In his book Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique, Xu [Jilin] gives a wide-ranging analysis of China’s recent history. His main point is that China has headed down the dangerous path of historicism — the belief that universal values do not exist and that everything is determined by national history. ...

"Chinese today are like nineteenth-century Europeans, bursting with ambition, industrious and thrifty, full of greed and desire; they believe that the weak are meat for the strong and that only the apt survive — they are vastly different from traditional Chinese, who prized righteousness over profit and were content with moderation. What kind of victory is this?…"

What China hasn’t grasped, Xu writes, is the distinction between civilization and culture. The new world civilization, he argues, embraces common values for all of humanity. Culture, by contrast, is specific, but need not come into conflict with those common values — the concept of rights, for example, can be found in Chinese tradition. Xu holds that China’s behavior resembles that of nineteenth-century Germany, which believed that its Kultur was superior to Anglo-Saxon Zivilisation, a view that led German elites to justify their country’s slide toward militarism and fascism.

Of direct relevance to today’s events — one thinks immediately of Xinjiang’s reeducation camps for religious Uighurs — are Xu’s comments on ethnic (or Han) Chinese. They make up 92 percent of the population of the People’s Republic, and he argues that they have imposed their views on China’s other fifty-five ethnicities. This is because the Han-dominated state’s vision fails to offer universal values that would appeal to the country’s non-Chinese ethnicities.

— Ian Johnson, "The Flowers Blooming in the Dark," New York Review of Books