The dark side of China’s national renewal

Examples of the west ceding global leadership seem to have become a weekly occurrence. In the vacuum left behind it is natural to look for a replacement and for many, including the mandarins in Beijing, China appears to be the most credible.

But how much do we know about the kind of global leader China wants to be? The best place to start is with the stated intentions of the country’s leaders. On assuming the mantle of the ruling Communist party’s paramount leader in 2012, President Xi Jinping declared it his mission to realise the “China Dream”, which he defined as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, according to official translations…

But the official translation of this crucial slogan is deeply misleading. In Chinese it is “Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing” and the important part of the phrase is “Zhonghua minzu” — the “Chinese nation” according to party propaganda. A more accurate, although not perfect, translation would be the “Chinese race”…

Some theoreticians in Beijing even argue the modern idea of the sovereign nation state is an illegitimate western invention that contradicts the traditional Chinese notion of “all under heaven”, with the Chinese emperor at the centre and power radiating out from the Forbidden City to every corner of the earth.

Race-based ideas of national rejuvenation and manifest destiny have deep and uncomfortable echoes in 20th-century history and earlier European colonial expansion. That is why Communist party translators have opted for the misleading official translation of “nation” rather than “race”.