But states that like to trumpet their history also have to do a lot of forgetting
than in Asia do states and their rulers tend to think they represent not just, say, defined territories or peoples with a shared language, but rather whole civilisations, often cosmically ordained. Strongmen running Central Asian states erect monuments to themselves as heirs to nomadic empires.
No country plays up the idea of representing a civilisation more than China does. Visitors to Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound in Beijing, are rarely spared a lecture on how, uniquely, China is an “ancient civilisation with over 5,000 years of history”.
China’s sense of itself as a glorious civilisation encompasses a long history, a vast geography, a huge population and the incorporation of lesser cultures and peoples. It is also fostered as the flipside of a sense of victimhood over colonial depredations. India offers many parallels, and it is no surprise that notions of a civilisational state are on the rise there, too.
In India Hindu nationalists decry the Western rationalism and universal values embraced by Jawaharlal Nehru and his political heirs. In China enthusiasts of a civilisational state go further, and credit it with the country’s development success. Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University in Shanghai argues that the Communist Party’s pragmatism and its gradual approach to reforms are rooted in an ancient awareness of China’s vast size and complexity, and in a hard-wired imperial aversion to chaos.
But history is messy. Those trying to maintain a civilisational mindset must wilfully debase big portions of it. In India, it is not just colonialism and its aftermath that have distorted the true culture in the eyes of Hindu nationalists. They also resent much earlier waves of Muslim conquest and seek to expunge their legacy.
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