中文
By Radhika Desai
Lead: The Global Civilization Initiative, proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping three years ago, sounds deceptively modest in its aims: mutual respect, common values, openness to diversity. But the concept of civilization at its heart carries a far deeper charge.
Among all the major foreign policy initiatives China has advanced in recent years — the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilization Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative — the Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) may well turn out to have particularly profound and lasting significance.
All these initiatives seek to clear space for development, security, multipolarity and peace. Together, they capture the curve of history as it moves — however hesitatingly, however unevenly — from capitalism and imperialism toward socialism and greater parity among nations. All are grounded in the Marxist analysis of the world, specifically the form developed in China over the past century and more.
This framework is also congruent with geopolitical economy, a historical materialist reading of international relations since the dawn of capitalism. Arguably, the GCI embodies the world historical spirit in its most fundamental sense, grasping the long-term movement of the history of the world, together with the nations and civilizations within it.
Is this assessment too great a burden for the GCI to carry? On the face of it, the initiative demands rather simple things: "respect for the diversity of civilizations," "common values of humanity" including "peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom," an openness to appreciating different civilizations, and a commitment not to impose one's own values and models on others.
It stresses "the importance of inheritance and innovation of civilizations" and the value of mutual interaction between them. All this sounds like motherhood and apple pie — so innocuous that agreement seems superfluous and objection in truly bad taste.
However, the importance of the GCI can only be appreciated if we understand the concept of civilization in its two Marxist senses, the positive and the critical, even ironic.
At a positive level, Marx and Engels considered civilization as a particular stage in history. Human societies graduated from primitive and natural forms of interaction and divisions of labor — hunting and gathering families, pastoral communities, and agricultural societies engaged in handicrafts — with each stage representing a greater division of labor. Eventually, with the rise of cities and merchants, human interaction moved to forms at some remove from humankind's natural origins. Indeed, the word "civilization" is connected to the Latin word for city: civitas. Cities represent a qualitatively new phase in the advance of the division of labor in human societies, and therefore in their sophistication and complexity. As Engels pointed out in his "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State":
"Civilization consolidates and intensifies all these existing divisions of labor, particularly by sharpening the opposition between town and country (the town may economically dominate the country, as in antiquity, or the country the town, as in the middle ages), and it adds a third division of labor, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it creates a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products — the merchants. ... For the first time a class appears which, without in any way participating in production, captures the direction of production as a whole and economically subjugates the producers; which makes itself into an indispensable middleman between any two producers and exploits them both."
While this was progress, it was tainted. It was accompanied by its dialectical twin, an increase in exploitation and surplus extraction. This combination of progress in the form of rising division of labor, drawing larger and larger masses of humanity into societies and advancing their capacity to produce by advancing the forces of production on the one hand, and the extraction of ever greater surplus from the direct producer on the other, would reach a culmination in capitalism. In capitalism, the contradiction between the progressive character of the advance of civilization and its exploitative and oppressive character would be magnified and sharpened, and the use of the word "civilization" would itself become an instrument of oppression.
Throughout human history, the ruling, surplus-extracting classes have claimed to be civilized, while consigning those they oppressed to the status of barbarians. However, capitalism does not just exploit and oppress the direct producers within a given society. It also seeks to exploit and oppress entire other societies, thanks to the imperialism to which its contradictions give rise. The status of "civilized" must therefore be denied not only to the working class at home but to all societies that capitalist ones seek to dominate.
Not just the working classes of the capitalist countries but entire societies beyond them were now considered barbaric. The term civilization was confined to the capitalist countries, and the laws of civilized international conduct — at least as they stood during the "hundred years peace" between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I — were confined to the interactions of the "civilized nations" so defined. As for the rest, any form of aggression was permitted, no holds barred. This was, of course, necessary for the imposition of imperial control.
Marx and Engels realized this acutely and saved some of the choicest tongue-lashings for these sorts of bourgeois and imperialist attitudes. So, for example, in "The Communist Manifesto," they speak of capitalism compelling other nations "to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst." They refer to capitalist crises as being a result of overproduction. In "Capital: A Critique of Political Economy," Marx speaks of the "civilized horrors of overwork" and of "refined and civilized means of exploitation," "capitalist civilization, with its misery and its degradation of the masses."
This capitalist and imperialist understanding of civilization was, and remains, diametrically opposed to the understanding of civilization expressed in the GCI. And as capitalism and imperialism are declining, it is precisely this understanding that we need to revive. That is the historical importance of the GCI.
Students of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur International School write Chinese calligraphy in Manosque, France, Feb. 5, 2026. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently replied to a letter from teachers and students of the Chinese language class at the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur International School in France, extending his best wishes to them as well as all the teachers and students of the school. [Photo/Xinhua]
Does the GCI require us to give up on the historically progressive or positive conception of civilization, which is also present in Marx and Engels? Does it mean that we should instead embrace the postmodern view that all cultures and civilizations are equal and that the very idea of progress is irrelevant? No, not at all.
In my understanding, the core message of the GCI is straightforward: all human civilizations embody their own versions of human progress — whether in the forces of production, human understanding of nature, society and self, or in political systems, social structures, and cultural expressions. All civilizations have their limitations, above all in the forms of oppression they still carry, and all still need to move forward. Yet such limitations cannot be overcome, nor can further progress be made, if their achievements are denied. This has long been the case under the dominance of Western — namely capitalist and imperialist — culture, which dismisses other civilizations as "uncivilized."
When Marx and Engels described communism — an order in which individuals fully realize their potential, including their social nature — as the "real movement," they were affirming that every society will reach it through its own path, for it is both historically inevitable and rationally justified. As more societies embark on this common journey, their collective progress can only be strengthened and accelerated through mutual respect, exchanges and mutual learning.
Radhika Desai is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
