Chinese scholars who have engaged with Fredric Jameson often observe—sometimes with admiration and sometimes with a degree of irony—that he appears ‘more Marxist than any Marxist in China’. Jameson’s Marxism, and, by extension, that of Althusser, Badiou, Žižek, and other Western leftist theorists, serves as a powerful reminder of the impossibility of any cultural essentialism upon which claims of Chinese exceptionalism might be founded (Liu 2018: 338).
The observation points to a deeper tension. During a recent visit of mine to China, a young scholar told me that efforts to analyse the country’s contemporary contradictions through the conceptual repertoire of Western Marxism can feel like wearing a garment tailored for another body: however elegant its original design, it sits awkwardly in the present context. The symbolic architecture of public memory in Beijing reveals a telling incongruity. Across Tiananmen Square, Mao’s portrait still dominates the Gate of Heavenly Peace. At the same time, within the National Museum of China, exhibitions often feature figures such as Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary, translator, and cultural intermediary, highlighting that encounters with the outside world have long shaped China’s modernity.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe regarded China with fascination, as an inscrutable, self-enclosed order that cast a persistent shadow over Enlightenment reason. That spectral presence returns today, albeit in a different form. Contemporary China is simultaneously the outcome of a Marxist revolution and a formation that eludes the inherited categories of Marxist theory. It confronts theory itself with a problem that cannot be reduced to the familiar dichotomies of East and West, socialism and capitalism, or modernity and tradition. In this respect, Marxism may be uniquely suited to the task, not as a doctrinal framework to be applied but as a dialectical method capable of both the historical enabling of global capitalism and the resistance to its universalising tendencies. China thus emerges not simply as the object of Marxist critique but also as the site where Marxism must reconfigure its own conceptual apparatus or risk forfeiting its critical relevance.
European Chineseness
Gottfried Leibniz (1994: 46–47) wrote that the Chinese ‘surpass us (though it is almost shameful to confess this) in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics adapted to the present life and use of mortals’. Leibniz explored the parallels between his binary arithmetic—the algebra of ones and zeroes—and the hexagrammatic structure of the Yijing (I Ching), primarily through his correspondence with the Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet in the early 1700s. In his letter to Bouvet, he remarked that the connection between his binary arithmetic and the figure of Fuxi (伏羲), whom he described as the author of ‘one of the most ancient monuments of science found in the universe today’, revealed ‘some influence of providence’ (Leibniz 2022: 180). For Leibniz, this correspondence was not merely a striking coincidence but also a profound confirmation of the universality of reason as a reflection of divine order. He interpreted the convergence between his own logical system and ancient Chinese cosmology as evidence that God’s rationality is inscribed across different cultures and epochs.
It was not only Leibniz, but also Samuel Johnson who recognised China as a mirror in which Europe might glimpse its own image—an image both familiar and estranging. In his comparative theological work Oriental Religions and Their Relation to Universal Religion: China, Johnson (1978) did not simply catalogue Chinese beliefs as exotic data for Western edification. Rather, he discerned in Chinese civilisation a profound spiritual and moral coherence that forced Europe to reflect on the limits of its own self-conception. He praised what he called ‘the Chinese creative faculty’, yet notably emphasised that its primary function was ‘to maintain and multiply; to reproduce, not to reconstruct’ (Johnson 1978: 6–7).
This was no trivial distinction: for Johnson, China’s genius lay not in revolutionary transformation, but in the ritual preservation of cosmic and social harmony. In this light, Chinese culture appeared as a counter-modern model, driven less by progress and rupture than by continuity and ethical refinement. It offered a philosophical challenge to the European narrative of development, suggesting that civilisation might unfold not through invention alone, but through the deep repetition of foundational principles.
This view placed Johnson somewhere between Voltaire and Hegel, two towering figures of European thought who also turned to China as a philosophical foil, though in starkly different ways. For Voltaire, China served as a rational utopia governed by secular virtue and Confucian wisdom. He admired the empire’s meritocratic bureaucracy and ethical system as a rebuke to European monarchy and religious dogma. In his Essai sur les mœurs, he declared that the Chinese had perfected morality before we knew the meaning of it. Voltaire projected onto China a vision of Enlightenment reason purified of ecclesiastical authority—a secular model of governance founded on ethical self-discipline rather than divine revelation.
Hegel, by contrast, found in China the very antithesis of historical freedom. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he famously dismissed Chinese society as trapped in a ‘patriarchal’ stage of development, incapable of dialectical self-overcoming. For Hegel, the Chinese State was a massive unity without inner differentiation, where individuality was submerged under the weight of tradition and ritual. While Voltaire saw China as ethically advanced, Hegel relegated it to the infancy of Spirit, characterising it as stagnant, repetitive, and ultimately outside the unfolding of world history.
China as a Philosophical Question
These philosophical engagements demonstrate that the challenge China posed extended far beyond the realms of commerce, diplomacy, or missionary ambition. It struck at the very heart of the European mind, exposing the limits of its self-assured claims to universality, moral supremacy, and rational order. China became a persistent question that European thinkers could not avoid, precisely because it revealed an alternative path to the very ideals that the Enlightenment had begun to champion: reason, virtue, social harmony, and political legitimacy.
The Chinese example raised fundamental and disorienting questions. Could a society be virtuous without Christianity? Was divine revelation necessary for moral clarity? Might there be other, equally valid civilisational trajectories beyond the European model? These questions could not be ignored. China was not merely a point of comparison; it was also a philosophical provocation, which revealed the fragility of Eurocentric certainties.
The questions that Europe asked about China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have returned with renewed urgency in the twenty-first century. Then, as now, China appeared not merely as a distant civilisation to be studied, traded with, or converted, but as a fundamental philosophical contest. Today, however, China is no longer a puzzle confined to the European imagination. It has become a planetary question that confronts the entire world. Once seen as the exception to Europe’s teleological narratives of moral, spiritual, and political progress, China now occupies a position that complicates the very foundations of modernity.
In the Enlightenment era, the question was how a civilisation untouched by Christian revelation could display such moral rectitude, bureaucratic efficiency, and cultural refinement. In other words, how a non-Christian empire could rival or even surpass Europe in ethical and political order. Voltaire admired Confucian rationalism as a secular moral framework for governance. Leibniz marvelled at China’s harmony maintained without metaphysical rupture. Johnson recognised in Chinese creativity a distinctive mode of reproduction: an artistry rooted in continuity, repetition, and the deep refinement of existing forms. The unspoken anxiety was that Christianity might not be the necessary foundation for civilisation after all.
In the present, the question has shifted but preserves the same structural logic. How has China, without embracing liberal democracy, achieved economic dynamism, technological ascendancy, and global influence that now surpass those of many Western states? The paradox is no longer primarily moral but also political and economic. China appears to have fulfilled the logic of capitalist modernity more completely and more rigorously than the liberal nations that once assumed themselves to be its originators. In this sense, China remains Europe’s mirror. Yet, the reflection it offers is more troubling. It reveals a possible future once imagined as uniquely Western: a world of accelerated productivity, pervasive surveillance, massive infrastructure, and state-directed global ambition, all without the liberal subject, without parliamentary plurality, and without the tenets of Enlightenment individualism.
What China reveals, once again, is the contingency of Western universals. Just as Enlightenment thinkers were forced to confront a civilisation that was moral without Christianity, we must now reckon with a state that is capitalist without Western democracy. The mirror has not disappeared. It has only grown clearer, sharper, and more difficult to ignore. Suppose modernism can be understood as the historical moment in which Europe encountered its own ‘unhappy consciousness’ through the mirror of China. In that case, postmodernism signals a fundamental inversion of this reflective structure. In the modernist period, particularly during the Enlightenment, China served as a surface onto which Europe projected its fantasies, anxieties, and self-doubts.
Yet, with the onset of postmodernity, this structure of reflection no longer holds. As for postmodernism, it is not difficult to move beyond Jameson’s (1984) influential definition of it as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, which may be regarded as the culminating moment of Western Marxism, particularly in the Hegelian line running from Lukács to Adorno. For all its conceptual force, however, this formulation left largely unexamined the decisive question of what, in historical and structural terms, transformed the cultural logic itself. Jameson described postmodernism as ‘the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism’. By treating its characteristic traits as the symptoms of a new cultural order, however, he left insufficiently examined the economic, technological, and political transformations that had in fact brought this regime of cultural production into being.
China’s integration into the global capitalist order played a pivotal role in shaping this postmodern transition. The Shanghai Communiqué of 1972 may be understood as one of the decisive turning points. Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing and the subsequent rapprochement between the United States and the People’s Republic of China did not merely recalibrate Cold War alliances; it also prepared the ground for China’s gradual integration into the US-led global capitalist system, prefiguring the very undoing of ideological difference as such. This integration, which accelerated after the Chinese authorities undertook their policies of Reform and Opening-Up, reshaped the spatial and temporal organisation of production: it fostered the transnational manufacturing networks, global supply chains, and new forms of financialisation that underpinned the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism.
The postmodern turn in culture was inseparable from the geopolitical opening that reconfigured the capitalist world economy and brought China—long treated as an external Other to the West—into its core circuits of production and consumption. To situate the Shanghai Communiqué as a hinge of this transformation is not to attribute to China a unilateral agency in producing postmodernism. Rather, it is to recognise that the geopolitical realignments of the early 1970s, including the US abandonment of the gold standard, the oil shocks, and the Sino-American rapprochement, constituted the historical ground of late capitalism itself, and thus of the cultural dynamics Jameson theorised.
In this regard, China stops functioning merely as a passive surface for European projection, but emerges as a subject in its own right, entering, reconfiguring, and in many ways subverting the system that once sought to contain it. The mirror turns and, in so doing, it is no longer positioned behind Europe as a static counterpart, but is placed in front, angled, recursive, and generative. What once served as a reflective surface for European self-examination now becomes an infinite mirror, proliferating images that have ceased to be stable reflections and have become shifting refractions.
China—no longer a philosophical antithesis or ethical exception—emerges as a world-making force that destabilises the inherited categories of global modernity from within. It refracts economic, technological, and ideological forms that elude assimilation into the West’s conceptual archive. In this infinite mirror, capital, power, and civilisational form appear not as derivatives of a European origin, but as divergent iterations, repetitions without return. What is reflected is not a single truth, but a dispersed field of perspectives, endlessly multiplied and estranged from their supposed source.
In this reversal, often referred to as postmodernity or, more precisely, counter-modernity in Johnson’s sense, the concept can be rethought not merely as the fragmentation of the European subject or the collapse of its grand narratives. Rather than a condition of internal exhaustion or cultural relativism, it becomes the moment in which the West is subjected to a form of external recursion, mirrored and multiplied by a force it once positioned as its other. China, long regarded as a philosophical counterpart or civilisational curiosity, now assumes the role of Europe’s infinite recursivity—not its negation, but its echo extended through unfamiliar coordinates. What postmodernity reveals is not simply the implosion of Western teleology. Still, it is an uncanny reflection, refracted through China’s appropriation, intensification, and redirection of the very instruments of modernity Europe once claimed as its own.
Rethinking Postmodernity
One piece of evidence supporting this hypothesis is the symbolism captured in the photograph ‘First Coke in Red China’, taken on 30 March 1979 by American photographer James Andanson (this is the image that accompanies this essay). Staged on the Great Wall in Beijing, the image depicts a Chinese boy drinking Coca-Cola, an iconic American brand, as China began to open its doors to global capitalism. This carefully orchestrated scene condenses the symbolic logic of postmodernity: history and ideology flattened into spectacle; the Great Wall transformed from a monument of sovereign isolation into the backdrop for consumer integration. Coca-Cola, once a sign of American cultural hegemony, becomes a floating signifier in a world in which ideology circulates without a centre. This dramatic scene, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek’s (2009) emblematic invocation of Coca-Cola, would come to shape the cultural and theoretical landscape of the 1990s. In this image, postmodernity reveals itself not as rupture, but as seamless absorption of contradiction into the global flow of signs.
In this moment, the East does not resist the West but completes its circuit. The red country, long imagined as the Other of capitalist modernity, now stands embedded in its logistical core, assembling its goods and drinking in its signs. It is a scene not of contradiction but of recursive integration, in which the categories of producer and consumer, East and West, no longer hold. China, once imagined as modernity’s outside or philosophical other, now realises its most refined and operational form. The Coke bottle, once a metonym for Americanisation, no longer signifies the expansion of a particular culture but rather the condition of a world in which signs, labour, and ideology circulate without a stable centre. In this configuration, postmodernity appears not as fragmentation or irony, but as the seamless integration of contradiction itself.
In this sense, China becomes the mirror not of Europe’s past, but of its unresolved futures: generating permutations of capital, technology, and state power that retain the form of Western rationality while severing it from its Enlightenment origin. Postmodernity, viewed from this angle, is not a rupture with modernity, but its proliferation through an angled mirror, a recursive unfolding in which the West confronts its own logic, estranged, intensified, and returned from elsewhere. The mirror, once a metaphor for introspection and dialectical self-discovery, now becomes a dispositif of proliferation, an optical system without centre or origin. This is the vertigo of postmodern geopolitics: Europe, having once interrogated itself through the figure of China, now finds itself positioned within a hall of mirrors it cannot control, surrounded by images of its own displaced futures.
Global capitalism, in its current incorporated form, would not have been possible without China. Far from existing on the margins of capitalist modernity, China has functioned as its engine room: the site where global value chains are materialised, where the abstractions of finance find concrete form through labour, logistics, and infrastructure. Since the late twentieth century, China’s consolidation into the world economy has represented not a deviation from capitalism’s logic, but rather its radical amplification. The unprecedented scale, speed, and precision of contemporary capital accumulation rely on the productive and administrative capacities that China has developed within its unique model of state–market integration.
In this context, we should treat the ongoing discourse of ‘decoupling’ between China and the United States with caution. It does not signify a rupture between two distinct systems, but rather a readjustment within an interdependent architecture. What appears as decoupling is, as Foucault would suggest, a shift in governmentality—a new mode of managing the same relations of production and control under altered conditions. China and the United States are no longer geopolitical rivals in the classical sense; they are co-architects of a planetary dispositif, the operations of which depend not on liberal-democratic values but on predictive data, algorithmic governance, and logistical scalability.
Decoupling under these conditions is not a separation, but a rearrangement of protocols. The global capitalist system has already internalised China as a structural necessity, not as an external rival. Attempts to separate from China, whether through trade restrictions, technological embargoes, or industrial realignment, while simultaneously preserving the logic of global capitalism, are inherently contradictory. The infrastructure of capital, from chip production to rare-earth extraction, from e-commerce platforms to artificial intelligence (AI) model training, is no longer national but distributed across a system in which China plays an indispensable role.
This interdependence is especially evident in the domain of high technology, where no actor can claim full autonomy. Companies such as DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI developer, exemplify this entanglement. Despite their ambitions to achieve technological sovereignty, such firms remain dependent on foundational models, many of which are developed in the United States or trained using global infrastructure and datasets. The supply chains for advanced semiconductors, the architectures of large-scale machine learning, and the regulatory frameworks that govern AI ethics are all embedded in a complex matrix of transnational dependencies. In this context, technological development is less a matter of national autonomy than of navigating and negotiating an evolving assemblage of protocols, standards, and knowledge flows. What appears as innovation is thus deeply conditioned by pre-existing global architectures of power and computation.
In this light, China does not stand as a new or alternative civilisational model. Instead, it represents the most refined instantiation of Western capitalism to date. It has absorbed the core logic of European modernity—that is, rationalisation, secularisation, and accumulation—and fused it with a centralised cybernetic system of governance. What distinguishes the Chinese model is not its rejection of class contradictions but its capacity to modulate, manage, and contain them within a tightly integrated apparatus of state power, technological infrastructure, and ideological scripting. Class antagonisms are not abolished; they are rendered legible and governable through real-time data feedback, social credit systems, and algorithmic surveillance. The Chinese State has thus operationalised the contradictions that liberal democracies continue to displace into political crisis.
China and Other Asias
China should be understood not as an alternative to European modernity but as its culmination. The Enlightenment dream of a rationally ordered, technologically optimised society, emancipated from theology yet driven by the will to mastery, has achieved in China a disturbing clarity. As Ya-Wen Lei (2023: 3–4) observes, China represents ‘an extreme case of time-compressed development’, in which the state, capital, and digital technologies were fused to ‘leap over a whole generation of economic experiences’ and accelerate the transition from industrial to post-industrial forms of production. What Europe projected as progress but could neither sustain nor fully acknowledge as its own project has been carried to its logical conclusion by the very society it long cast as its civilisational opposite.
The difference is not civilisational but historical. China’s belated integration into the capitalist world system enabled it to condense and radicalise the Enlightenment project at the very moment when the West had lost faith in its own universalist promises. The techno-developmental regime Lei describes, in which law, data, algorithms, and state coercion are harnessed together, exposes the liberal distinction between economic modernity and political freedom as an ideological conceit. Here, the convergence of market logic with cybernetic governance, of logistical efficiency with imperial ambition, is not a deviation from Enlightenment rationality but the fulfilment of its instrumental core.
The mirror that China now holds up to the world reveals something the West prefers to forget: that this model was born not in Beijing, but in the fusion of capitalist accumulation, colonial logistics, and Enlightenment rationalisation that shaped the modern world system. From Nixon’s rapprochement to the decades of offshored manufacturing and financial interdependence that followed, Western capital abetted the very developmental path it now condemns as ‘authoritarian capitalism’. What it denounces in China is, in truth, the stripped-down image of its own historical project, a rationalised, technologised order in which development displaces politics as the organising principle. The world that now disquiets the West is not alien but a perfected continuation of the one it built and exported, and which it no longer dares to recognise as its own creation.
In this way, confronting the problem of China today demands more than an extension of existing critical theory; it requires a reinvention of radical thinking itself. The historical failure of socialism, particularly in its statist and developmentalist expressions, has left us with a depleted conceptual language for understanding China’s transformation. What began as a revolutionary project to overturn global capitalism has, in the Chinese case, culminated in the consolidation of a highly centralised capitalist state. The traditional categories of critique have been absorbed into a system that governs not merely through repression, but also through infrastructural modulation, technical rationality, and administrative capture. In such a context, critiques that repeat the assumptions of Western Marxism risk becoming complicit with the very system they seek to challenge. The task now is not to restore a purer form of Marxism, but to acknowledge its exhaustion and open new pathways for radical thought outside its conceptual limitations.
This requires a perspective that moves beyond geopolitics and the linear historicism inherited from the Enlightenment and orthodox Marxist traditions. We must turn to a reflection on Asiatic modes of existence, not as cultural essence or identity, but as historically sedimented ways of being shaped by different relations to modernity, power, and time. These modes cannot be reduced to Western categories of progress or regression. They unfold in discontinuous rhythms and articulate forms of collective life that were only partially integrated into the capitalist world system. To think through China today is to face a particular difficulty: a political formation that has internalised the legacy of Marxism while systematically foreclosing the emancipatory possibilities that Marxism once sought to activate. In place of revolutionary subjectivity, there is a population managed through logistical infrastructure and cybernetic control; in place of dialectical transformation, there is a system that integrates contradiction as a function of governance.
To understand this impasse, it is necessary to revisit the short twentieth century of Asia. This historical arc does not simply follow China’s revolutionary trajectory but also marks a broader shift in which Asia began to march towards its own destiny. While China’s path—from the collapse of the Qing Dynasty through the 1949 revolution to its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001—has been central to regional and global transformations, it cannot be taken as the representative arc of Asia as a whole. Reinterpreting Wang Hui’s concept of the short twentieth century of China, it becomes clear that China’s historical experience must be distinguished from the complex and heterogeneous temporalities of the Asian region.
Across the continent, from the independence struggles of South and Southeast Asia to the postcolonial experiments and authoritarian consolidations in Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and beyond, Asia’s twentieth century unfolded through divergent routes, shaped by local conditions and transnational entanglements. These trajectories were not derivative of China but marked by their own internal logics and ruptures. To think about the short twentieth century of Asia is thus to trace a multiplicity of beginnings—revolutionary, decolonial, and developmental—that refuse to be subsumed under the narrative of any single nation-state.
China may have resolved the contradictions of its revolutionary century by entering global capitalism, but historical tensions across the wider region remain unresolved. Decolonial projects were suspended, alternative modernities repressed, and political imaginations deferred. These divergent Asiatic modes of existence retain within them political and philosophical resources that have not yet been exhausted or thoroughly co-opted. They offer a basis for rethinking the limits of our categories and imagining other possible configurations of life beyond capitalist realism.
Engaging with these modes does not mean idealising them. It means recognising within them the persistence of other rhythms, practices, and struggles that dominant historical narratives have marginalised. The contemporary challenge facing China is not simply an economic or geopolitical issue, but also a theoretical one. It demands that we question what becomes of critique when it is no longer grounded in the externality of class struggle, when revolution no longer serves as its horizon, and when the Marxist tradition itself has been folded into the mechanisms of state and capital. What remains is the imperative to invent: not a new system of theory or doctrine, but new concepts, new vocabularies, and new ways of thinking that can respond to the conjunctures of history we now inhabit.
Featured Image: Mannequin. Source: @nSeika, Flickr.com (CC).
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