What is Modern China?

The search for it has ended in emptiness

Driving around any major Chinese city will reveal a plethora of ghost neighborhoods. Entire city blocks waiting for decay or demolition. These are not like abandoned buildings in developed nations, they were never structures once buzzing with activity and life. China’s ghost places were constructed to boost GDP, but they were never used. People did not move in, people did not live in them, productivity was never a part of their existence. These places were built and then left to rot, and they currently occupy huge areas around every major Chinese city. Entire districts worth of infrastructure, skyscrapers, museums, and monuments are now just hollow shells waiting for the end.

These ghost places are more than just some strange phenomenon, I have come to believe they represent the real soul of China. The search for modern China is over, but what that search has uncovered is shockingly vapid: a self-defeating lust for the appearance of money and power. I say “appearance” of those things because most of modern China has neither of them in real substance. We have now reached “peak-China”, but this long-awaited China has almost nothing to offer the world. Unlike the romanticized Sinic past, with its fascinating complexity of religion, art, and practice, modern China is deeply disappointing. It has emerged as a hollow facade of greed and humiliation trying to impose its impotent emptiness onto an increasingly disgusted world. China is a country gutted by a failed Marxist civilization that is now lashing out in nationalist desperation against the dying of the light. A corroded concrete dragon increasingly ossified as its life force drains away.

China is already in decline. Its population officially began declining in 2022, and the country is set to lose half its population by 2080. What we see now is peak-China. What we see now is what modern China really is, because there’s probably nothing significantly new that’s going to arise in China from here on. This is it. The fastest aging population of any large country. China’s working age demographic, those between the ages of 18 and 60, has already been in decline for a decade as young people fail to be born and the elderly proliferate. The average age of a Chinese person has already surpassed the average age of an American. The big difference is that America has always been a developed country while China has never fully developed. China has not just become old before becoming rich, it has become old before becoming cultured or innovative. The search for modern China is over, and the search has ended with this: a hollow declining leftover of the twentieth century’s failed Marxist civilization.

Karl Marx said “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce”. The twentieth century’s Cold War is now repeating itself, but not as tragedy, not as the fatal showdown between two virile ideologies competing for vindication in front of a conflicted world. No, our century’s new cold war is the farcical repeat in which China shoulders the role of a dilapidated Soviet Union trying to overturn the liberal democratic West. Unlike the old Soviet Union, which pioneered Marxist civilization and became the first space power, China is still an underdeveloped backwater with a huge half-impoverished population that somehow staggered into the new era with an outdated oligarchy of Leninist leftovers.

Subconsciously, Chinese people know these facts about their country, and millions of them are trying to escape. My own encounters with people across China reveal a paradox brought on by propaganda conditioning. Although it’s impossible for Chinese to express this in explicit terms, most of them are subtly aware of what their country really is. They are aware, if only on a subconscious level, that their country is nothing special and that their own lives have become worse because of what China has become. But they cannot express this. There are few ways of organizing around this realization, there are few ways of affirming this within a narrative community, so their thoughts are often uninformed and mixed with the extreme nationalist pride they were fed nonstop during their anxiety ridden school years. They’re torn between reality and the semi-fictional country they see portrayed in propaganda images. These images mix incongruently with the lived experiences of Chinese people’s actual lives: the incivility of neighbors, endless work hours, lack of basic rights, lack of basic hygiene, abusive bosses, low wages, cramped living conditions, corruption, childhoods filled with almost nothing but studying for zero-sum exams, dangerous food toxicity, polluted air, dust everywhere, always feeling helpless without a voice, relentless ageism, relentless sexism, and the general involution of a low productivity society.

The people are trapped. The only country with stricter censorship than China is North Korea. Most of the internet is inaccessible to the average Chinese person. Crackdowns on VPNs and bans on all international social media apps ensure that Chinese people are increasingly restricted to an information and entertainment echo chamber that leaves them without access to the world. Many, if not most, Chinese people cannot hold conversations with the rest of the world’s people without that dialogue devolving into an awkward exchange of misunderstandings the moment it veers outside formal interaction. Most Chinese people are no longer aware that China’s official neo-fascist worldview is offensive to the rest of the world. They often begin speaking to foreigners with nationalist talking points about the superiority of China, and they have no idea why others are offended by this. They cannot know this to be inappropriate, because the only permitted online exchanges with foreigners involve recordings of foreigners praising China and enthusiastically embracing propaganda talking points about the supremacy of Chinese culture and society.

Digital control is matched by physical control. Chinese increasingly live in huge apartment tower complexes surrounded by walls and accessible only via facial recognition gates. The people who live in these high security complexes insist that these measures make them feel safe, but at what cost? During the zero-covid era, these neighborhood complexes were locked down, nobody was allowed in or out. The security guards (baoan) imposed draconian policies restricting freedom of movement, and they welded shut any tower where an infected person was found. This led to tragedies. Towers caught fire and people burned to death, heart attack victims couldn’t be extracted, life saving surgeries were canceled, suicidal depression sent many plunging from windows. During the dreadful zero-covid years, it was politically preferable for government officials to bring about the deaths of hundreds of people rather than allow a single person to be infected with coronavirus and thus suffer the central government’s wrathful retaliation. The leadership could not lose face, no matter what the cost. Zero-covid meant absolute zero, and no number of lost lives would stand in the way of the leader’s historical project to outperform the West and manage the virus better than anyone else. In the end, however, nothing was accomplished. Zero-covid could not be maintained, infections spread, and millions of people died, just as they had in the rest of the world. Chinese exceptionalism was nothing but a mirage. That didn’t matter, what really mattered was projecting the appearance of competent power. What mattered internally was humiliating the Chinese population, driving them to a state in which they were forced to submit entirely and lose all freedom, even the freedom to escape a burning building. The Party’s control is what mattered. The Party is China, and the Chinese people belong to the Party. Whether they live or die is the Party’s decision. Whether they think, move, or speak is the Party’s decision.

What happened to China? Even now, the word “China” conjures up images of kung fu, exotic food, East Asian women with powdered faces, unique architecture, the Great Wall, temples of Buddha statues, tea, and red lanterns illuminating the night. What we think of when we think of “China” is something from a bygone historical era. China has become like Egypt, another civilization from the mysterious past that went extinct at some point and is now frozen in an ancient image.

I was confused immediately after arriving in China. I had thought I was entering an ancient civilization, but what I found instead was the largest pile of concrete I had ever seen. Endless skyscrapers of concrete. Concrete and dust. Endless dust settling across everything and finding its way into every nook of my apartment. Corroded metal rebar sticking out of crumbling concrete, water stains streaking down barren Stalinist architecture. The sky was forever grey with pollution, and the moon was a new and disturbing color every night. Neon lights illuminated the skies. Half a building would be thriving with business, and then I’d take a wrong turn and find myself in a corridor overrun with weeds and a tree growing out the window. Many of the buildings were nothing but hollow concrete shells. Nobody seemed to notice. Any idealized image of poets sipping tea under a bent pine quickly vanished upon arrival. The brutal reality was something else, something from the twentieth century, something I was too young to fully remember, but I had collected random images from history books that almost portrayed what I was seeing. It took me years to piece things together, to realize that modern China belonged to something that was already history when I was a child, it belonged to that extinct Marxist civilization that haunted the memories of the elderly but had seemingly lost all relevance by the time I entered school. I was not prepared to make sense of this. China was supposed to be something else; it was supposed to be a thriving ancient civilization opening up to globalization, a colorful part of our united nations cooperating for the betterment of humanity. But what was this thing I found myself in? A decaying Stalinist steppe city lost in its own bizarre narrative.

The young people I encountered were often different. I met many younger people who had grand hopes for the future, and they were optimistic about China entering the world and building connections with the outside. They wanted to learn from other countries and share themselves. But the longer I lived in China the smaller this segment of society became. It was increasingly obvious that China was moving backwards, that China was on the wrong side of history, that China was against pluralism and against democracy and against human rights. The young people sank more and more into isolation and cynicism. They recognized China for what it was, but they were still forced to think and speak as if the international community was even worse than China. The space for dialogue and sharing shrank. The foreigners had packed their bags and left during the three long brutal years of zero-covid. Half the foreigners in China were gone in a single winter. China was closing, China was no longer joining the international community, China was no longer going to be a colorful part of the world. It was going to be isolated, it was going to become like North Korea. Hollow nationalism is what remains. A vague promise by the oligarchy to make China great again and rectify the fake humiliations of a past century, even if it requires international violence.

Among the youthful efforts to bring color to Chinese society was the hanfu movement that sought to restore traditional Han Chinese clothing that had been lost for four centuries. The hanfu movement gained strength for several years in the late 2010s. More and more young people could be seen sporting their unique flowing ancestral clothes on the streets of China. It seemed possible that a full mainstream revival of hanfu in public life was less than a decade away. However, like other efforts, the greed and status-seeking so endemic in modern China quickly engulfed the movement. Bitter feuds about historical authenticity and rising prices tore the movement down and priced most Chinese out of the market. Without the ability to adapt beyond the “authentic” historical materials and styles, the prices for hanfu soon grew exorbitant. Chinese youth were already suffering from widespread underemployment before zero-covid gutted the economy and raised their unemployment rate past 20%. The hanfu movement has since declined rapidly, it’s now just another victim of repressive government policies and societal pettiness and greed. I often encouraged people to embrace the hanfu movement and talked regularly about how I enjoyed the style, but I was increasingly met with cynicism until the movement was obviously approaching its end. The optimism of China’s youth now appears spent. The great rejuvenation of ancient Chinese culture now seems dead and buried. Ancient Chinese civilization is extinct, and it cannot be revived. Modern China is set in its ways, it cannot change, and time has run out.

Chinese (Sinic) civilization once thought it was the “zhongguo”, the central region and culture of the world. Its people and their leaders desperately held onto this fantasy long after they should have. As far as modern historians can tell, the region we now call China had already fallen significantly behind Western Europe by AD 1350. By 1500, there could be no question that the West was far ahead by every measure of social and economic development. Western Europe’s per capita GDP had almost always been higher than China’s, but five hundred years ago it was substantially higher and rising rapidly. Unlike Japan, which finally grew to understand how far behind it was, China never did. Japan was an oceangoing civilization that had more contact with the outside world than China. China, enclosed in its sense of superiority and continental parochialism, was unable to change. It took more than a half century of repeated humiliations, the collapse of the entire Chinese region into decades of unprecedented savagery, and huge chunks of its territory being colonized by Westerners and Japanese for the civilization to finally wake up from its self-defeating fantasy and realize that it was not the world’s central country nor culture. In fact, China was nothing special.

It took more than a century for this humiliation, this massive loss of face, to sink in. When it did finally sink in, it took on self-destructive tendencies and culminated with Mao Zedong’s successful efforts to destroy ancient Sinic civilization and replace everything with foreign imports, most importantly Marxism-Leninism. Thus, ancient Sinic civilization ended, and the Chinese region became a part of Marxist civilization. China still calls itself the “zhongguo”, but nobody believes it. History repeats itself, but the second time is farce. Very little is now more farcical than believing China is the zhongguo.

Mao Zedong succeeded at ending ancient Chinese civilization, but his positive cultural project ended in failure after his death. His great Proletarian Cultural Revolution succeeded in its destructive aspects but failed when it tried to construct something new. Maoism was discredited after ten years of orgiastic violence, and then Marxism as a whole collapsed after 1989. China was reduced to a giant cultural void. The “olds” had been destroyed, but where was the new? The people had an idea, they wanted to open up and embrace democracy, but their efforts ended in failure at Tiananmen. China entered the twenty-first century with a collection of ageing Leninists purging the ranks of the oligarchy and intent on remaining in power no matter what the cost. China was ruled by Leninists who no longer had Marxism. They had power but no legitimacy, they had no ideas nor cultural program, so they turned back to fascism and embraced consumerism to pacify the people. Feed the people a steady diet of nationalism to keep them feeling loyal and supportive of the Party and let them buy more stuff so they have something to work for. Fascism and consumerism, the new opium of the masses. Leninist-fascist-consumerism was the new official religion, and all others were banned.

“China” is equivalent with this social void I have described as Leninist-fascist-consumerism. Of course, such an ideology does not exist except as a semi-workable draft fusion that holds the Chinese void together into something cohesive. Nobody believes in this religion. What is “China”, really? Is it nothing but the wreckage of the past? This is my belief: there is no China, there is nothing but the ruins of past chinas which are now being demolished by greed driven economic accidents. There is no real Marxism in one of the most unequal societies on earth. There is no real fascism in a society that lacks the will to even restore its authentic ethnic clothing styles. There is no realized consumerism in a society with a shrinking consumer base and record youth unemployment. All that remains is an oligarchy fighting over the assets of a shrinking population and dilapidated resource base combined with the dreams of an all-powerful leader seeking something to put himself in the history books.

China is the opposite of the zhongguo because it’s entirely peripheral. Nothing comes out of China that is not somehow foreign. Whatever China now is, it is the result of the outside coming in and using China’s raw materials to produce something unrelated to “authentic” China. Modern China is defined by manufacturing the world’s cheap goods and exporting them. These cheap goods are planned in foreign design studios and manufactured by overworked Chinese laborers. China is simply used like a machine for creating what the rest of the world has already designed. I have walked and driven through many Chinese cities and asked myself what there is that’s authentically Chinese about these places. There is almost nothing I could find. With the notable exception of some Chinese foods, everything is “foreign”. The people are all wearing Western style clothing: t-shirts, polos, button-ups, leather shoes, trousers, jeans, suits, ties, dresses, sneakers, shorts, athleisure materials, varsity jackets, Major League Baseball caps, catholic school uniforms, and all kinds of knockoff products imitating Western brands. The people’s technology consists of Western invented cell phones, smart watches, laptops, vehicles, and stoplights. The core architecture of China is Stalinist with a layer of international styles that almost all began in modernist Western architecture studios, or else bad replicas of historic Western styles built out with cheap tiles and cement. The city planning and street design, especially over the last ten years, has sought to replicate American models even past the point where they make sense for local use. The food is increasingly influenced by American snack foods and imported ideas from Korea and Japan. Chinese TV series are almost all poor-quality copies of the rest of the world’s programming. Chinese news broadcasts copy their Western news counterparts down to the finest details. China has knockoff versions of American Ninja Warrior and all the other reality programs. Chinese cinema appears to be little more than Mandarin language adaptations of Hollywood classics. The longer I lived in China, the more I asked myself: “What is Chinese about China?” Even the Chinese language, “Mandarin” or “Putonghua”, was created in the twentieth century and has no pure connection to the ancient Chinese language, nor is it popular to learn outside China. China is, by definition, the periphery of the world order, it is the opposite of the zhongguo. China is a receiver, not a giver.

Despite all this, the average Chinese person often still retreats into state sponsored nationalism. While living in China, I would sometimes point out the real meanings of various foreign objects, but almost none of the locals were aware of the cultural origins of what they were wearing or using. American high school varsity jackets, for example, are a uniquely American accessory with a purpose and meaning deeply related to the sports team dynamics of their respective educational institutions. At one point, nearly half of Chinese college students could be seen wearing fake versions of these jackets, and yet when I pointed out the meaning of the large letters and the athletic association behind the design, almost none of them had even heard that the jacket style was related to America at all. Similarly, huge numbers of Chinese young people wear Major League Baseball (MLB) branded clothing without realizing that the MLB is an American sports league. It is this astonishing lack of knowledge about the outside world that enables the Chinese-void to maintain its fascist propaganda worldview while remaining an entirely peripheral state. China’s lack of cultural context and naivete about other cultures enables the population to be fully colonized by the world-center while still believing itself to be superior. As foreigners increasingly exit China and the government continues its crackdown on international exchange, we can expect Chinese ignorance to spread and for China to remain utterly peripheral while simultaneously claiming with renewed vigor to be the zhongguo. Fantasy and reality are again growing further apart in Chinese society.

Somewhere I read the opinion that a civilization differs from a culture insomuch as a civilization views itself as a universal representation of reality and truth. A culture, in contrast, views itself as a narrow representation of a specific sub-group of the whole. If this is true, China long ago forfeited any claim to being a civilization. Its narrow nationalist protectionist agenda, its obsession with “cultural self-confidence” and the “sinification” of everything reveals the extent to which China no longer claims to be anything universal or even true. China has been reduced to something parochial and peripheral, a small entity fighting against Western Civilization. The West being among the world’s last true civilizations, an entity willing to incorporate into itself all the world’s cultures and all the world’s truth. The West is no longer a culture, it’s no longer even a group of people, the West has reached the final triumphal form of global civilization. The West has become the real zhongguo and is nearly synonymous with “all under heaven” (tianxia).

Chinese propaganda relentlessly pushes the concept of “cultural self-confidence”. The idea is that Chinese people should be proud of Chinese country and identity, and they should avoid “worshiping foreigners” and treating them and their culture as special and superior. But relentlessly informing your population that they should be confident almost certainly means that the population is not confident. Instead of fixing the underlying cause of the people’s lack of confidence, China’s propaganda apparatus has instead resorted to blindly asserting that China is great and other countries are not great.

Chinese propaganda’s best efforts to build cultural self-confidence often appear desperate to anyone who is not Chinese, and many Chinese themselves recognize the desperation. Among the basest of these propaganda efforts is the “four great inventions” that allegedly emerged from the Chinese region in ancient times. These four inventions are featured everywhere in China. One of the neighborhoods in which I lived constructed four separate monuments to these alleged inventions. Similar monuments are being erected all over China. The problem with the “four great inventions”, however, is that they have nothing to do with modern China, and at least one of them, paper, is known to have been invented thousands of years earlier in Egypt. Another one of them, printing, was not that useful until being reinvented and improved upon in Germany a thousand years later. The fact that the government needed to stretch back thousands of years to find examples of “Chinese” innovation is a clear sign of desperation. While most Western countries could easily dig up ten such inventions from the last few centuries, China had to go back millennia just to find four things that might have been invented by the Han race. What has China invented over the last 200 years? I cannot think of anything, and certainly nothing of global significance. More importantly, however, this obsession with inventions attempts to cover up the sense of inferiority that modern Chinese suffer from the fact that they have contributed so little to our modern world. The modern world of 1970, for example, would have been almost exactly the same regardless of whether China had ever existed or not.

When it comes to art, modern China has little to boast about. Modern China is an artistic desert. Russia is probably among the countries that shares the most historical parallels with China, and yet Russia has produced many volumes and museums full of incredible literature and art. No matter what one might think about Marxist Russian art movements like socialist realism, for example, it must be admitted that they’ve become well known around the world. But what has China produced that carries similar significance? Possibly the most famous novel to come out of modern China is Mo Yan’s ‘Red Sorghum’, but anyone who has read this book knows that it’s far below the quality of lesser-known Russian novels and it’s also disgusting, disjointed, contradictory, and almost meaningless. Perhaps the next most famous modern Chinese work is Cixin Liu’s ‘Three Body Problem’, a book that won a sci-fi award and yet is so horrendously bad that it remains the only book I’ve actually hurled across the room because it was so frustratingly nonsensical and stupid. The book is extremely controversial among those who have actually read it, and nobody seriously believes it belongs in the same league as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I remain convinced that Cixin Liu achieved recognition only out of a misplaced sense of political correctness mixed with billions of dollars in Chinese propaganda amplification. Chinese cinema has fared worse than its literature. No mainland Chinese film has achieved international fame or widespread name recognition. China’s most successful film ‘The Wandering Earth’ is a mediocre production that was basically only viewed by Mandarin speakers and is unknown outside the Sinosphere. When the Chinese government placed a widespread ban on American films during the zero-covid era, the country’s cinemas emptied out and half of them closed their doors forever. It’s widely acknowledged and openly admitted even by nationalists that China’s film productions are horrible. When it comes to painting or graphic art, there’s nothing like a Chinese version of the Mona Lisa. There is nothing like a Chinese Van Gogh. Most of the world’s people could not name a single Chinese painting, and they definitely could not name a single modern Chinese painting. China doesn’t even have a meme-able painting like the American Gothic. When it comes to sculpture, the only somewhat recognizable examples are the country’s many massive concrete Mao Zedong sculptures honoring a man that most of the world now regards as history’s second or third most murderous dictator. Although some will dismiss China’s underwhelming artistic performance as a side effect of its underdevelopment, this dismissal becomes harder to defend when comparing China with some of its smaller less developed neighbors who are nevertheless outperforming it. India, for example, has a thriving and popular film industry in Bollywood which is known around the world for its unique style. Where is the Chinese equivalent of Bollywood? Despite its relatively small size and recent development, South Korea has a thriving globally recognized music and TV industry that pumps out K-pop and K-dramas. In contrast, China has no music industry of any substance, it has no internationally known celebrities (Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong), and none of its TV shows are viewed outside the Sinosphere. China has not just failed artistically when compared to the West, it has fallen far behind smaller and less developed countries in the East.

Chinese sport is possibly even less impressive. None of the world’s recognized sports began in China apart from kung fu (which was possibly invented by an Indian Buddhist missionary). Modern China is shockingly bad at sports. It does not have a single globally renowned sports league, and the only way it succeeds in the Olympics is via mass state-sponsored camps that extract genetically gifted children for nonstop training (a model it copied from the Soviet Union). China spent untold billions trying to develop a respectable football/soccer league only to see it collapse after zero-covid. The Chinese men’s national soccer team is so bad that they regularly lose to small unstable countries like Syria and Sri Lanka despite China’s colossal population and government funding. China’s best sport, ping pong, is barely regarded as an actual sport by most of the world. Basketball is by far the most popular sport in China, and yet Chinese people tend to be poor at playing it, and they have not succeeded at it internationally. The broader trend is that China massively under performs in all sports categories, even when it appears that China should dominate a given sport, it somehow manages to disappoint. It’s also shocking that modern China has never created any major sport of its own, especially when compared to the proliferation of new sports that have emerged from the United States in recent years (Ultimate Frisbee, for example).

I would like to suggest that underlying much of this underachievement is China’s lack of philosophy. China’s most famous philosopher was Confucius, a man who lived and died centuries before anything even remotely like “China” ever existed. The Sinic region’s second most famous philosopher was Confucius’ near contemporary Laozi, a man who possibly never existed and who wrote a single short booklet. The works of both Confucius and Laozi were written in an obscure dead language known as “classical Chinese” that is now extremely difficult to interpret accurately even for native Chinese people. Both of these men were condemned after 1949 and their influence was systematically eradicated. There is almost nothing in China’s fast-paced chaotic society today that has been significantly shaped by their influence. Confucius has been reduced to a human mascot roughly corresponding to the giant panda. Nowadays, the most influential philosophers in modern China are Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, but both were Westerners, and both have lost considerable relevance following the collapse of the Soviet Union. China cannot perform, in large part, because it has no deep foundational thinking or ideas, it lacks creativity on the philosophical level, and thus the entire psychology of the society is stunted. The result of this underdeveloped worldview is an unappealing nationalism that has undermined China’s soft power.

Ultimately, Chinese self-confidence cannot be built on narrow nationalist bigotry. Either China becomes something of substance, or it remains a censored manufacturing periphery dominated by a totalitarian oligarchy. Either is achieves something and ads to the colorful global fabric, or it continues hollowing into a husk. China’s leaders appear to know that real substance is no longer possible, and it is this realization that has led them down the dangerous path of self-confidence through violence, the conquest of more territory, and historical lies and identity manipulation to justify that violence. Retreating into tribal us-vs-them paradigms that push the nation’s options into alignment with the oligarchy’s wishes.

The American Dream is so powerful that China copied the idea of a national dream. China’s leaders decided they needed their own Chinese Dream, “zhongguo meng”, in order to become a central nation like the United States. The term “Chinese Dream” is a transparent copy off the United States, and yet the term is ubiquitous in the government propaganda posters and monuments scattered around China. The Chinese public, however, is sensitive to the fact that so much of what China has achieved in recent years has resulted from copying developed nations. Chinese military equipment, for example, is almost all produced from stolen Russian and American blueprints. The entire Chinese government and almost all its institutions are simply clones of Soviet counterparts. These facts are politically incorrect in China despite being broadly known. Upon first learning to read Chinese, I was personally shocked to discover that a term like “Chinese Dream”, which is so obviously plagiarized off the much older American Dream, was plastered everywhere in direct translation. Such is the nature of Chinese society. Plagiarism, due to a lack of creativity, extends all the way to the top. Billions of dollars in propaganda funding could not imagine anything new.

The quest for wealth and power has always been about copying whatever model the Chinese think might get them to their dream faster. Because their dream is empty of real substance, they cannot imagine anything original. Before the Chinese began copying the Americans, they were copying the Soviet Russians. In 1953, the Soviet Union sent advisors into China and reorganized their entire system around the Soviet model. Historian Jonathan Spence described this process and wrote that the Soviet economic growth model consisted of “five basic elements: an emphasis on the need for high growth across the entire planning period, a focus on heavy industry as the index of meaningful growth, insistence on high rates of saving and investment to make that growth possible, institutional transformations in agriculture, and a bias towards capital-intensive methods.” To this day, China has never fundamentally swayed from the Soviet economic model. They simply cannot move away from it unless they plan to copy the free world and bring about the downfall of Party power. It is impossible for China to create its own model, unless one counts Mao’s disastrous communes. Chinese innovation is notoriously rare, and it takes a lot of innovation to formulate and then experimentally test a successful new economic model.

But what is the Chinese Dream? There has only ever been one Chinese Dream: wealth and power. Chinese propaganda is filled with the aspiration to have a rich and powerful country (“fuqiang”). It sounds shallow because it is shallow. There is nothing of substance. Chinese nationalists simply lust for money and power. Why do they want to be rich? There is no reason, there is “no why”. Why do they want to be powerful? Again, there is “no why”. Because China is a hierarchical society in which the rich are powerful and everyone else is a slave, it’s a true and crude oligarchy. They do not see the need to justify their lust for money. The only real goal they recognize is racing to the top of the hierarchy, looking down on everyone else, basking in adoration. They view life as nothing but this involuted struggle to the top. This is the entire Chinese worldview condensed down to its core substance.

I have spoken to over a thousand Chinese young people, and most of them feel absolutely no shame in admitting that money is the only thing they care about. When asked what they want to achieve in life, they say “I want to be rich”. Their whole youth, literally from dawn to dusk, is wasted competing with their peers for privileged academic spots and top scores on exams. Personal beauty in China is regarded as nothing more than having a series of specific features that the entire society agrees are beautiful: white skin, “high nose”, height, “double eyelids”, thick hair, thin v-shaped face, and skinny bodies. Nothing outside of this hierarchy of beauty is regarded as desirable. To be beautiful is simply to look like this. If you have these features then you have won the beauty game, but if you do not have them then you are ugly and undesirable. Money can be invested to acquire some of these traits, and having these traits will allow you to make more money, get more jobs, marry a richer spouse, and accumulate more money and power. Everything goes back to money. Beauty is a kind of power, and power is how you can make more money. The Chinese Dream is nothing but raw wealth. National power is just a way to manipulate and control the world’s people and thus accumulate more money for one’s personal in-group. The most common blessing for Chinese New Year is literally “hope you get rich this year”. Yes, it’s actually that shallow.

When China is finally rich, China will have power, and China will sit atop the hierarchy of the world enslaving the world’s population as best they can while basking in the glory of finally being the “zhongguo”, finally being at the top of the hierarchy. This is the Chinese Dream in its raw form: to reduce the world to subservience under China’s hollow meaningless worldview. China does not seek to give the world anything, it seeks to take from it. It seeks to make the world adore its emptiness as the ultimate manifestation of being-in-the-world. After destroying all religion and embracing the empty materialism of Marxism, China has nothing left but the mindless accumulation of material. Humanity reduced to automata.

The love of money leads to slavery, and thus most Chinese are dominated by a slave like mentality. They will not rebel against those who are above them on the hierarchy because doing so would cut their flow of money and they would lose whatever social status they have accumulated. The fear of losing this is overwhelming, and they have no alternative values with which to fight. They have no religion that allows them to imagine another set of standards outside the crude competition for money. Religion is systematically undermined in all education and propaganda. If access to money is the only value, and the Party controls access to money, then the Party controls society. Thus, everyone is reduced to slavery, even those who have money, because they fear losing it more than anything else.

The emptiness of China has been hidden beneath exaggerated claims about the past. None of its exaggerated claims is better known then that “China has more than 5,000 years of history”. There are numerous problems with this claim and numerous dimensions to these problems. Perhaps the first thing that must be settled is to decide upon what constitutes history. Without knowing the definition of history, we cannot begin to decide how long China’s history really is. The dividing line between history and prehistory has always been drawn at the point of written records. Prehistory is what happened before the invention of writing, and history is what happened after events could be recorded. Only with writing can a group of people freeze in time a record of their impressions. While oral history is important for events that occurred within a couple generations, almost no professional historian would accept the accuracy of an oral history claiming to recount events from over three centuries in the past. “History” consists of the events we have near contemporary written record of. Armed with this definition, we can safely say that China cannot possibly have a history longer than 3,500 years because there was no writing in East Asia until that time. However, we must also ask whether something called “China” existed 3,500 years ago. This is a tricky question because the Mandarin word for China is “zhongguo”, and the word “zhongguo” existed in ancient times; however, that doesn’t mean that the ancient word referred to what we now call “China”. For example, the word “Europe” existed in ancient times, but does that mean the history of the European Union goes back thousands of years? The answer is “yes and no”. There were events happening in what we now call “Europe” 7,000 years ago, but there’s something absurd about saying that the European Union is ancient. The European Union, which we now call “Europe”, was established in 1993, and the modern nation-state of China was founded in 1949. Both are modern entities, but only one of them alleges to have an ancient origin. However, if you claim anything loudly and angrily enough then people will just accept that your claim might be true, and therefore China “has a history of over 5,000 years” while the European Union is 30 years old. Both the Indo-European word “china” and the ancient Sinic word “zhongguo” referred to a region and not a state. “China” is equivalent to other regional words like “Europe”, “America”, and “Africa”. “America” was founded in 1776, but one could say that America has a history of over 10,000 years if one merely wants to speak of the region’s human habitation.

Unlike other nation-states like the United States and Pakistan which openly and shamelessly admit their actual founding dates as 1776 and 1947, the Chinese adamantly insist that China is 5,000 years old. I have often tried to casually refer to China as being around 70 years old just to gauge reactions, and these reactions almost always consist of adamant rejection and complaint followed by repeating the mantra about “over 5,000 years of history”. Pakistanis, on the other hand, do not have a problem saying Pakistan is 75 years old despite what we now call Pakistan having been the birthplace of the extremely ancient Indus Valley Civilization. I have often attended Chinese student speech competitions and been struck by the fact that every single historical speech or reference is somehow attached to a verbal claim about “5,000 years”. What is the point of this almost creedal confession? Anyone who has been to China can easily observe that almost nothing about modern China is connected to anything from the ancient past. There are almost no old buildings or even antiques in modern China, there is basically no religious continuity because Chinese adamantly believe that “the Chinese have no religion”, and the mass urbanization and commercialization of the society over the last several decades has all but destroyed the foundations of ancient Sinic culture. It is exactly this complete erasure of ancient China that has led to this creedal proclamation about “5,000 years of history”. Embarrassment about the extent to which contemporary China is empty of culture and history has led to the need to fill that vacuum with exaggerated claims about the society’s past. Modern China is now so empty of content that it has become necessary to invent some kind of content. After the failure of Mao Zedong’s dream to construct China into a vanguard Marxist society, there was nothing left for China to become, it could either go back into the past, breakup into smaller states, or finally enter Western modernity. Because the past was recently and systematically destroyed by the communists who were still in power, it was not possible to return to it without ruining the government’s legitimacy. Breakup was obviously rejected by a fiercely power-hungry regime. The only way forward was copying the already developed nations while making exaggerated and mostly false claims about the past to justify the existence of “China” as a homogeneous nation-state. What has happened in China is the equivalent of what might have happened if the Soviet Union had decided not to breakup but rather to gaslight the world into thinking that Eastern Germany had always been an inalienable part of Russia. As ridiculous as this sounds, this kind of gaslighting is now the only form of historiography still permitted in communist China.

Modern Chinese propaganda has at times tried to respond to these criticisms of its “5,000 year claim” that I have just discussed. To save their self-identity as ancient and superior, they have sometimes pivoted to claiming that China is special because its civilization is equivalent to its modern state. One will sometimes hear nationalists speak of China as a “civilization-state”. Why do they make this claim? Because ancient Sinic Civilization is not especially old in comparison to other civilizations. Western Civilization goes back 7,000 years to the ancient Mediterranean, and Hindu Civilization has a similar age. Furthermore, genetic testing demonstrates that humanity migrated into China from the West, so it’s scientifically impossible for China to be older than the West. The way to make China appear special, then, is to claim that the modern nation-state of China is somehow equivalent to an entire civilization. In other words, Britain is only one small part of a broader Western Civilization, but China is actually an entire civilization in a single nation-state; therefore, China is superior to any other country. Few Westerners could understand why Chinese people would want to make this kind of argument because such claims seem so distant and irrelevant to anything happening in the real world. However, these questions form a huge part of many modern Chinese people’s identity and sense of self-worth.

There are numerous problems with the “civilization-state” argument. First, as we have already pointed out, modern China has no continuity with ancient Sinic civilization because that culture was almost completely destroyed when China was absorbed into Marxist civilization. Secondly, modern China has less continuity with ancient Sinic civilization than many modern non-PRC states like Japan and Korea. Modern China cannot be a civilization-state because it’s not synonymous with either Marxist civilization nor Sinic civilization. The reality is that China is a communist country with a corresponding historical timeline, and the faster it abandons these exaggerated claims about its past, the faster it will grow into a healthy member of the international community with a realistic concept of its identity.

The search for modern China began with the arrival of Christian missionaries, but China rejected the path they offered and thus chose the void. Although Chinese propaganda typically portrays history as if China was thrust into the modern world by violent foreign imperialists, this was not the primary historical reality. Modernity came to China first through missionaries who wanted to spread education, medicine, science, religion, literacy, and the fruits of global culture to the Chinese people. Among the first of these missionaries were the Jesuits who introduced the Chinese to better astronomical methods and were the first to convince them that the world wasn’t flat. However, the Jesuits were less successful at convincing the Chinese that China was not actually the center of the world. In the following centuries, thousands of missionaries arrived to teach the Chinese about the modern world. Contrary to Chinese propaganda, these missionaries were among the most effective defenders of the average people against the more extreme abuses of imperialism, and they were among those who fiercely opposed the opium trade. Most of modern China’s early leaders were educated by Christians or were themselves Christians, Sun Yatsen and Chiang Kai Shek were both Christians, and it was missionaries who inspired them to modernize China and help the region abandon its outdated isolationist worldview, embrace the rest of the world, and learn from the great things the world could teach China. Like the Buddhist missionaries who came to China two thousand years ago, from what is now India and Pakistan, Christian missionaries were ready to help China advance and change its society for the better. The proto-nation-state of China was nearly proclaimed a Christian republic by its first leaders, and it was well on its way to becoming such in everyday practice as millions of the common people were embracing the Christian faith and the cultural advancements that came with it. But then communism came to power and turned China towards Marxism and the Soviet dialectical materialism that was part of that worldview. China spiritually devolved, and the foundations of what could have been a truly content-rich Christian China were eroded by rising xenophobia and anti-religious bigotry’s that forever destroyed ancient Sinic culture and replaced it with a dying fallacy. Despite communist persecution, Christianity has continued to grow rapidly in China, but, because of government suppression, the faith cannot become a recognized component of the overall society’s worldview or public culture. Unfortunately, Christian content in China remains “foreign” and “subversive” because it cannot be properly integrated into a public ideology that hates it. Christianity has been pushed out of what counts as “China”, it remains on the periphery of Chinese culture and consciousness, and it cannot help fill the Chinese-void with meaningful substance. This is tragic when we consider that it was benevolent Christian missionaries who first introduced China to modernity, they gave China a chance to develop a form of modernity that was not based on the current trajectory of fear, humiliation, greed, and ethno-nationalism. It was Christianity that provided an alternative to China’s eventual cynical acceptance of the worst forms of social Darwinism that continue to shape its worldview. Instead of a society built on the raw accumulation of wealth and power, China could have been a universalist civilization built on charity and humility.

Sadly, the search for modern China is over, and it's over because Chinese society has run its course. That course led to the massive hollow facade that now confronts the world with a new cold war. It could have been different, but it’s not. This is the reality we face. China is in terminal decline, a dying society that appears to have made its tragic choice and hardened its own heart. Unfortunately for the world, decline is the most dangerous phase of a nuclear armed regime’s lifespan. We must now strive to safely contain and erode the ability of this hollow behemoth to reach out and contaminate everything we value.