‘China nationalism’
(Mínzú). This helps to explain, say, Mao’s pro-agrarian, anti-ideological posture at the peak of
his powers. A connection to the land is good not for reasons of human dignity or even greater
GDP, but because it helps to keep the natives consolidated in a mass, a point that Jean-Paul
Sartre grasped—and justified metaphysically as necessary for ‘permanent revolution’ (though
that’s not quite what has happened in China). Similarly, ideology is bad not because it is ‘unsci-
entific’ (a Western Marxist conceit borrowed from Moscow) but because it disembeds people
from the mass, as they entertain thoughts that come from outside their common material
existence. Even the seemingly futuristic capitalist reforms of Mao’ successor, Deng Xiaoping,
aimed at greater consolidation, this time through high-tech infrastructure, ranging from trans-
portation to surveillance (Gewirtz, 2019).
If the West is profoundly dualistic in its metaphysics, China is profoundly animistic. The word
‘holistic’ is sometimes used (e.g. in Nisbett, 2003), but that occludes the difference, especially in
terms of capturing the West’s blindsidedness to the ‘meta-civilizational’ challenge facing it in the
coming years. After all, ‘animism’ was coined by Edward Tylor in 1871 in the founding moment of
what became the imperial discipline of ‘anthropology’. It was adopted with gusto in the philosophy
of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, which together succeeded
in associating animism with the ‘primitive’ or ‘childlike’ mind for most of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, the cosmologies of the parts of the world not completely dominated by Abrahamic
theology’s dualism—and I mean both Christianity and Islam, as well as Judaism—regard such
‘animism’ as the natural attitude. Here China might be seen as having held its metaphysical line.
Indeed, Chinese investment in the former Western colonies in Africa and Latin America represents
a test to see whether those now independent countries will keep to their imperial Abrahamic line
or ‘revert’ to what the West would regard as their pre-colonial ‘animism’. In any case, it’s clear that
animism needs to be treated more seriously, even though its origins were pejorative.
Russia, notwithstanding having a GDP comparable to Canada’s, is well poised to influence
this situation. It is our world-historic joker. On the one hand, the leading Putin-oriented intel-
lectual, Alexander Dugin (2014), has provided a land-based ‘Eurasian’ vision that looks a bit
‘blood and soil’, but in any case plays into China’s current ‘Silk Road’ (aka ‘Belt and Road’) ini-
tiative in a win-win way, since it’s ultimately about Lebensraum. On the other hand, the very
smart global media channel RT (‘Russia Today’) nurtures the West’s self-doubts based on an
unholy mix of pluralism and skepticism. The combined collective result encourages ‘smart’ people
to ask: ‘What’s wrong with China, when it gets down to it?’ The long game here appears to be
is to destabilize the West’s self-understanding by playing on its self-vaunted mental flexibility.
If I were China now, I’d present ‘Going Green’ as a global Lebensraum strategy, which reap-
propriates ‘animism’—perhaps after some rebranding—to force the world into a more serious
sense of stewardship for the planet. That’s the sort of thing that Greta Thunberg (and her
followers) would immediately embrace. It’s an idea that had been floated by the Nazis before
the atrocities of the Second World War (Neumann, 1942: chap. 5). It would require making the
world more generally risk-averse (‘precautionary’), so that people come to favor security over
freedom, regardless of their views on animism. And that may not be as hard as it seems.
10 M. A. PETERS ETAL.
Notes
1. http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
2. This excerpt is taken from Zakaria’s (2008) ‘The Rise of the Rest’ that appears in Newsweek at http://www.
newsweek.com/id/135380/page/2.
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s/
4. ‘The 21st Century as Whose Century?’ Journal of World-Systems Research, Volume XIII, Number 2, Pages
96-118.
5. According to official figures, China’s GDP was set to drop from 10.4 in 2010 to 7.8 in 2012. https://www.
chinadaily.com.cn/business/2013-01/18/content_16137028.htm. Accessed 13 October 2021
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-evergrande-debt-property/2021/10/12/403d48
ca-2b1a-11ec-b17d-985c186de338_story.html. Accessed 13 October 2021.
7. https://www.oecd.org/eu/escaping-the-stagnation-trap-policy-options-for-the-euro-area-and-japan.pdf
8. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/one-year-hong-kong-arrests-117-people-under-new-
security-law-2021-06-30/. Accessed 13 October 2021
9. https://www.csis.org/podcasts/pekingology/retrofitting-leninism. Accessed 13 October 2021.
10. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-america
n-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/. Accessed 12 October 2021.
11. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/biden-says-he-chinas-xi-have-agreed-abide-by-taiwan-ag
reement-2021-10-05/. Accessed 14 October 2021.
12. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-officially-applies-join-cptpp-trade-pact-2021-09-16/. Accessed 13
October 2021.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Michael A. Peters http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1482-2975
Benjamin Green http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7810-908X
Steve Fuller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2190-6552
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