© Lintao Zhang / Getty ImagesChinese President Xi Jinping
The article begins by citing Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis, which argues that a clash between East and West would define the post-Cold War future as a form of cultural and religious identity conflict. In presenting this theme, the article then dives into what Xi Jinping has touted as his 'global civilization initiative' based on the premise that "civilizations can live in harmony." The catch, as interpreted by The Economist, is that the "West must stop promoting its values, or Huntington will be proven right."
Arguably, the world has been in a cultural conflict for a while now, and it didn't start with US-China competition. The rise and surge of political Islam, after all, pursuing hard-line interpretations of Sharia law, and even going as far as terrorism and insurgency, was a reaction to Westernization in the Middle East, an attempt to try and enforce an Islamic identity against it. To some extent, the War on Terror was a 'clash of civilizations' as much as it was a clash of ideologies and cultural identities which saw each other as mutually existential threats.
Comment: A woke government's pettiness knows no bounds. But the agenda is deeper than that: