China's Cultural Rise: Visions and Challenges

China's economic rise has made salient the issue of its cultural rise/development. Domestically, a fast-changing China has generated a genuine demand for new cultural values and products that are attractive and relevant. Sustained economic growth has expanded the "urban middle class", whose consumption behaviour is vastly different from peasants and manual workers. Internationally, despite the fact that China has for years been emphasising the peaceful nature of its rise, its growing significance in the world economy has given rise to varying degrees of fear and scepticism in different parts of the world. To lower the distrust and sense of insecurity, there is a strong need for China to better use culture as a source of attraction, and to promote a more favourable perception of China through cultural exchanges.

Against this backdrop, Chinese academics and intellectuals in recent years have begun to raise the issue of cultural rise/development. Of course, culture became an issue more than a century ago when interaction with the west changed the Chinese perception of China's position in the world, and it was in fact traditional Chinese culture which was blamed for China's decline. The current interest in the issue of culture, most notably since 2006, occurs in the context of a rising and modernising China, a radically different situation from that before the 1980s. After nearly three decades of single-minded pursuit of economic growth, the Chinese Government has also begun to pay heed to its cultural development. In September 2006, the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council jointly issued a national programme on cultural development for the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006–10). This is the first such programme since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came into power in 1949.

Unlike its economic rise, the shape of China's cultural rise is not yet clear. Despite increasing discussion about the subject, it remains unclear what kind of culture will eventually emerge and whether it will be attractive enough to overcome the fear of a rising China. But the concept of cultural rise has been proposed, and discourse on the topic has begun to gain attention. It could have profound implications for China's domestic development and global image.

The Cultural Dimension of China's Rise

The breakneck speed and mammoth scale of China's economic rise has taken the world by storm. Great uncertainties and apprehension about China's increasing prominence in the international arena have aroused varying degrees of fear and scepticism throughout the world. Powerful countries and conglomerates are worried that China may cause a major shift in global power currently dominated by the US and the EU. The situation is made worse when western mass media attempt to portray and perpetuate China's image as a "rising challenge" to the west. Since the 1990s, the media has also repeatedly used the term "China threat", evincing China's rise as a destabilising force ideologically, economically and militarily.¹

To counter the "China threat" theory, the concept of "China's peaceful rise" has been proposed, envisaging a rising China that exerts its influence on the international scene in a non-threatening and non-confrontational manner. Though often hailed as rhetoric, it sends an important message to the rest of the world that China would like to emerge as a great power without following the more violent, imperialist paths taken by Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the US in the past.

The concept of "peaceful rise" has been debated and refined in the last two years. There are currently three main prongs: China will strive for peace in its foreign affairs, promote harmony in domestic development, and seek reconciliation on the Taiwan issue.² Since 2005, Chinese president Hu Jintao has extended the idea of building a "harmonious society" to the international community. At the 2005 Asian-African Summit, he proposed for the first time to build a "harmonious world". Whether "peaceful rise" or "a harmonious world", the question of how China uses its growing...