How Chinese Civilization Ended

The End of Chinese Civilization and the Birth of PRC China

Jasper Becker was among the first foreigners to move to Beijing in the 1980s, just as China was exiting its self-imposed isolation and seeking new interactions with the outside world. After decades of dysfunction, China was finally ready to admit that it desperately needed foreigners, especially Westerners, in order to escape the extreme backwardness and poverty into which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had descended.

What Becker encountered in Beijing was an ancient city filled with memories stretching back centuries. In his book A Farewell to Old Peking: The Destruction of an Ancient City and the Creation of the New Beijing Becker described a feeling of endless opportunities for historical discovery in the many quaint places hidden around the city. He wrote: “Beijing seemed eternal. Armies had marched in and trooped out… They all had their entrances and exits, but none had really dared to challenge Beijing itself… kings, seers, poets, and thinkers of every sort had had their moment and then departed. Their stories added to the pool of memory.” The accumulation of centuries of history had made Beijing the embodiment of Chinese civilization and the greatest marvel of East Asia. But then… it all ended.

After 1989, and accelerating prior to the 2008 Olympics, Peking was completely destroyed and an entirely new city, Beijing, was built over its ruins. 95% of the city was bulldozed. Centuries of history were erased in fifteen years, and atop the rubble rose hundreds of modernist high-rise towers. One commentator summed up the new Beijing as a “Stalinist steppe city” prone to dust storms and pollution haze. Millions of Beijing natives, whose families had resided in the city for centuries, were deported and replaced with a new population. The accumulated stories, traditions, architecture, art, memories, and even people of old Beijing were erased forever. East Asia’s greatest city, its cultural heart, was demolished.

Why did this happen? Jasper Decker wrote that what he witnessed while residing in China’s capital was a continuation of the Cultural Revolution’s war against the “four olds” and “the greatest act of vandalism in Chinese history”. It was part of a systematic policy carried out over decades. The plan was to utterly destroy all remnants of ancient China and start over again, to relegate everything from “old China” to the dustbin of history and begin anew with Marx and Mao. This rebuilding would require the obliteration of thousands of years of accumulated history and tradition. Unfortunately, the policy succeeded. Chinese civilization came to an end.

Today, Beijing is new and without history. Even its tourist sites have been torn down and reconstructed. The Forbidden City and Great Wall are now largely fake recreations. The ancient wood palaces of the Forbidden City were ripped out and replaced with concrete and metal. The famous portions of the Great Wall were rebuilt in the 1950s for diplomatic photo-ops. Both of these icons of China are now merely artificial shadows of Chinese civilization, little more than props for the propaganda department.

The complete destruction of old Beijing and the end of Chinese civilization instilled in the wider population a sense that the current government and its corresponding society were all-powerful and inevitable. There was no going back, because everything from before 1949 has been annihilated. Nearly every city in China has experienced the same totalizing obliteration of its past as Beijing. Almost everything old was demolished, and everything useful for tourism or propaganda was rebuilt as a politically correct simulacrum. Anything that survived this great purge has been distorted into something new.

The effects of this unparalleled destruction on the Chinese worldview cannot be exaggerated. Today, China has become a hollow shell of what historians once called “Chinese civilization”. The PRC is a giant Marxist machine that killed the dragon and buried it under mountains of concrete and steel. The population of China is trapped in a historical hallucination, simultaneously repeating maxims about “5,000 years of history” while living their lives amidst ideological and material spaces that have no continuity with anything that predates the 20th century. The people of China are trapped in a materialist nightmare of historical nihilism.

Is there any hope in China’s civilizational abyss? It’s hard to see how the Chinese people can escape from the ruins of their historical civilization, especially now that the Marxist civilization which was meant to replace it has imploded into farce. Chinese society is now increasingly collapsing into empty consumerism. The people have lost hope. Their past has been obliterated, and the officially enforced vision of their future is nothing but a semi-fascist “China dream” formulated as an endless involuted struggle for national status.

The very existence of the Chinese people is now in doubt. China’s birth rate has plunged so low that it’s now inevitable that half the population will disappear in the next 60-80 years. Long before that threshold is reached, the PRC will almost certainly collapse as a viable nation-state under the immense pressure of demographically induced economic implosion. Religion is probably the only hope for personal and societal salvation in such a scenario. Something deep will have to alter the fundamental spiritual and communal nature of the Chinese people if any remnant of “China” is going survive past the 21st century.

Perhaps the more important question, however, is whether this “China”, which was invented around the turn of the 20th century, is worthy of preservation. Has the nation-state of “China” helped the Chinese people? Are the people of mainland East Asia better off because “China” was summoned into existence? Perhaps the era of nationalism should end forever and the Chinese people should no longer think of themselves as “Chinese” in the sense that we’ve come to define that term. There is more to human beings than their nations, and there are more ways than one to define our identities. A spiritually revived Chinese people might return to their roots and rediscover universalist identities as inhabitants of “all under heaven” (tianxia). Prayer is the beginning of real change, and only prayer can help lead China into a better world.