Since the mid-20th century, the arts and culture scene in China has gone from strict Communist Party control to relative freedom and back to heavy restrictions. More recently, the Chinese government under Xi Jinping has increasingly used culture as a tool for projecting soft power abroad and portraying China as a legitimate civilisational alternative to liberal democracy. How should Europe respond to this in its cultural cooperation with China?
When Wang Xiao1 was a child during the Cultural Revolution, her father buried his leather shadow puppets in the garden to save them from the Red Guards, who were destroying anything associated with traditional art and the “old culture”. In secret, he taught his children to bring them to life so that the ancient art would not die.
Decades later, in Xi Jinping’s China, Wang Xiao is an established puppeteer: she holds shows in Beijing and runs a puppetry school. Choosing her words carefully, she shares: “It’s a terrible thing to say, but as artistic freedom shrinks, my work prospers. Children are told they must know their culture and have cultural confidence. That means more classes, more students.”
Under Xi Jinping, China aims to become the world’s leading nation in every field, including arts and culture.
Under Xi Jinping, China aims to become the world’s leading nation in every field, including arts and culture. The country projects its cultural power abroad as it does domestically: through tight political control. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oversees the Ministry of Culture, cultural industries, and artists, ensuring they “serve the people” (read: the Party). A Leninist organisation, the CCP promotes a positive image of the country it rules, portraying China as a credible international actor and an alternative model to liberal democracy.
Mao’s cultural doctrine
The CCP was founded in 1921 under the guidance of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The Communist International (Comintern), an organisation founded by Vladimir Lenin dedicated to advancing world communism, played a decisive role in shaping the new organisation, influencing its political strategies and providing cadre training. From the outset, the CCP, like the CPSU, placed great emphasis on propaganda, including in the fields of art and culture.
After the Long March (a defining 1930s military retreat during the Chinese Civil War that elevated Mao Zedong’s power), Mao refined his ideas on the relationship between art and politics. His 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” articulated his vision clearly. Mao declared that “literature and art are part of the whole revolutionary cause” and must “serve the workers, peasants and soldiers” by advancing the political objectives of the revolution.
Once in power, the Party quickly asserted control over artists, creating numerous state-sponsored associations including the China Writers’ Association, the China Dancers’ Association, and others. In 1949, the famous novelist Shen Yanbing, also known under his pen name Mao Dun, became China’s first culture minister. He oversaw the alignment of literature and art with the ideology of the Communist Party, promoting the view that culture should serve the workers, peasants, and soldiers. During this period, many cultural institutions were under the ministry’s direct oversight.
Mao Dun was forced to resign in 1965, as the Cultural Revolution began. Mao Zedong told the Red Guards to eradicate the “Four Olds” – old customs, culture, habits, and ideas – and “purify” society. Soon, the Ministry of Culture was paralysed and its cadres purged. In its place, a revolutionary committee dominated by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, took over. Artists were labelled class enemies, tortured, bullied, and forced to undergo “re-education” through labour, and many died. Creative production nearly ceased, even at the level of folk art.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution following Mao’s death in 1976, cultural activity slowly revived, though China remained poor and isolated. With Deng Xiaoping’s accession to power and the start of the Reform and Opening-Up policy in 1979, things improved. Cartoons from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio offer a beautiful example of post-Cultural Revolution artistic production.
The 1974 discovery of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di greatly helped China’s cultural revival.
The 1974 discovery of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di greatly helped China’s cultural revival. Once the Cultural Revolution had passed, the Terracotta Warriors were massively advertised abroad. The statues became a new tool of Chinese soft power. They projected the image of an ancient civilisation linked seamlessly to the modern Party-state – a stark reversal from the destruction of culture under Mao Zedong.
Xi Jinping’s not-so-new era
From the late 1970s through Hu Jintao’s presidency from 2003 to 2013, China’s cultural sphere flourished with relative openness, gaining global recognition, especially in contemporary arts. In twenty years, Chinese painters rose from near invisibility to international fame. They became major players in the lucrative global market for contemporary art, and their works are collected by both Chinese and Western billionaires. Ai Weiwei is probably the best known among them in the West, but the works of other artists such as Wang Guangyi – often called the “Chinese Andy Warhol” – are also highly sought after.
This trend reversed under Xi Jinping, who rose to power in 2012 and rapidly infused a Mao-flavoured nationalism into Party politics. His 2013 visit to Qufu, Confucius’s birthplace, served as a political rehabilitation of Confucianism – now tweaked as a precursor to socialism. In 2017, Xi declared a “New Era”, re-centring the Communist Party in Chinese society and once again tightening its grip on cultural productions. He also underscored the need to “tell the China story” well, a process in which artists play a central role.
The New Era marked the end of relative artistic freedom. For instance, Gao Zhen – one of the Gao Brothers, known for provocative works mocking Mao’s personality cult and reinterpreting the Cultural Revolution – has been imprisoned since 2024 under a law against “defaming the reputation of heroes and martyrs”.
The Confucius Institutes are another instrument the Communist Party has routinely used to project soft power. Launched in 2004 under the Ministry of Education, these institutes supposedly intended to promote Chinese language and culture abroad, with teaching materials and staff vetted by the CCP. As Xi Jinping’s nationalist ideology grew stronger, they became tools of influence and political control. In the face of international criticism, many Confucius Institutes have been rebranded or closed, particularly in the US and the EU. The Covid-19 pandemic dealt a major blow to China’s cultural outreach, with foreign students departing and academic exchanges being paused. The CCP’s ideological campaigns intensified. Propaganda ballets were staged at the China National Opera, which had once hosted famous foreign artists.
When Covid-related restrictions finally eased in December 2022, cultural exchanges slowly restarted. In 2023, Xi Jinping launched the Global Civilisation Initiative, which is the cultural diplomacy arm of the Party’s Community of Shared Future for Mankind. As the Trump administration weakens US soft power, China is reasserting cultural “openness”. But CCP ideology and censorship are never far away.
A long march, abroad
Many embassies around the world count a cultural advisor among their diplomats. This is particularly true of China, whose embassies play a central role in managing cultural diplomacy. For a time, Beijing’s diplomatic missions seemed mainly involved with teaching Chinese to students. However, with Xi Jinping in power, they turned into tools for monitoring how the “China story” is told abroad and for intervening when narratives diverge from official CCP lines.
In 2020, Nantes History Museum in western France cancelled an exhibition on Genghis Khan after Beijing demanded the removal of terms including “Genghis Khan”, “empire”, and “Mongol”. The controversy was a sign of the Party- state’s growing sensitivity around identity issues, including in Inner Mongolia, where China had just enforced a ban on teaching classes in Mongolian. The exhibition finally opened in October 2023, with loans from Mongolia and Taiwan, rather than China. There have been other, similar incidents. The recent renovation of Paris’s Guimet Museum sparked debate when researchers alleged that references to “Tibet” had been removed under Chinese pressure – a move some consider as complicity in cultural genocide.
Yet despite its efforts, China has not always managed to control the narrative. Major but alternative Chinese voices such as Ai Weiwei, contemporary film director Chloé Zhao, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature Gao Xingjian, have found an audience in the West. Ironically, these artists might not be very famous in their own country, but they form a diaspora cultural resistance. Their success shows that cultural soft power cannot be completely centralised.
No foreign influence in my backyard
Conscious of the power of culture, the CCP allows little space for foreign influence. During the 1990s, American cultural icons such as Mickey Mouse, Madonna, and Sylvester Stallone were visible across China, but that did not last long. The China Film Administration, under the Party’s Propaganda Department, strictly limits the number of foreign films allowed on the Chinese market and also censors the content. This has helped the Communist Party preserve ideological control and nurture the domestic movie industry.
Conscious of the power of culture, the CCP allows little space for foreign influence.
Disney’s experience with the challenging dynamics of the Chinese market illustrates the success of Beijing’s control. In 1998, the US-produced cartoon Mulan, based on the Chinese legend of heroine Hua Mulan, failed to captivate Chinese audiences. The animation’s 2020 live-action remake – partly filmed in Xinjiang, home to the Uyghur minority persecuted by the CCP – faced backlash in the West for ignoring human rights concerns. The comments of leading actress Liu Yifei, who supported the police during the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, also sparked international controversy. Despite complying with the CCP’s sensitivities, Disney gained little access to the Chinese market. The movie received a score of 4.7/10 on the Chinese rating platform Douban. Meanwhile, domestic animated movies have flourished, with Ne Zha 2 (2025), a box-office sensation in China, becoming the first Chinese cartoon to achieve significant global success. This has only increased the CCP’s confidence, in a kind of soft power reversal.
What is more, China has already established itself in digital industries, and particularly the gaming industry. Games like Genshin Impact (2020), played by hundreds of millions globally, subtly project an image of China as technologically creative and culturally sophisticated.
In recent years, China’s soft power has shifted from traditional institutions such as Confucius Institutes to digital ecosystems. Through global social media platforms and cultural exports like gaming and cinema, the CCP is building a pervasive narrative infrastructure. This digital Silk Road of culture allows the Party to reach global audiences directly – aestheticising Chinese ideology normalising control.
How should Europe react?
Responding to the CCP’s cultural assertiveness is complex. For years, Europeans assumed that China’s economic liberalisation would naturally lead to political liberalisation. This didn’t take into account the CCP’s determination to remain in power.
The EU’s 2019 communication EU-China – A strategic outlook marked a turning point, recognising China simultaneously as a partner, competitor, and systemic rival. Since then, Europe has begun scrutinising Chinese propaganda efforts – ranging from disinformation to covert cultural influence – more closely, as can be seen from investigations into Confucius Institutes in several EU member states.
European cultural actors must better understand the political aims embedded in Chinese cultural outreach; ignorance risks complicity. For instance, at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in France, few noticed the problematic nature of an exhibition entitled Strangers, curated in China and depicting Tibetans from a Han Chinese perspective. The exhibition illustrates the risk of uncritical collaboration and the reproduction of state narratives.
Since 1979, the CCP has gradually reinforced its discourse around “Chinese civilisation”, using culture as both shield and sword. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has reframed its cultural soft power into a civilisational power, granting legitimacy to China’s quest for global leadership and normalising its model as a legitimate civilisational alternative. In its cultural cooperation with China, Europe must acknowledge this political dimension, engaging openly but without naïveté. Rather than merely reacting to China’s narrative, Europe should project its own story – one grounded in openness, pluralism and individual freedom. Dialogue should continue but not at the expense of Europe’s narrative sovereignty, artistic freedom, or democratic values.
- The name has been changed. ↩︎
