Chinese Spiritual Civilisation

01 Jan 1970

Deng XiaoPing said that the China he had built had “one hand which is tough while the other is soft.” He meant that China and its people required two hands, one strong and material and one soft and ‘spiritual’. Deng said that “to get rich is glorious”, but then became concerned that in the rush to become rich quickly, ‘spirituality’ had been ignored and forgotten. What was needed to rectify the balance was a “Socialist spiritual civilisation”

Some say that Samuel Huntington’s book “The Clash of Civilisations” raised Chinese alarms, arguing that “only powers with a strong ‘spirituality’ such as the U.S. or the Islamic world would be significant players in the clash of civilisations. The Soviet Union had lost its place for not having a viable ‘spirituality’. Thus China must find a Chinese ‘spirituality’.

Xi Jinping seems to be wrestling with the same problem. China is a military and economic superpower, but its citizens are not motivated by a deep, ‘spiritual’ loyalty to the Party and the government. That is partly because there is an issue: how does an atheistic political system define what is ‘spiritual’. It was never really clear what the ‘spiritual civilisation’ that Deng and Jiang proposed actually meant.

One obvious attempt at definition lies in the stress on secular morality: while pursuing wealth, the Chinese people should avoid corruption and selfishness and obey the Party. In some ways that is an Old Testament morality with a different god!

Others, mainly intellectuals, claim that Marxism had always had a ‘spirituality’ that even includes a ‘mysticism’. But that ‘mysticism’ is surely impossible to define in an atheistic and totally secular political system.