White Paper Offers Chinese Wisdom at the Crossroads of History

Arran Hope

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A new white paper titled “China’s National Security in the New Era” is targeted to both domestic and international audiences and offers “Chinese wisdom” and solutions to contemporary challenges.

In a bid for global leadership, the document frames “unstoppable” world historical trends as aligning with its mission of national rejuvenation and rebukes the United States for being a destabilizing international actor.

Claiming the world is at an “historical crossroads,” the document is a call for countries to fall in line behind its vision of ensuring peace, development, stability, and order in the international system.

For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the world is in constant, complex motion; in flux. There are “trends” (动态) and “flows” (流动). History has “tides” (历史潮流) and thought has “currents” (思潮). A scientific analysis of the world tells us that any movement in time and space has two qualities: magnitude and direction. Time moves relentlessly in one direction. Nothing else does. In some cases, the direction of travel is upward (升); in others, it is in reverse (逆). There is, however, an overall direction (大方向). The Party, in a white paper on “China’s National Security in the New Era” (新时代的中国国家安全), now tells us with confidence that that direction aligns with its vision: “The historic tide … is unstoppable; the overall direction of human development and progress, and the overall logic of world history, have not changed” (历史潮流不可阻挡，人类发展进步的大方向、世界历史曲折前进的大逻辑没有变) (State Council Information Office, May 12).

Ingrained in the Party’s ideological frame is a fear of the human vulnerabilities that exposure to unwelcome movement—turmoil (变乱) and turbulence (动荡)—brings. Its response to this fear is an overwhelming preoccupation with immovability—or, in other words, stability (稳) and order (序). (‘稳’ appears more than 70 times in the text, which runs to over 20,000 characters, and ‘序’ nearly 20.) Stability is achieved through shaping one’s environment. [1] Stability over the long term relies on controlling one’s environment to the greatest extent possible. For a nation-state operating in an interconnected world where conflict threatens the social fabric (变乱交织的世界) and in which “the spatial and temporal domains are wider than at any time in history, and the internal and external factors are more complex than at any time in history” (时空领域比历史上任何时候都要宽广，内外因素比历史上任何时候都要复杂), stability is achieved by ensuring national security.