At their Beijing summit on May 14, 2026, Chinese President Xi Jinping asked US President Donald Trump whether China and the United States could avoid the “Thucydides Trap,” in which rivalry between a rising power and an established one ends in war. During the talks, Xi also warned that mishandling Taiwan could bring the two countries into conflict.
The exchange captured the strategic anxiety of the present moment. China’s rise is measured in factories, patents, artificial intelligence models, naval vessels, infrastructure projects and trade flows.
Governments and companies study its industrial policy, automated manufacturing and technological capabilities. Competitors want to discover the mechanisms of Chinese success; countries in the Global South want to adapt those that appear useful.
Yet the study of Chinese language, history, philosophy and culture has not kept pace with China’s growing importance. The imbalance is dangerous. The world is learning how China produces, finances and competes without learning enough about the historical and cultural frameworks through which questions of order, humiliation, obligation, authority and national renewal are debated in China.
The trend is visible in education. According to the Modern Language Association’s 2021 enrollment survey, enrollments in Chinese at US colleges and universities fell by 14.3% between 2016 and 2021.
Graduate enrollments declined from 1,266 to 892. Academic exchange has also contracted as geopolitical tension, security concerns, travel restrictions and political controls have made sustained engagement more difficult. At the moment when China expertise is becoming most necessary, the channels that produce it are narrowing.
What cultural understanding changes
Cultural literacy does not mean accepting the claims of the Chinese government. It means recognizing that policies and statements are interpreted through different historical memories and moral vocabularies.
American political discourse has traditionally emphasized individual rights and limits on government. Chinese political discourse more often stresses social order, collective welfare and relational obligation.
Neither society speaks with one voice, but the difference helps explain recurring arguments over human rights, governance and social stability. In diplomacy and business, Chinese interlocutors may also place greater weight on personal relationships, indirect speech and the preservation of face than Americans accustomed to explicit disagreement.
Historical memory matters just as much. Western and Japanese imperialism caused immense suffering in China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That history is emphasized in Chinese education and official narratives, while many Western publics know little about the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties or the Japanese invasion. What one side sees as contemporary policy, the other may interpret through a longer history of national vulnerability and foreign intrusion.
China also remembers centuries in which it was one of the world’s most sophisticated civilizations. It developed a durable bureaucratic tradition and, during the Song dynasty, achieved remarkable advances in commerce, education, printing, technology, philosophy and the arts.
That history does not justify modern territorial claims or government policy. But it helps explain why many Chinese people regard national rejuvenation less as the birth of a new power than as recovery from a historical interruption.
Henry Kissinger contrasted American and Chinese forms of exceptionalism. Each country carries a story about its distinctive place in world history. Diplomacy conducted without understanding those stories is prone to mistake symbolism for substance, defensive behavior for aggression, or compromise for humiliation.
China is more than the Chinese state
Understanding China also requires resisting the temptation to reduce it to a single essence. Chinese society and civilization cannot be reduced to the Communist Party, just as Chinese civilization cannot be reduced to Confucianism.
China has been shaped by Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist and Legalist traditions, as well as popular religion, Marxism, nationalism, capitalism and global modernity. These inheritances overlap and compete.
New Confucianism offers one revealing example. The movement took shape as Chinese thinkers confronted Western power and modern institutions. Philosophers including Mou Zongsan, Tang Junyi and Xu Fuguan defended the Confucian tradition against those who blamed it for China’s weakness, while also asking how it might respond to science, democracy and individual freedom.
After 1949, much of this work continued in Hong Kong and Taiwan, while Confucianism was officially repudiated and, especially during the Cultural Revolution, violently suppressed on the mainland.
New Confucians distinguished technical knowledge from wisdom. Science and reason could reveal and transform the natural world, they argued, but could not by themselves settle questions of meaning, moral cultivation or the proper ends of power. Their thought remains relevant to societies that possess extraordinary technical capabilities but are less certain about the purposes those capabilities should serve.
Some mainland thinkers have since promoted nationalist, authoritarian or patriarchal versions of Confucianism. Others across mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea and North America have explored its compatibility with democracy, meritocratic government, reciprocity and human dignity. Confucianism is therefore not a fixed political doctrine. It is a contested living tradition.
Tu Weiming has done more than most to bring that tradition into global conversation. His idea of “cultural China” extends beyond the Chinese state to include people connected to Chinese civilization through language, memory and intellectual engagement.
He criticizes the political use of Confucianism to enforce obedience, but also argues that its emphasis on self-cultivation, relationships and the unity of humanity and nature can contribute to a global ethic.
Tu’s work matters not because Confucianism provides a master key to Chinese behavior. It matters because it demonstrates the intellectual conversation that becomes visible once China is approached as a civilization rather than merely a strategic problem.
Beyond official China
Philosophy is only one entry point. Literature, cinema, and art reveal forms of Chinese experience that official statements and economic statistics cannot. Writer Lu Xun (1881–1936) exposed the moral and social crises of early twentieth-century China.
Nobel laureate Mo Yan transforms rural history through satire and magical realism. Liu Cixin’s science fiction projects Chinese anxieties and ambitions onto a cosmic stage. The films of Zhang Yimou have explored power, memory, family, and upheaval through a visual language recognized around the world.
These works challenge the image of Chinese society as a uniform mass. China contains arguments among nationalists and cosmopolitans, liberals and conservatives, feminists, religious believers, environmentalists, workers, entrepreneurs, and young people uncertain about the future.
Government restrictions have narrowed the public sphere. As a result, some intellectual debate has moved into private seminars, bookstores, reading groups and carefully managed digital conversations. That makes China harder for outsiders to understand, not less necessary to understand.
Western institutions bear part of the responsibility for the gap. Chinese philosophy is still often confined to area studies rather than treated as part of philosophy’s common inheritance. News coverage understandably concentrates on the party-state, security and economic competition, but this can make official China appear to be the whole of China. Nationalist politics on both sides further discourages the curiosity on which cultural knowledge depends.
Cultural literacy as strategic realism
Closing the gap requires more than celebrating cultural exchange in principle. Universities should sustain advanced Chinese-language instruction and integrate Chinese philosophy, history, and literature beyond specialist departments.
Publishers and foundations should support translators who make contemporary Chinese intellectual debate accessible. Journalists need the time and language skills to report on Chinese society rather than only the state. Governments should protect legitimate security interests without treating academic exchange itself as a threat.
The task must be reciprocal. Chinese authorities have made understanding China more difficult by restricting research, journalism and open debate. A genuine dialogue of civilizations cannot be produced through slogans or controlled cultural diplomacy. It requires access, disagreement and the freedom to encounter a society in its complexity.
Cultural literacy will not eliminate strategic competition, and it does not require admiration for Chinese government policy. It is a form of realism. Countries cannot negotiate successfully with an imagined China, deter a China they misunderstand or coexist peacefully with a civilization they know largely through headlines and threat assessments.
Escaping the Thucydides Trap therefore requires more than military restraint and crisis-management hotlines. It requires both societies to understand the historical narratives through which the other interprets power, order and national purpose.
The West has devoted enormous energy to measuring what China can do. It is time to invest comparable effort in understanding what China thinks it is doing — and why.
Bill Kelly is a former lecturer in communication studies at UCLA and author of Reinventing China: From a Century of Humiliation to the New Middle Kingdom. Jan Krikke is the author of six books about Asia and a longtime Asia correspondent based in Thailand.