Jiang Shigong on World Empire and Civilization

Jiang Shigong, “World Empire and the Return of Civilization:  Taking Seriously the Post-Cold War Discourse of Civilizational Revival”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Jiang Shigong (b. 1967) is a Professor of Law at Peking University, a leading member of China’s New Left, and a frequent apologist for the Xi Jinping regime.  Translations of many of his works appear on this site.
 
I devoted the last of my four lectures at the Collège de France last summer to Jiang, to the dismay of my friend and colleague Jean-Philippe Béja, who has spent much of his long and decorated career defending Chinese dissidents, and who unfortunately happened to attend that particular talk.  In a passionate condemnation of Jiang following my lecture, Jean-Philippe went so far as to suggest that I was “wasting my time” by paying attention to such figures. 
 
I will leave for another occasion a discussion of the perils of accusing a fellow scholar of “time-wasting,” a Pandora’s Box if there ever was one.  Here I will simply note that I disagree profoundly with the idea that we should not pay attention to intellectuals just because we disagree with them.  Jiang has an influence and a following in China and is also an insightful and engaged scholar even if we do not share his engagement.  Closing our eyes will not make the Jiang Shigongs of this world go away, and focusing solely on dissidents risks creating a misleading image of a China that looks more like us than it actually is, a kind of faux ami.
 
Enough said.  The text translated here is of a piece with the rest of Jiang’s work.  It is a talk he gave at Fudan University’s China Institute on June 8, 2023, and might profitably be read together with the interview with Prof. Wu Xinbo by The Observer, which discusses U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s trip to China, also translated on this site.  I do not know Wu or his work beyond this one particular text, but the interview broadly expresses what most Chinese Liberals hope for:  an improvement in – perhaps the eventual normalization of – Sino-American relations, for both geopolitical and ideological reasons.  Jiang Shigong wants something quite different.
 
Jiang believes that the American world order, imposed through a mixture of military force and the “rule of law,” has destroyed the ideological legitimacy of liberalism both at home and abroad through excess and miscalculation.  Endless wars have emptied the coffers while bringing few real benefits.  Deindustrialization has led to class warfare, the rise of populist nationalism, and the threat of violence.  “Liberal” intellectuals in the academy work to destroy the legacy of the Enlightenment from within via various modes of “critical theory” created by deconstructionism.  The Biden administration has sought to right the ship after the near disaster of the Trump era, but Jiang sees these efforts as “fiddling while Rome burns,” particularly given the Biden administration’s focus of containing China.
 
Elsewhere in the world, the “regional civilizational empires” that shaped the world prior to the rise of world empire in the modern era are returning as the empire fades.  Jiang cites particularly the examples of Russia, Turkey, and India, all of which are flexing their civilizational muscles in different ways for different reasons, some of which are territorial.  Jiang is right that these civilizational movements can be read as responses to the failure of liberalism, both as an ideal and as world empire.
 
Jiang is of two minds about the revival of regional civilizational empires.  On the one hand, he welcomes any challenge to the “liberal Leviathan” because he would like to see it fall.   On the other hand, Jiang is wary about “civilizational” claims which cannot be adjudicated except through power politics and war and believes that modern nation-states should draw on their own civilizational heritage to give moral order and direction to the “operating system” of liberalism – which otherwise can be amoral and directionless – but a world where nation-states are taken over by their civilizations will be Huntington’s world of a clash of civilizations.
 
Jiang claims to embrace the ideals of liberalism and globalization, the conditions that facilitated China’s rise.  To no one’s surprise, Jiang identifies Chinese socialism as currently practiced as the answer to the dilemma of what will follow the fall of the American world order.  China will champion win-win solutions to the world’s problems without resorting to the American tools of war and “law and order.”
 
By now I have probably translated several hundred pages of Jiang Shigong, and his style is familiar to me.  At times his writing almost reminds me of the eight-legged essays scholars had to learn to write in imperial times to pass the examinations; Jiang’s essays are similarly formal and predictable in their own way.  That said, I still find Jiang Shigong worth reading even if his ultimate conclusion is rarely in doubt.  He is well-read and well-informed and offers a complex view of the world from a particular Chinese perspective.  He repeats himself, as we all do if we write enough, but he always has something new to say, a new angle to explore, another layer added to the argument.  My only regret is that his analysis of China is rarely as sharp and critical as his analysis of the rest of the world.
 
Translation
 
Since the end of the Cold War, we have witnessed the emergence of a global discourse on the revival of civilizations, particularly Islamic and Central Asian civilizations, accompanying Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory. In recent years, this discourse has intensified to become an important theme in global intellectual theory. In the United States, from Huntington's theories through the framing of the Trump Doctrine, American conservatives have maintained a civilizational discourse throughout, and at one point even hoped to use the term "clash of civilizations" to characterize the competition between China and the United States.
 
Non-Western countries with their own deep tradition of civilization have competed to use the discourse of civilizational revival to reorient their politics. For example, Putin calls on Russian civilization, Turkey is using the civilizational discourse of pan-Turkism, India consistently advocates the revival of its historical civilizational tradition, and even the European Union frequently references European civilizational traditions in its efforts to strengthen European integration, hoping to build the EU into a "civilizational state." China is no exception. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation undoubtedly means the rejuvenation of civilization, and Zhang Weiwei's[2] 张维为(b. 1957) discussion of China’s "civilizational state" is a typical example.
 
I. Why has a discourse of "civilizational revival" emerged?
 
There is something on an implicit critique of the liberal capitalist order in this global "chorus" of "civilizational revival," and we might say that these different and even contradictory civilizational discourses are united under this "banner." Which leads us to ask:  What happened to liberalism, which defined the modern world order?   Since the European Enlightenment, liberalism has withstood the challenges of conservatism, romanticism, nationalism, and communism, to the point that Francis Fukuyama confidently declared that the end of the Cold War meant "the end of history" and that liberal democracy was the sole form of government for all mankind. Today, however, the resurgence of various political ideas in the guise of "civilization" means that the globalization of liberalism has encountered a major challenge.
 
The challenge to liberalism arises in part because of the inherent limitations of liberal theory, but more important is the political evolution of liberalism into a new global political construct of world empire, which has meant that the critique of "world empire" has inevitably become a critique of "liberalism.”  In today's worldwide critique of the concepts of "liberal empire," "liberal Leviathan," and even the "liberal international order," the critique is not so much directed at "liberty" or "liberalism", but rather against the concepts of "empire" or "Leviathan." Thus to reactivate the vitality of liberalism, we need to separate liberal theory from the political construction of world empire.
 
To this end, we must first ask how liberal theory has become bound up with the concept of "empire," to the point of creating an ever-expanding imperialism. In fact, the current global revival of civilizational discourse often draws on conservative theory, with the goal of criticizing liberalism, and clearly fails to grasp the main contradiction facing the world today. The main contradiction in the world today is not the struggle between conservatism and liberalism in terms of values, but rather the economic and political oppression that most countries in the world are suffering under "world empire," in other words, the political and economic struggle between freedom and oppression under the world imperial order, including developing countries in the Global South or developed countries in the Global North, such as EU members, Japan, and Korea.  This means that we need to shift our theoretical focus away from the conservative values embodied in the discourse of civilizational revival and toward the political economy analysis implicit in the discourse of civilizational revival, and thus analyze the origins of world empires and the dilemmas they face.
 
2. Empires and civilizations:  From "regional civilizational empires" to "world empire"
 
In the face of the changing global political and theoretical environment, I argued in my 2019 article, ​“The Internal Logic of Super-Sized Political Entities:  ‘Empire’ and World Order,” that Chinese scholars should move away from the "nation-state" theoretical paradigm that dominates modern Western humanities and social sciences. For example, the dominant theoretical paradigm in law, political science, economics, and sociology today is that of the state, which has given us theoretical concepts such as sovereignty, constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, state-building, and the social theory of the state. In fact, these theories must be understood in the context of the global imperial order, and for this reason, I propose to reconceptualize human history in terms of the "empire" paradigm, arguing that human history is the history of the evolution of empires, i.e., from the traditional "regional civilization-empires" toward the more recent modern world empires.
 
The point of highlighting the concept of "regional civilization-empires" is to focus on the spatial and civilizational orientations of the traditional empires. In terms of space, while traditional empires claimed to be universal, in fact they occupied only a specific part of the planet; in terms of civilization, traditional empires all shaped a particular civilizational order, in which religion played an especially important role. While the political landscape of empires rose and fell, the strength of religion facilitated the maintenance of relatively stable spatial relations, to the point that these "empires" often became synonymous with certain "civilizations.” This is the case with Rome and European or Christian civilization, with Russia and Eastern Orthodox civilization, and the Turkish and Arab empires were often synonymous with Islamic civilization. This is this reason that the political scientist Lucian Pye (1921-2008) saw China as "a civilization-state pretending to be a [nation-] state.”  If we look at things from this perspective, the various civilizational discourses being revived in numerous countries across the world today actually speak to the revival of these ancient regional civilizational empires.
 
Following the “great discoveries” that launched the modern era, Europe stitched the world together through modern tools such as commerce and trade, the industrial division of labor, finance, and law, and thus began to construct a world empire on the ruins of regional civilizational empires. We might say that since the 18th century, modern European thinkers have been discussing one basic question: how and why did Europe construct a universal way of life and impose it on other civilizations, resulting in a universal order for human history?
 
Here, I would like to cite a familiar but often overlooked thinker:  Adam Smith. In his The Wealth of Nations, he argued that while China followed a natural path from agriculture and industry to commerce, Europe followed an unnatural path from commerce and industry to agriculture. By promoting the global expansion of commerce and trade, European states moved toward a "fiscal-military state.” The states that could extract the most wealth had the ability to wage war, expand markets, and thus increase trade, and the states with the strongest militaries had the easiest access to financial credit, all of which fueled the rise of Europe and the destruction of regional civilizational empires in a drive toward world dominance and the construction of world empires.   A contemporary example of this financial-military state is the United States’ "military-industrial complex.”
 
From this perspective, once the British Empire defeated the Napoleonic Empire in 1805, not only did it have the most powerful military force in the world, but more importantly, London became the global financial center, and the British pound replaced the East Asian Mexican dollar as the global currency. This signalled the initial formation of a world empire, and indeed, we can see the British Empire as the first version of a world empire. Historians Jack Gallagher (1919-1980) and Ronald Robinson (1920-1999) called this "the imperialism of free trade," in which trade and commerce shaped the features of world empire.
 
After the two World Wars, the leadership of the world empire shifted from the British Empire to the American Empire, which we see as the second version of the world empire. The political scientist John Ikenberry (b. 1954) has called this second world empire the "liberal Leviathan," and stresses the fact that the United States has constructed its world empire both through military force as well as through politics and law, hence the “liberal” Leviathan. Of course, some people call it the "New Roman Empire," in which the idea of “Rome” also stresses the violent character of the U.S.-constructed world empire.

Based on the above research, in my 2021 book The End of Civilization and World Empire: The Global Legal Order Built by the United States 文明终结与世界帝国：美国建构的全球法秩序, I used the idea of "the end of civilization" to show that the "world empire’s" nation-state system had put an end to the "regional civilization empires" that had previously shaped human history, following which the “civilizations” that had distinguished those empires became “traditional civilizations,” and mankind entered into “modern civilization” with the rise of world empire.
 
The main purpose of this book was to respond to Fukuyama's "end of history" theory as well as Huntington's "clash of civilizations.” In my view, these two theories together constitute the ideology of world empire, that is, world empire has brought about the end of history in individual nation-states as well as a clash of civilizations internationally. Our discussion of civilizational revival today must be understood in the context of global imperial history, especially in the context of world empires.
 
3.  The Civilizational foundation of nation-states (and world empire)
 
When we talk about the idea of a “civilizational state,” people often oppose it to the nation-state, and stress the civilizational basis of a civilizational state, as if the nation-state had no such civilizational basis, being instead a simply “tool of state violence.”  It is true those who pioneered the concepts of "state" and "nation-state," focused mainly on the legal basis of state-building and the national context, paying little attention to a state’s civilizational basis. But this does not mean that nation-states are not grounded in civilizations; in fact, nation-states first emerged out of the fragments of the Roman-Christian regional civilizational empire. All European nation-states share a common basis in European Christian civilization, yet each nation-state has its own civilizational foundation, and we often talk about "French civilization" and "German civilization."
 
An important difference between the nation-states order that emerged in Europe and that of regional civilizational empires lies in their different ways of dealing with the relationship between church and state. The regional civilizational empires needed the civilizational force of religion to maintain their empires, and thus often adopted a model which brought church and state together, at times even imposing theocratic rule; the nation-state, on the other hand, preached the separation of politics and religion, of public and private life, and of state and society, based on the modern values of freedom and equality, thus transforming the state into a rationalized modern organization, a political organization with a monopoly on violence, forcing religion to withdraw from politics and retreat into the sphere of private life.
 
This means that the rise of the West required the construction of a new civilizational order, which we often call "modern civilization," while the civilizations shaped by regional civilizational empires in the past are now dubbed "traditional civilizations." As the scholar Bruno Maçães (b. 1974) put it, modern Western civilization is an abstract framework, an operating system. This operating system has shaped the modern values of freedom and equality for all mankind. The roots of modern civilization are found in the Calvinism of the European Reformation, and it was this puritanical spirit that propelled the rise of modern science and gave birth to the idea that all men are created equal under God.
 
It is obvious that the civilizational foundations of the nation-state are Protestantism, modern science, and Enlightenment rationality. This may explain why the world empire was built by Protestant Anglo-Saxons. In the process of building their world empire, the Protestant empire fought and won the "clash of civilizations" with the Catholic empire of Napoleon Empire, the Lutheran empire of Germany, and even the Orthodox empire of the Soviet Union. In the history of the rise of Europe, European nations have always used science, industry, the nation-state, and the idea of freedom and equality as the yardstick to measure "civilization," thus seeing the old regional civilizational empires of the East as "stagnant empires," also describing them as “closed” and “primitive” countries, whence the “white man’s burden,” the boast that the construction of world empire, colonialism, and imperialism by the great powers was meant to bring civilization to the barbarians.
 
It was under the pressure of the colonial wars that the ancient empires of regional civilizations were forced to encounter religious revolutions and embrace the modern values of freedom and equality, and thus embarked on a journey towards modern civilization. In Islamic civilization, the example of this is Atatürk’s Reforms in Turkey, and in Eastern civilization, the example is Japan’s desire to “leave Asia.”[3]  With the separation of religion and politics, the traditional regional civilizational empires disintegrated into fragments of nation-states, which were eventually incorporated into the world imperial system. Fukuyama was convinced of the "end of history" because he believed that liberal values best satisfy human desires and passions, which in the United States meant devotion to scientific research, business schools, and law schools rather than to prayer or moral contemplation. Prayer and moral contemplation are either the concern of the lost regional civilizations, or of those cultural conservatives now talking about civilizational revivals. 
 
4. The Decline of world empires:  postmodern, conservative, and civilizational Theories
 
The world imperial system is today in decline, for which there are many theoretical explanations.  For example, the journalist Martin Jacques (b. 1945) discusses the rise of developing countries such as China as well as the crisis of Western democracy, etc. Here I propose to set aside discussion of the political and economic roots of this decline, and instead focus on a number of theories, assessing their value in describing the disintegration of the world empire. 
 
First is the familiar but often overlooked revolutionary Marxist critique of the capitalist world imperial system, especially Leninism, world-systems theory, and dependency theory. While Marxism criticizes the global colonial expansion of capitalism, it also tends to see this expansion as a force driving tradition toward modernity. Lenin, on the other hand, argued from the position of late-developing countries, and insisted instead that liberal capitalism had already developed to the advanced stage of imperialist financial monopoly and that the European powers maintained their parasitic and corrupt imperial rule through colonial plunder and control of the late-developing countries, thus making the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist revolutionary movement the central driving force to end colonialism, imperialism and the capitalism behind it.
 
Basing themselves on Lenin, both world-systems theory and dependency theory emphasize the unequal nature of the center-periphery structure created by the world imperial system, which has led to late-developing countries being locked into a position at the lower end of the division of labor in the global industrial chain, and thus on the periphery of the imperial order for an indefinite period of time. This means that in order to modernize, the countries of the Global South must achieve political and economic independence, setting aside their dependence on the Western-constructed world imperial system.
 
Since reform and opening, the main direction of China's economic and political development has been its integration into the world economic system, so that the dominant theory in the Chinese academic world has been the Western-constructed modernization paradigm, and left-wing theory, which criticizes imperialism and capitalism, has been on the periphery. However, in the wake of the recent competition between China the U.S., where the United States is attempting to adopt a strategy of "decoupling" to contain China's rise in the world system, ideas of imperialism and hegemony have gradually returned. This means that we need to reactivate the left-wing theoretical heritage of the Marxist tradition in the face of the expansion of world empire.
 
The second is postmodernism, deconstructionism, and the decentering theories of the cultural left, which aim to destroy the ideological authority of the world empire from within. The cultural diversity and civilizational pluralism brought to us by postmodern deconstructionism ostensibly symbolize the flourishing prosperity that comes from encapsulating the world in a global imperial order. But in fact, it only reminds us that when the Roman Empire brought the gods of the lands it conquered into the Roman pantheon, it sowed the seeds of disintegration for the glory of the empire, i.e., Rome owned the whole world but was nothing in itself.
 
The deconstruction of postmodernism is in fact the deconstruction of the discourse of legitimacy constructed for the West during its rise and the historical process of constructing a world empire in this multicultural context, be it the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment, the theory of modernization, or the various theoretical constructs of the civilization/barbarism discourse. This deconstructionism is undoubtedly destroying the civilizational foundations of the world empire, to the point that today there is a group of "new barbarian nomads" roaming the globe, known as the "Davos man." They are the parasites of the world empire, plundering global resources through technology and finance, without any sense of responsibility for the governance of the Global South on the periphery of the empire, and of course no civilizational ideal or sense of moral responsibility such as 19th century “liberal imperialism’s” "white man's burden."  
 
The quantitative easing policy[4] of the United States today is the base from which these savage nomads are destroying the economic foundation, political authority, and cultural credibility of the world empire, which has led many Western scholars to criticize the "rootlessness" of this world empire. As George Yeo (b. 1954), former Singapore Minister for Foreign Affairs, has argued, the core division within the United States at present is between the old liberalism and the new liberalism. In fact, the distinction between these two kinds of liberalism can be seen as liberalism with moral responsibility and liberalism without moral responsibility, liberalism with civilizational roots and liberalism without civilizational roots. And the reason why Western liberalism has lost its moral responsibility and civilizational roots begins precisely with postmodernism’s deconstruction of liberal ideology.
 
Third, in the face of the rootlessness of the world empire, there is a strong revival of American conservatism that seeks to restore the civilizational foundations of world empire. However, when American neo-conservatives try to establish Protestant evangelicalism as the civilizational foundation of the world empire, they are inevitably plunged into a new crusade in the guise of a "clash of civilizations," which will eventually remind the world how the American abandonment of Kabul was a mere rerun of the same flight from Saigon.
 
The unending militaristic wars have left the world empire unable to face the rise of emerging economies on the frontier, the shift of the global industrial chain and perhaps even the center of economic gravity. The redistribution of global wealth has triggered a class war within the United States, and the world empire has become a burden that Americans can no longer bear. For this reason, Trump's conservatives are no longer right-wing imperialist conservatives, but rather left-wing populist conservatives or nationalist conservatives, who would dismantle the world empire, take their marbles, and go home.
 
The Biden administration, in order to strengthen its control over the wealth of the world empire, has not hesitated to use the Ukraine crisis to divert European capital and industries to the United States, and to force the high-tech industries of Japan and South Korea, and even Taiwan [lit. “China’s Taiwan”], to move to the United States. This amounts to sacrificing a pawn to save the rook 丢卒保车, and it clearly reveals the declining fate of the world empire. In this sense, American conservatives, no matter if they are Huntington's clash of civilizations conservatives or Trump-style populist, nationalist conservates, have come to part ways with with the U.S.-constructed world imperial system and are advocating the exploration of a new picture of the future of humanity on the basis of a dialogue of civilizations.
 
Fourth, if postmodernism and conservatism are destroying world empire in its center in different ways, then on the frontiers of empire, especially in these emerging economies, the postmodernism they have learned from the West has become a theoretical weapon in the deconstruction of the world empire, while the conservatism they have learned from the West undoubtedly reinforces their pride in their own civilizational traditions and historical experiences. Thus, the discourse of civilizational revival represents the revival of the old regional civilizational empires and an ensuing rebellion against the world empire. It is only in this historical context of the evolution of world empires that we can understand the post-Cold War civilizational narratives, from the Islamic world to what we see in Russia.   In this sense, the radical theoretical tradition of the left and the right-wing conservatives reviving traditional civilizations in the world’s peripheries, as well as the post-modern leftist thinking and even the conservative discourse in the heart of the world empire, are actually on the same intellectual page, and they resonate with each other in their common critique of the "new nomadic barbarians" and the rootlessness of the world, and jointly advocate dismantling the world imperial system.
 
While those attempting to revive traditional civilizations have formed temporary alliances against the world empire of liberal capitalism, there are deeper differences between them. With the future decline of the world empire and the revival of regional civilizational empires, will the theoretical struggle between revivalist movements and the world empire gradually evolve into a "clash of civilizations" between the two? This is certainly something we should be awake to.
 
Russia fell into the crisis in Ukraine through civilizational discourse; Turkey under Erdogan is constructing a "Turkic Union" through a civilizational discourse of language, ethnicity, and religion to promote its expansion into Central Asia and the Middle East; India's intent to reconstruct its historical glory as the master of the Indian Ocean is bound to cause tensions in the Islamic world and Southeast Asia. As the "ghosts" of these ancient civilizations rise once again from their graves, we seem to see ominous signs of a future "clash of civilizations" in the impulses toward territorial expansion inf each of these ancient regional empires.
 
Yet behind each "clash of civilizations" there is actually a clash between ancient and modern times, all of which poses the question of how to build a new modern order after abandoning the world imperial order. What will be the civilizational foundation of the new modern order?
 
5. The Revival of Chinese civilization:  Toward a higher and more perfect modernization
 
Against this backdrop, we should pay attention to the commonalities and differences between the civilizational renaissance discourse emerging in China and those in Russia, Turkey, India, and even the Middle East. As early as 2004, in my article “The Rise of a Great Power and the Revival of Civilization: The Taiwan Issue and the ‘Enduring War of Civilization,’” I argued that the rise of China would inevitably promote the revival of Chinese civilization, and that the great revival of the Chinese nation would be a revival of civilization. However, the renaissance of Chinese civilization is not anti-liberal modernity, but rather the "creative transformation" of traditional Chinese culture and the exploration of a Chinese path toward modernization. This path is what is known today as "Chinese-style modernization."
 
The focus of Chinese-style modernization is on modernization, i.e., China must build a modern state with a global orientation but owing to its historical and cultural traditions and socialist values, China will follow a different path from the West.  The Russian political scientist Alexander Lukin (b. 1961) cleverly acknowledged this when he reversed Lucien Pye’s observation and characterized China as "a modern state pretending to be a civilization." This challenging concept highlights China's modernity, which is particularly evident in what Fukuyama now calls China's construction of a "responsible government" that is accountable not only to the Chinese people but also to the people of the world, a perfect combination of the classical Chinese tradition of universalism and the modern tradition of internationalism. Therefore, although China criticizes the world imperial system constructed by the United States, especially its policy of decoupling, instrumentalizing the U.S. dollar, and undermining global economic and political cooperation, it has steadfastly embraced the essence of the Westphalian system to defend the authority of the United Nations, and has always sought to establish cooperative relations with the United States and other countries to build a community of human destiny and construct a new form of human civilization on the basis of dialogue and mutual appreciation of civilizations.
 
Therefore, China will not reclaim territories it historically lost, nor does it intend to rebuild the sphere of influence of the traditional tribute system. China is not a destroyer of the modern international community, but a firm builder of the modern international order. Chinese-style modernization is actually going to repair the damage of the colonialist plunder and imperialist wars that the capitalist modernization path inevitably brought and advance the modernization of all mankind to a higher and more perfect historical era.
 
Only from this perspective can we understand why Professor Zhang Weiwei emphasizes the distinction between a "civilization-state 文明 — 国家" and a "civilizational state 文明化的国家.” He emphasizes that China is building a modern civilizational-state based on the absorption of beneficial elements of traditional civilizations, rather than a "civilization-state" that tries retake lost territory in the process of reviving its own civilization, as has happened elsewhere. I agree with Professor Wen Yang's 文扬[5] superb analysis of the distinction between these two concepts. The "civilization-state" is actually what I call the historical "regional civilization empire," where the revival of civilization means the revival of empire; while the "civilizational-state "seeks to establish a civilizational foundation for the state, so as to defend and improve the United Nations system on the basis of multiple civilizations.
 
In this sense, China’s rise has a universal significance at this moment in world history, in the sense that the rise of China and the revival of civilizations in other regions must work together to avoid the recurrence of the "clash of civilizations" tragedy of regional civilization empires fighting for supremacy in the wake of the decline of world empire.  They should instead bring the history of globalization to a new era of peaceful dialogue and shared prosperity among civilizations.
 
Notes

[1]强世功, “世界帝国与文明复兴：认真对待后冷战以来的文明复兴论述,” talk given at the Fudan China Institute and posted on the website of that institute on June 8, 2023.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  Zhang Weiwei is head of the China Institute where Jiang is speaking, and well known for his work on China as a civilizational state.

[3]Translator’s note:  This is a shorthand reference to an editorial published in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo on March 16, 1885, arguing that Japan should abandon its conservative, Confucian past, “leave Asia,” and join the West.  The editorial was published anonymously but is generally associated with the reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901).  

[4]Translator’s note:  As far as I can tell, this is shorthand for the “financialization” of the world economy.

[5]Translator’s note:  Wen Yang is a member of Fudan’s China Institute, and recently published a volume on The Logic of Civilization:  The Contest Between and Future of Civilizations East and West/ 文明的逻辑：中西文明的博弈与未来.