Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who served as president of the UN Security  Council from January 2001 to May 2002, perceptively wrote in his book Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy that “the Chinese Communist Party should instead be called the Chinese Civilization Party”.

The book was published in 2020, and as if to confirm the correctness of his observation, China in 2023 held its First Forum on Building up China’s Cultural Strength. The theme of that meeting was “Towards Greater Cultural Confidence and Mutual Learning Among Civilizations”. The theme for the 2024 meeting was “Chinese Modernization and the New Cultural Mission”, while that for 2025 was “Deepening Reform of Cultural Systems and Mechanisms, Stimulating Cultural Innovation and Creative Vitality”. The official write-up frames this year’s meeting as “striving to write a new chapter of cultural prosperity”.

Rising powers have always sought, alongside material strength, the capacity to set the terms in which they are described, admired, imitated, and remembered. The United States did this through Hollywood; the Soviet Union through Bolshoi tours; postwar Japan through the quiet diplomacy of anime and Studio Ghibli; South Korea through K-pop, K-drama, and K-cinema. There is every reason for China to do the same, not only to promote increased self-confidence in the civilization of China, but to project China’s soft power as well.

The phrase recurring across all three forums — “mutual learning among civilizations” — is a noble aspiration. China must not repeat the mistakes of the many empires throughout human history. At the height of their power, they thought their culture and civilization were the best in the world, disregarding others. Remember British author Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the “white man’s burden”, suggesting that white men’s duty was to “civilize” nonwhite people? There is no doubt that Chinese civilization encompasses some of the richest creations of men and civilizations. However, the most durable achievements of modern Chinese culture have rarely been acts of pure self-assertion; more often than not, they are acts of synthesis, marrying a foreign form to a native spirit, or an ancient story to a modern interpretation.

Consider the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto, composed in 1959 by two conservatory students, He Zhanhao and Chen Gang. It pours the melodic language of Yue Opera and the ancient legend of lovers transformed in death into a pair of butterflies into the European concerto form — solo violin against full orchestra, with the sonata architecture of exposition, development, and recapitulation. The result is neither Western nor traditionally Chinese, but a synthesis of two cultural heritages, instantly moving audiences from both.

The Yellow River Cantata, written by Xian Xinghai in 1939 in the cave dwellings of Yan’an during the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and reborn three decades later as the Yellow River Piano Concerto, runs the synthesis the other way: The full symphonic apparatus of the West is harnessed to a subject wholly and unmistakably Chinese — the great river that cradled the civilization, and the spirit of the Chinese under siege. Where the Butterfly Lovers offers tenderness, the Yellow River offers grandeur. Together, they show how capacious the strategy of synthesis can be.

A state can fund, convene, digitize, translate, and promote; whether it can also call forth the works that will still be performed and read a century hence, only time will tell

Literature shows the same pattern. Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem took hard science fiction and produced a trilogy that, in Ken Liu’s English translation, won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel — the first translated work and the first by an Asian author to do so. Adapted since for television by both Tencent and Netflix, and counting among its admirers readers Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, it is exactly the achievement the forums mean by cultural confidence — a Chinese writer mastering a foreign form and carrying it back into the world on his own terms.

It is against this long history of synthesis that the forum’s engagement with artificial intelligence in the arts should be read. The newest experiments attempt to wed the most advanced technology to the oldest forms. Technology companies and museums have begun training generative models on the vast corpus of classical landscape painting, so that an algorithm can produce, in seconds, an ink-wash scene in the manner of the Song masters; the Palace Museum, alongside firms such as Tencent and Baidu, has poured resources into digitizing, animating, and reanimating the imperial collections. In music, AI tools are used to harmonize and recombine traditional melodic material, to restore degraded recordings, and to generate new works in old idioms. An excellent example is the AI-generated animation of Zhang Zeduan’s handscroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Such works not only increase the awareness and pride of the Chinese people in their heritage but also deepen foreigners’ understanding of the richness of Chinese culture by introducing it through modern technology.

Whether the cultural strength of this kind can be summoned by the forum and policy is among the genuinely open questions of the present Chinese moment. The works most often invoked as evidence of Chinese greatness — the Tang poems, the Song landscapes, Dream of the Red Chamber (originally a novel, but since filmed), the Butterfly Lovers itself — emerged as often from the unplanned interior of the civilization as from its official ambitions, and sometimes in quiet tension with them. The Butterfly Lovers was written by students; the Yellow River Cantata in a cave; The Three-Body Problem by an engineer at a power plant. A state can fund, convene, digitize, translate, and promote; whether it can also call forth the works that will still be performed and read a century hence, only time will tell. But Mahbubani’s reframing holds a real insight: A party that understands itself as the steward of a civilization, rather than merely the government of a state, has set itself a longer and more interesting task than the ordinary business of politics.

The author is a former Hong Kong resident who practiced as a hematologist in Singapore for many years.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.