The ominous revival of Sinocentrism

YOU SANG-CHUL
The author is the CEO of China Lab.

Earlier this month, I visited Guangzhou in Guangdong Province, China. More than 450 journalists from 197 media outlets from 101 countries and international organizations around the world attended the World Media Summit hosted by China’s Xinhua News Agency.

Representatives of Reuters and Associated Press raised their voices against the deepening threats to media, including fake news. But my attention was on “Humanomics in the New Era,” introduced by the organizer. At first, I listened to it without much thought, and then I was surprised. I thought this could be the “Xi Jinping Economics.”

The gist of the humanomics in the new era is the three elements at the bottom: Marxism, China’s reality and Chinese tradition. Mao Zedong also achieved the Sinicization of Marxism by adding the reality of China to Marxism. President Xi Jinping adds Chinese tradition to this.

That leads to China’s unique socialism of Xi Jinping’s New Era. Under these Xi Jinping thoughts, humanomics is created through Xi Jinping’s economics and cultural philosophy.

The humanomics of the new era are developed from two pillars: people and culture. Rather than the materialism of the Western civilization, China will attain “Chinese-style modernization,” the vision of Xi’s third term, through people-oriented economic development.

China’s modernization contains Xi’s idea that “modernization is not Westernization.” He wants to attain modernization in a Chinese way. In the early days of his power, Xi demanded Chinese economists find China’s economic development theory from Chinese tradition, rather than Western theories such as Keynesianism.

Humanomics in the new era is a kind of answer to Xi’s demand 10 years ago. Its ultimate goal is to build a community for all of humanity. China proposes the Humanomics in the New Era as the new economic standard that humanity should pursue.

It reminds me of a series of global standards that China proposed in recent years. China presented the Global Development Initiative in 2021, the Global Security Initiative in 2022 and the Global Civilization Initiative this year.

It can be seen that China is deliberately and ambitiously pursuing the proposal of global standards. Naturally, I can’t help but think the world will now be divided into two parts: the Chinese standard and the Western standard. China frequently says that it has no intention of replacing the United States.

But China seems to have already begun to act to replace the United States. Only time will tell whether China’s ambition will become a reality.