Why the West Still Can’t Decode China’s Rise

I’m French, I lived in China for many years and I’ve spent almost a decade trying to bridge the gap between China and the West. That gap remains enormous and, I’d argue, largely self-inflicted on the Western side.

Perhaps the clearest example relates to Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Here is a sitting head of state laying out, in extraordinary detail, the theory, history and philosophy behind his country’s governance, and yet the book series is rarely read the way it deserves to be: carefully, on its own terms and with genuine curiosity about the intellectual tradition it comes from. That’s what I’ve tried to do here. This is my review of Volume V: the product of the conviction that you cannot understand China if you refuse to listen to what China actually says about itself.

The book isn’t a memoir or a treatise of political science but a curated collection of speeches President Xi Jinping gave from May 27, 2022 to December 20, 2024 to specific audiences, including the report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and remarks at CPC Central Committee plenums and CPC Central Committee Political Bureau study sessions. A significant number of them had never been published before.

In effect, this means the content is not Xi explaining China to foreign readers, but him explaining China to China. This makes the book both more interesting, because you’re getting the actual operating language of the system, not a translation of it for foreign ears, and more demanding, because you’re walking into a conceptual universe built on its own terms, with its own vocabulary.

The book spans 18 thematic sections. I’m not going to go through all of them—that would take a small book of its own. But the structure of the book itself is revealing: It opens with the theme of National Rejuvenation Through Chinese Modernization and closes with The Party’s Leadership and Self-Reform. This mirrors a very ancient Chinese intuition that the grandest ambitions ultimately rests on self-cultivation. I’ll therefore focus on these two sections of the book, the first and the last, as they together give you the essence of China’s governance: what the project is and why the Party thinks it’s entitled to deliver it—the “why” and the “how.”

Chinese modernization

Let’s start with the why, the section on National Rejuvenation Through Chinese Modernization, which itself contains seven speeches. Among these, by far the most substantial, running for almost half the section, is the speech titled Chinese Modernization: Our Path to a Great Country and National Rejuvenation that President Xi gave on February 7, 2023 at a study session for members and alternate members of the newly elected CPC Central Committee and principal officials at the provincial and ministerial level.

This speech is extraordinary: China’s top leader explaining in detail the country’s entire theory of development to the people tasked with implementing it.

Let me copy the introduction of the speech in full because I find it such a perfect distillation of the foundational historical trauma that animates the entire National Rejuvenation project:

“The Chinese nation boasts a civilization dating back more than 5,000 years, which long stood at the forefront of the world. However, the policy of national seclusion, which began in the later stages of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), resulted in China missing out on the opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent wave of scientific and technological revolution. This, coupled with internal strife and the impact of Western modernization, led to China’s decline. The Opium War of 1840 was the tipping point for the country, reducing it to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society and inflicting dreadful sufferings on the people.

To relieve their plight and escape the oppression and manipulation they faced, the Chinese people rose up in resistance. Noble-minded patriots explored various approaches to national rejuvenation. Some led the Self-strengthening Movement, which attempted to ‘learn from the foreigners in order to best them’; others launched the Reform Movement of 1898, hoping to strengthen the country through widespread reform. Dr. Sun Yat-sen spearheaded the Revolution of 1911, which sought to modernize China by creating a bourgeois republic and fostering industrial development. Ultimately, despite their best efforts, each of these endeavors fell short. The mission of modernizing China thus fell to the CPC.

However, achieving modernization within a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society proved an impossible task. During the New Democratic Revolution (1919-49), our Party united the people and led them in ferocious battles fought with unyielding determination. Through the Northern Expedition (1926-27), the Agrarian Revolutionary War (1927-37), the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and the War of Liberation (1946-50), we successfully toppled the three mountains of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the people as the masters. This triumph secured our nation’s independence and liberated our people, creating the essential social conditions for China’s drive for modernization.

Following the founding of the PRC, our Party continued to lead the people in carrying out socialist revolution—dismantling the feudal system that had persisted for thousands of years and establishing socialism as the country’s basic system. This transformation represented the most comprehensive and profound social change in Chinese history, and laid the political and institutional foundations for China’s drive for modernization. During this period, China lagged so far behind much of the rest of the world that even basic household items like kerosene, matches and nails had to be imported from other countries.”

The foundations that Xi is laying here are absolutely crucial, and probably surprising to some readers.

First of all, he explains that “national seclusion” during the Ming Dynasty is the original sin. Many people assume that China is driven by a victim narrative where they blame the West for the century of humiliation following the Opium War of 1840. Xi’s perspective clearly shows this isn’t the case: It blames itself! The West taking advantage is but a byproduct of a decline China authored first.

You cannot understand the way China behaves today if you don’t understand that. The drive isn’t to avenge the humiliation. It’s to never again be the country that let it happen. Hence so many of China’s landmark initiatives: the almost sacred status of reform and opening up, the relentless focus on science and technology, the insistence on integrating into, not withdrawing from, the global economy. All of it traces back to one lesson: When we closed the door, we lost everything.

The self-blame doesn’t stop at isolation. Xi also identifies China’s feudal system, which “persisted for thousands of years,” as a fundamental obstacle that had to be dismantled, together with the failed pre-CPC modernization attempts that “despite their best efforts… fell short.”

The other important aspect of the speech is how Xi stresses that, to “narrow the yawning gaps in economic performance and science and technology between China and the developed Western nations… our Party was clear-headed from the outset: instead of blindly imitating Western models, as some developing countries did, we emphasized the importance of charting a distinctive path toward modernization adapted to China’s realities.”

That is indeed a truly distinctive aspect of the Chinese project, and the one the West finds hardest to accept, that modernization doesn’t have to mean Westernization. Xi even says it explicitly later in the speech: “Chinese modernization has dispelled the myth that modernization is synonymous with Westernization.”

One of the central philosophical claims of the entire book is that China has found a different route to modernity, one rooted in its own history and adapted to its own conditions, and that this isn’t a temporary detour but a permanent alternative. In his speech, which, as a reminder, is addressed to members of the newly elected CPC Central Committee, President Xi keeps stressing how important it is for them to remember this. As he writes: “To achieve modernization, a country must not only follow the general laws that apply; more importantly, it must keep in mind its own realities and distinctive characteristics.”

In other words the temptation to imitate is as dangerous as the temptation to close off. Both are forms of surrender—one to foreign models, the other to fear—and both eventually prevent development.

He gives five reasons for this, in China’s specific context.

First, at the risk of stating the obvious, China has “a huge population.” As he explains, today “only slightly more than 20 countries around the world, with a combined population of about one billion, have achieved modernization.” Consequently, this means that China, when attempting to achieve modernization for more than 1.4 billion people, is by definition operating without a roadmap: modernizing more people than every currently developed country combined. You can’t just scale up someone else’s model for that.

Second, he stresses that one of the key objectives of China’s modernization, as opposed to “Western modernization,” is “common prosperity.” In his words: “the biggest problems with Western modernization are that it is capital-centered rather than people-centered and that it seeks to maximize capital gains rather than serve the interests of the people.”

To him, this isn’t just a moral failing but also a structural one. He explains that modernizing without common prosperity “create[s] a huge gap between the rich and the poor and [leads] to severe polarization,” which he says is the reason why “some developing countries [that] have approached the developed country threshold” ultimately “[fell] into the middle-income trap and became mired in prolonged stagnation.”

Third, he emphasizes that Chinese modernization must not only be about “material abundance” but also about “cultural-ethical enrichment.” As he puts it, “an important cause of the Western predicament today is their failure to check greed, which is the nature of capital, and their failure to resolve their deep-seated problems of rampant materialism and spiritual impoverishment.” It’s hard to disagree on that one.

As a result, he writes that Chinese modernization “must develop a socialist ideology that has the power to rally and inspire the people, foster ideals and convictions […] nurture and promote the core socialist values, and develop advanced socialist culture.”

Fourth, and this has always been a very important theme for Xi, ever since his days as a local official, he emphasizes that Chinese modernization cannot come at the expense of “harmony between humanity and nature” and must give “priority to resource conservation and environmental protection, and letting nature restore itself.” As he explains, this isn’t only an ideological commitment, but also a practical matter, China having especially constrained natural resources per capita.

Last but not least, the fifth point that Xi advances as a core differentiation is that Chinese modernization will be achieved through peaceful development, not through the “bloody crimes such as war, slavery, colonization and plunder” that, as he puts it, characterized Western modernization and which China itself “suffered” from. China, he says, will “never oppress other nations or loot the wealth and resources of other countries in any form” but will instead “always uphold peace, development, cooperation, and shared benefit.”

The jury is, of course, still out on whether China will manage to live up to this promise but there is, sadly, no jury needed for the Western side of the comparison: That verdict came in a long time ago. As the famous quote from Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations goes: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Beyond these five characteristics, in the same speech Xi also outlines six fundamental tensions, called “major issues to be addressed for further progress,” that describe the permanent contradictions that Chinese modernization must hold in balance.

I won’t walk through each, but the framework itself is absolutely fascinating to me as it maps exactly onto the theory of yin and yang, one of the most foundational concepts in ancient Chinese philosophy: the concept that reality is made of complementary opposites, and that wisdom consists not in resolving them but in navigating the tension between them.

The six tensions, ranging from “strategy vs. tactics” to “self-reliance vs. opening up,” each work exactly like yin and yang: Neither side can exist without the other, neither can be allowed to dominate, and the moment one does, the system falls ill. Strategy without tactics is paralysis. Tactics without strategy is drift. Self-reliance without opening up is the Ming Dynasty mistake. Opening up without self-reliance is colonization by another name. The art of governance, in this regard, is purposefully not making choices as the harm would come precisely from doing so.

This is a conception of governance that has no real equivalent in Western political thought, where unresolved tensions are seen as problems to fix, not forces to harmonize. In our view of the world, there must always be a right and a wrong, a good and a bad: Rarely do we imagine that wisdom might lie in understanding that if we destroy “wrong” we simultaneously lose the tension that gave “right” its meaning in the first place.

CPC’s self-reform

The last theme of the book, The Party’s Leadership and Self-Reform, is a blunt—in a way foreign readers don’t expect—reckoning with the Party’s own fragility and weaknesses. In this section, Xi enumerates, in methodical detail, the ways the Party is most likely to fail.

Read this for instance: “Our Party has been governing China for decades and the country has enjoyed a prolonged period of peace. In the absence of existential threats and rigorous challenges in a harsh environment, a number of Party members and officials begin to lose their enterprising spirit, wallowing in comfort and indulging in pleasure instead. As a result, they may become demoralized, and succumb to confusion and even panic when faced with the numerous new challenges presented by the great struggle.”

If that’s not direct, I don’t know what is: the leader of the CPC telling his own officials that they’re beginning to grow decadent, demoralized and incapable of doing their jobs.

This particular passage stems from an important concept in Chinese governance: the Four Risks, an official, standing diagnosis of the four ways the Party is most likely to destroy itself. They are: lack of drive, incompetence, disengagement from the people and inaction and corruption. In other words, the Party has an official doctrine on its likely causes of death and constantly reminds itself to check for symptoms.

Another passage that I found remarkably self-aware is from the speech Stay Alert and Determined in Tackling Challenges Unique to a Large Political Party, which Xi gave in 2023 at the Second Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. He writes that the objective of “full and rigorous internal governance,” notably to guard against the Four Risks, is “not to exert rigid control over Party members, instill fear and apprehension or intimidate members into inaction.” He emphasizes the need for pragmatism in this regard, codified in a framework called the Three Distinctions that separates honest mistakes made while experimenting, reforming or operating without precedent from deliberate violations committed for personal gain.

In other words, the system diagnosed that its own anti-corruption medicine was producing a side effect, institutional paralysis, and built a tool to treat it, without stopping the treatment.

Taking a step back, that’s probably one of the most important contributions of Xi Jinping thought to Chinese governance. The question that obsesses Chinese leaders isn’t “how do we measure up to the West?” In fact I suspect the West occupies far less of Xi’s thinking than we imagine. What he does spend a lot of time thinking about, and this is clear from his writing, is how the Party can break the cycle that destroyed every Chinese dynasty before it.

In the introductory paragraph of the 2024 speech Advance the Party’s Self-Reform, he poses the question explicitly, “How can the Party escape the historical cycle of rise and fall?” He says that the Party contributed two solutions to the dynastic cycle curse, one was provided by Mao Zedong and the other by Xi’s own leadership: “On the basis of the first answer put forward by Mao Zedong, which was to ‘put the government under the people’s scrutiny,’ we have found the second answer, that is, to continuously advance the Party’s self-reform.”

Party self-reform is something he says is a “great endeavor” put in place “since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012,” so it’s clear it is part of Xi Jinping thought. Xi became the top leader of the CPC in 2012.

Interestingly, and this will also undoubtedly surprise foreign readers, he lists oversight by “other political parties, the judiciary, the public, and the media” as part of the system of self-reform, all part of a “constructive and mutually reinforcing interaction between supervision by self and by others.” Many foreigners always assume that the CPC abhors external scrutiny and here you have Xi himself telling the Party leadership that it’s not just useful, something they must “readily accept,” but historically decisive—an essential component of one of only two answers, across millennia of Chinese history, to the question that brought down every Chinese dynasty in history.

That, overall, is Xi’s answer to the question of legitimacy: self-cultivation itself. Not self-cultivation as a path to legitimacy, but self-cultivation as legitimacy. The way a healthy body isn’t rewarded with health: It simply is healthy.

This raises what are perhaps the most troubling questions of all for Western readers. Where is our doctrine of self-reform? Where is our institutional vocabulary for naming the diseases Xi names: complacency, incompetence, disengagement from the people? We hold elections. But elections are a mechanism for choosing who governs, not for ensuring that governance is any good. And isn’t good governance, by definition, the kind that never stops self-cultivating?

This book is many things but it is, above all, the work of a system that takes its own health seriously. One finishes it wondering whether we in the West can say the same.

The author is an influential French entrepreneur and writer. He writes about China, geopolitics, and multipolarity on Substack and X, and his work is regularly published in leading Western and Chinese-language outlets.