Xi Jinping’s political philosophy, Xi’ism, aims to uphold and develop socialism with Chinese characteristics to realize socialist modernization and national rejuvenation. It promotes 14 fundamental principles, including a people-centered approach, law-based governance, core socialist values, harmony between humans and nature, absolute Party leadership, and promoting a community with a shared future for humanity. However, these principles often result in stringent restrictions on individual freedoms.
Western governments and media have criticized President Xi and the Communist Party of China (CPC) for their forceful assimilation of ethnic minorities into China’s Han culture. Beijing has intensified pressure on Chinese ethnic minorities to integrate fully into the Han culture, with those who resist being forcefully assimilated.
The West’s central contention is that ethnic minorities should be granted the right to preserve their distinct cultural, religious, and social identities and manage their regions as autonomous autonomies. However, Beijing has ignored these rights for the sake of engineering a new Chinese nation.
Xi’ism aims to integrate the 1.2 billion diverse ethnic Hans into a new Chinese national identity. This is done through a country-wide social engineering program supervised by the CPC, aiming to strengthen the social cohesion of the 1.3 billion Chinese and ensure the country’s continued prosperity as a nation-state.
China’s Communist Party (CCP) leadership has successfully transformed a failed country into a prosperous one, with GDP growth averaging almost 10% a year since 1978 and over 800 million people lifted out of poverty. Xi’s tenure in 2013 saw continued growth, despite restrictions on individual and social rights, despite the CPC’s success in providing a prosperous life for most Chinese.
Xi believes that China’s social cohesion is a cornerstone for this success, and to achieve this, Beijing is implementing a social engineering program. Western societies are engineered, as they have been engineered for 15 years, with public education systems brainwashing younger generations with homogeneous values, objectives, and ways of thinking.
Western national or regional societies gravitate around common ideologies, values, and objectives, indicating that they have been engineered. The question is not whether it is necessary to social engineer a society, but how to do it to maximize its prosperity.
The Western social engineering paradigm faces several challenges, including the lack of explicit acknowledgement by political elites, deeply rooted values that grant unrestricted individual freedoms, and the fallacy of attributing Western prosperity to freedom and democracy rather than scientific and technological development.
These beliefs weaken social cohesion and robustness, and mask the need for a fundamental change in the current social paradigm. The Chinese Communist Party (CPC) is socially engineering a new Chinese national identity by forcefully assimilating ethnic minorities and homogenizing the eclectic Hans.
While the West should not follow China’s lead and attempt to eliminate ethnic diversity, it is essential to be proactive in socially engineering its own societies based on values and objectives that are not always popular. It is time for the West to consciously and productively redesign its current social engineering paradigm to build a society that can overcome challenges of this century and ensure the future prosperity of its peoples.
