Xiplomacy The Ancient Conversation Behind a Modern Chinese Idea

The Maya were already having the conversation

Consider the scene Xi encountered. El Castillo, the great stepped Pyramid of Kukulcán, rises above the Yucatán landscape. Nearby stand the enormous Great Ball Court, the Temple of the Warriors and the observatory traditionally called El Caracol.

These were not simply impressive buildings. They belonged to a sophisticated civilization concerned with mathematics, astronomy, agriculture, religion, political authority and time itself. Yet UNESCO specifically emphasizes that Chichén Itzá shows the interaction of Maya and Toltec ideas and building traditions, though current archaeology increasingly doubts the old story of a straightforward Toltec conquest and reads the relationship with Tula as a more tangled, two-way affair. So Xi’s observation that civilizations can remain distinctive while learning from one another has an historical precedent beneath his feet.

But there is another delightful dimension to the story. The Maya and Chinese civilizations developed thousands of kilometres apart with no established evidence of direct ancient contact between them, yet both independently developed sophisticated calendars, monumental architecture, astronomical traditions and complex writing systems.

That does not mean, as fringe pseudo-history sometimes suggests, that ancient Chinese voyagers created Maya civilization or that Maya culture came from China. There is no credible evidence for that. It means something considerably more interesting: human beings confronting similar problems sometimes produce remarkably sophisticated solutions independently.

Civilizations don’t have to be related to have something to say to one another.

Long before “Xiplomacy,” there was the Silk Road

Xi’s central argument becomes stronger still when applied to China’s own history. The popular Western image of the Silk Road is often something like a camel caravan carrying Chinese silk toward Rome. That picture is inadequate. There wasn’t really one Silk Road. There were enormous overlapping networks of roads, sea lanes, oasis towns, caravan routes and commercial relationships connecting China, Central Asia, India, Persia, Arabia, the Mediterranean and eventually Europe.

UNESCO describes these networks as conduits not merely for commodities but for religious beliefs, scientific knowledge, technological innovation, cultural practices and art. And here is where history becomes wonderfully human. Imagine a merchant arriving in an oasis town such as Samarkand or Bukhara. Perhaps he carries Chinese silk. Another merchant has Persian glass. Someone else carries Indian spices. Another brings horses from Central Asia.

But after everyone has sold their goods, something else has happened. They have eaten each other’s food. They have heard each other’s languages. They have encountered different gods. They have learned different ways of calculating, healing, navigating and making things.

The merchant might return home carrying silk. His mind comes home carrying something else. That may be civilization’s most important import.

The Chinese monk who went looking for answers

One of history’s greatest examples of this was not a diplomat at all. He was a Buddhist monk. In the seventh century, Xuanzang left Tang China and undertook an extraordinary journey through Central Asia to India. His motivation was remarkably intellectual. Chinese Buddhism possessed translated scriptures, but Xuanzang encountered disagreements and inconsistencies in them. Instead of simply accepting the version available at home, he went looking for the source material.

Think about the intellectual humility contained in that decision. A scholar effectively says: perhaps our understanding is incomplete, and I will travel thousands of kilometres to learn from somebody else.

Xuanzang studied in India and eventually returned to China carrying Buddhist manuscripts. His translation work profoundly influenced East Asian Buddhism. But the traffic was reciprocal. His detailed descriptions of the places he visited became important historical evidence concerning seventh-century Central and South Asia.

The traveller went abroad seeking Indian knowledge. India subsequently acquired an important historical witness through the Chinese traveller. That is cultural exchange in its finest form, and it occurred nearly fourteen centuries before Xi Jinping called for a “dialogue among civilizations.”

China did not simply give knowledge to the world

This is also where one sentence in the Xinhua article deserves qualification. Xi lists China’s famous Four Great Inventions: paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. Their importance is unquestionable. Chinese papermaking moved westward through Central and Western Asia before reaching Europe; printing technologies developed extraordinarily early in China; gunpowder transformed warfare; magnetic navigation contributed enormously to maritime history. Even Chinese official accounts acknowledge that these technologies passed through other societies on their journeys westward.

But the really interesting history isn’t that China invented things and Europe benefited. It is that humans invented things, other humans encountered them, modified them, combined them with other ideas and produced things their original inventors could never have imagined.

Paper is a magnificent example. Chinese papermaking moved west. The Islamic world became enormously important in its manufacture and transmission. Europe eventually adopted paper on a massive scale. Then Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century printing system combined movable metal type, presses, ink, metallurgy, paper and European alphabetic writing into an extraordinarily effective information technology.

Figure 3 · The journey of an idea: paper

The consequences included cheap books, expanding literacy, scientific communication, religious upheaval and eventually mass politics. Nobody designed that entire chain. Civilization assembled it collectively.

It looks surprisingly like open-source development. One civilization writes part of the code. Another forks it. Another improves it. Someone combines it with something apparently unrelated. Five hundred years later nobody can sensibly claim ownership of the entire system.

Marco Polo is less important than the millions whose names disappeared

Western histories often personalize intercultural exchange through celebrity travellers such as Marco Polo. Chinese histories have their equivalents. But the overwhelming majority of civilization’s intermediaries are anonymous: merchants, sailors, translators, missionaries, refugees, craftsmen, slaves, soldiers, doctors, intermarried families.

One particularly useful correction to the romantic Silk Road story is that cultural exchange wasn’t always peaceful or voluntary. Ideas travelled with armies too. Disease travelled with merchants. Religions sometimes displaced other religions. Empires absorbed peoples. Technology enabled conquest as readily as prosperity.

Civilizations don’t merely converse. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they steal. Sometimes they fight. And sometimes, centuries later, nobody remembers which culture originally owned the thing everybody now regards as normal.

That is another weakness in the polished Xinhua narrative. Cultural exchange is not inherently benign. It is simply profoundly human.

Figure 4 · The people who carried the dialogue

Then came an Italian carrying mathematics to China

A particularly fascinating Chinese-European encounter occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century. The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in China possessing something more useful than merely an argument for Christianity: European scientific and mathematical knowledge. Ricci learned Chinese, adopted aspects of Chinese scholarly culture and developed relationships with members of the literati. One of the most important was Xu Guangqi, a Chinese scholar-official. Together, in 1607, they published a Chinese translation of the first six books of Euclid’s Elements, working from the Latin edition of Christopher Clavius.

Think about the journey embodied in that book. Euclidean geometry emerged in the ancient Greek world. It was preserved, studied and developed through centuries that included enormous contributions by scholars working in Arabic. It entered European intellectual culture. A Jesuit then carried it to Ming China. A Chinese scholar translated and interpreted it. The mathematics subsequently became part of China’s own intellectual tradition.

Whose civilization owns the triangle? The question becomes absurd. And that is precisely the point.

Zheng He complicates the story even further

A century before Ricci, China itself sent one of history’s most extraordinary fleets into the Indian Ocean. Between 1405 and 1433, the Ming admiral Zheng He commanded seven major expeditions through Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean, reaching South Asia, Arabia and East Africa. And Zheng He’s own identity beautifully complicates simplistic ideas of “Chinese civilization.” He came from a Muslim family in Yunnan. His expeditions involved diplomacy, trade, imperial power, gift exchange and demonstrations of Ming prestige.

So when modern China invokes Zheng He as evidence of a historically outward-looking and relatively peaceful Chinese civilization, there is truth there, but again it needs qualification. These weren’t hippie cultural exchanges. A gigantic imperial fleet appearing in your harbour carrying representatives of the Ming emperor was also an unmistakable demonstration of power.

Diplomacy and power have always travelled together. Which brings us straight back to Xi.

Bukhara: Xi chose a particularly appropriate city

Xinhua mentions Xi visiting Bukhara in Uzbekistan in 2016 and describes the city as a “living fossil of the Silk Road.” Ignore the awkward phrase. The choice of Bukhara is historically meaningful. Central Asian cities were not merely service stations between China and Europe. They were intellectual and commercial centres in their own right. The larger Silk Road system connected Chinese, Iranian, Turkic, Indian, Arab and Mediterranean worlds. UNESCO describes precisely this kind of multidirectional exchange.

The mistake is imagining civilization as a relay race: China, then Persia, then Europe. It looked more like a network. Information moved both directions. And sideways. And sometimes returned centuries later transformed beyond recognition.

If Xi genuinely wants a historical metaphor for twenty-first-century civilization, the Silk Roads are actually a pretty good one. Not because China sat at their centre, but because there wasn’t really a single centre.

There is an uncomfortable modern echo in Xinjiang

And that brings us to the contradiction Xinhua doesn’t explore. One of the great historic crossroads of these networks was what is now Xinjiang. UNESCO’s description of Uyghur Muqam explicitly says that Xinjiang experienced extensive East-West cultural exchange because of its position along the Silk Road. Muqam itself incorporates poetry, song, dance, folk traditions and classical musical forms. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, having proclaimed it a Masterpiece three years earlier.

That is almost a perfect living embodiment of Xi’s argument. Civilizations meet. Cultures absorb influences. Something distinctive emerges.

But Xinjiang is simultaneously the location of one of the most serious international controversies surrounding contemporary China. The UN Human Rights Office’s assessment, published on 31 August 2022, concluded that serious human rights violations had been committed against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim communities, and found that the extent of arbitrary detention may amount to crimes against humanity. China rejects the assessment and categorically disputes its central allegations, saying its policies have addressed terrorism, extremism and poverty while protecting ethnic cultures. A fair account has to include both positions.

But here’s the philosophical difficulty. You cannot celebrate cultural diversity merely as museum heritage. Culture isn’t only music performed on a stage. It is grandparents teaching children. It is language spoken around the dinner table. It is religion, jokes, recipes, funeral customs, songs nobody wrote down, and stories people tell incorrectly because their grandmother told them incorrectly.

That messiness is culture. Preserving the costume while constraining the community that gives it meaning would not satisfy the philosophy Xi articulated at UNESCO. And this is exactly where his philosophy deserves to be judged by its own standard.

China knows what cultural destruction looks like

There is another historical reason China should understand this particularly well. During the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1966, Red Guards attacked the “Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas. Temples were damaged. Religious objects were destroyed. Books and historical materials disappeared. Intellectuals were persecuted. Tibetan monasteries were among institutions that suffered extensive destruction during the period, and modern reporting still notes that historical legacy.

China subsequently reversed much of this. Temples were restored, archaeological sites protected, traditional practices revived, museums expanded. China today possesses an enormous cultural-preservation apparatus.

That history creates an extraordinary lesson. A civilization can damage itself. You don’t need foreign invaders to destroy cultural heritage. Sometimes people become so certain about the future that they begin smashing their own past.

Nor does the West escape this examination

This cannot become another comfortable essay in which Western civilization sits in judgment over China. Europe has burned books. Christian powers destroyed indigenous religious traditions. Colonial governments suppressed languages. The United States operated boarding schools intended to assimilate Native American children. Australia’s Aboriginal children were removed from families under policies that produced what became known as the Stolen Generations. Britain built an empire that transported technologies, institutions and education while simultaneously exercising coercive political and economic power over enormous populations.

Civilizations are complicated because people are complicated. There is almost never a ledger containing only credits or only debits. And this is precisely why Xi’s warning against civilizational arrogance deserves consideration even by people deeply critical of his government.

Perhaps the greatest dialogue happened over dinner

Political histories focus naturally on presidents, emperors and treaties. But civilization probably spreads more effectively through kitchens. The tomato is American. Imagine Italian cuisine without it. Chilli peppers originated in the Americas. Imagine Sichuan cooking without them. Potatoes came from the Andes. Imagine Ireland without them.

Coffee’s early history leads through Ethiopia and Yemen before exploding across the Islamic world and Europe. Tea travelled from China and became so deeply embedded in British identity that generations of Britons effectively forgot that their national drink was an Asian import. Then Britain cultivated tea on an enormous scale in India. Portugal carried chillies into Asia. Spain transported American crops across the Pacific. Chinese porcelain transformed European tastes, after which Europeans spent generations trying to reproduce it.

Civilizations don’t merely exchange philosophies. They eat one another, and then insist several generations later that the resulting food is authentically their own. That may be the funniest evidence supporting Xi’s argument.

Figure 5 · Civilizations at dinner

The problem isn’t Xi’s philosophy

After putting all of this history around the Xinhua article, I arrive somewhere slightly different from simply dismissing “Xiplomacy” as propaganda. The fundamental idea is historically defensible. Xi says civilizations flourish by learning from one another; history says he’s right. Xi says no civilization possesses all wisdom; history says he’s right. Xi says pride and prejudice are the two biggest obstacles to exchange; again, history provides mountains of evidence.

But history adds an important footnote: governments don’t own civilizations. Xi Jinping doesn’t own Chinese civilization any more than Donald Trump owns American civilization, Keir Starmer owns British civilization or Emmanuel Macron owns French civilization.

Civilizations are much bigger than governments. They belong partly to the dead, partly to the living, and partly to generations that haven’t arrived yet.

The real lesson of Chichén Itzá

Which brings us back to that photograph. There stands the president of modern China beside the president of modern Mexico, contemplating stones laid down by people who could never have imagined either country.

The Maya who built Chichén Itzá are gone. Their civilization isn’t. Chinese emperors are gone. Chinese civilization isn’t. Rome fell; Greek civilization survived it. The British Empire largely disappeared; Shakespeare didn’t.

Governments are temporary. Civilizations are extraordinarily stubborn.

Perhaps that’s the historical perspective missing from “Xiplomacy.” The most important dialogue between civilizations isn’t actually conducted by presidents. It is conducted by Xuanzang carrying manuscripts home from India; Xu Guangqi translating Euclid with Matteo Ricci; an unknown Central Asian merchant carrying paper westward; an Arab navigator exchanging knowledge with sailors across the Indian Ocean; a Portuguese trader carrying an American chilli into Asia; a Chinese potter unknowingly changing European dining rooms; and some anonymous British worker eventually putting Chinese tea and Caribbean sugar into the same cup.

Nobody planned that civilization. Humanity assembled it accidentally: piece by piece, conversation by conversation, meal by meal, war by war, marriage by marriage, mistake by mistake, and occasionally with extraordinary flashes of curiosity.

That is why the most valuable sentence in Xinhua’s article may still be Xi’s warning that people must avoid “complacency and self-importance.” It applies beautifully to China. It applies equally well to the West.

And perhaps the best response to Xinhua’s “Xiplomacy” isn’t rejection. It is a challenge: make it reciprocal. If China asks the West to understand Chinese civilization rather than caricature it, the West should. If the West asks China to listen seriously to criticism about individual liberties and minority cultures, China should. If developing nations say Western models cannot simply be imposed wholesale upon societies with different histories, Western governments should listen. And when universal human dignity is threatened, “cultural difference” should not become a convenient excuse for any government, Eastern or Western.

Because after several thousand years of trade, migration, translation, conquest, intermarriage, invention, borrowing, stealing and adaptation, the historical record has already delivered its verdict. There isn’t a purely Chinese civilization. There isn’t a purely Western civilization. There isn’t even a completely isolated national culture.

There are distinctive civilizations, certainly. But beneath them runs an enormous tangled web of borrowed ideas. Civilization itself may be humanity’s longest-running collaborative project. And perhaps the most civilized thing we can still do is keep talking.