China and the Global Culture War: Western Civilizational Turmoil and Beijing’s Strategic Calculus

Nathan Levine

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The study of great-power competition between China and the broader West (including the United States, Europe, and the Anglosphere) today tends toward tunnel vision with its focus fixed on the narrow range of issues most familiar to geopolitical analysts in Washington, including economic and security affairs. Less tangible issues of culture, society, morality, and ideology are largely ignored—even though it is precisely such issues that are now driving increasingly ferocious and fundamental political debates within the West over the future of our civilization. This narrow focus is a dangerous mistake.

Already viewing geopolitics through a more holistic lens of what might be called “civilizational competition,” Chinese analysts have no similar misconceptions. In fact, there is reason to believe that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has identified these cultural or civilizational struggles as central and potentially determinative factors in China’s long-term strategic competition with the West. At the least, we can say with certainty that many analysts in Beijing are demonstrably paying close attention to the “culture war” wracking the West and take it quite seriously—seriously enough that it already has seemingly influenced China’s own domestic and foreign policy decisions.

The opacity of CCP internal politics renders Beijing’s decision-making process something of a black box and makes it difficult for outside observers to isolate and determine with certainty those factors that go into the calculus behind any specific policy. Nonetheless, through official party discourse and the work of associated scholars and think tanks, we can obtain glimpses of how China’s leadership may be weighing these issues in their decision-making. More significantly, it is possible to identify and trace a direct conceptual line between past work by some of the CCP’s most influential theorists critiquing American and Western cultures—in particular chief party ideologist Wang Huning—and the strategic logic of a number of key decisions being made by Beijing today.