Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Volume I. Second English Edition. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2018.

Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Volume II. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017.

Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Volume III. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2020.

Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Volume IV. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2022.

Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Volume V. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2025.

There are books that explain a government, and there are books that explain a civilisation. At first glance, The Governance of China appears firmly to belong in the first category. Across five substantial volumes, Xi Jinping discusses poverty alleviation, technological development, Party discipline, military reform, diplomacy, environmental policy, education, culture, and almost every other aspect of governing the People’s Republic. Published by the Chinese state and translated into numerous languages, these books are plainly intended to explain official policy to both domestic and foreign readers.

Before proceeding, however, I should express a mild irritation. Mr Bickley appears to regard me as his resident expert on China. The truth is less impressive. I have visited the country five times in my entire life. Three of those visits hardly count, as I was a child visiting my grandparents in Hong Kong. On the other two occasions, I spent a fortnight in Shanghai and three weeks in Beijing. My Cantonese is good enough to avoid offending elderly relatives. My Mandarin is sufficient for buying a bus ticket and discovering that the person behind the counter has understood only half of what I intended to say. Making sense of a political text that runs to seven hundred pages per volume and that is not only impenetrable in places, but in some respects intended to be impenetrable, is not a task for which I am ideally qualified.

Many Western reviewers solve this difficulty by dismissing The Governance of China as little more than propaganda. That is too easy. One can certainly object to the political assumptions behind these books, and I frequently shall. Yet they deserve to be read before they are condemned. Governments often reveal themselves most clearly not in what they conceal, but in what they repeat endlessly.

Volume V is particularly demanding. It is heavy reading in both English and Chinese. The prose is dense, formulaic, and saturated with repetitive ideological language, long compound sentences, and exhaustive catalogues of achievements, objectives, and responsibilities. Readers expecting the argumentative rhythm of an English essay or the narrative drive of a Western political memoir will find themselves disappointed. One can read several pages before encountering a sentence that lingers in the memory. This is not entirely Xi Jinping’s fault. Chinese political prose before 1949 could be remarkably elegant. I think of Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, or even Sun Yat-sen at his best. The leaden style of The Governance of China owes much less to Confucius than to Lenin. It is the inheritance of Soviet political culture. The Leninist-Maoist tradition of Central Committee reports, Party resolutions, and speeches to assembled comrades prizes doctrinal precision, institutional continuity, and collective authority above literary elegance or individual style. The individual disappears behind the institution. Style becomes subordinate to correctness.

Yet perseverance is rewarded. Beneath the official language lies a coherent historical vision that many Western readers fail to appreciate. These volumes are not merely collections of speeches explaining current policy. Nor are they simply attempts to justify the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party. They are, more fundamentally, an attempt to explain modern China to Chinese people, and perhaps to the world. Once that realisation takes hold, passages that initially seemed little more than bureaucratic repetition begin to fit together into a recognisable intellectual framework.

British readers should not flatter themselves that these books have little to do with us. Britain appears surprisingly often—not always by name, but always by implication. If the Century of Humiliation has a beginning, it begins with British cannon on the Pearl River. If Xi Jinping’s historical imagination has a defining event, it is not the Communist victory in 1949 but the humiliation that began more than a century earlier with the Opium Wars. Modern China still lives in the shadow of Britain’s greatest imperial triumph. What follows, then, is my best effort to understand how Xi Jinping sees that history.

Certainly, these are political books. Xi writes as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, not as a detached historian. He defends his government with predictable confidence and seldom pauses over its failures. Yet to stop there is to miss what makes the volumes interesting. Running beneath discussions of economics, diplomacy, military reform, education, technology and Party discipline is something much older than Communism. Xi is attempting to answer a question that has haunted China for nearly two centuries: how did one of the world’s oldest civilisations become so weak that foreign powers could dictate its future?

The answer, for Xi, is not merely historical. It defines the entire purpose of modern China. Again and again he returns to what Chinese people call 中华民族伟大复兴—the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

实现中华民族伟大复兴，就是中华民族近代以来最伟大的梦想。

“Realising the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in modern times.”

This is probably the single most important sentence Xi Jinping has written. It appears so frequently that one almost stops noticing it. Yet every volume ultimately circles back to this idea. Poverty alleviation, military modernisation, technological independence, educational reform, anti-corruption campaigns, semiconductor production, artificial intelligence, ecological policy, financial reform, and even cultural revival are not presented as isolated programmes. They are all components of one larger project: ensuring that China can never again be humiliated by stronger foreign powers.

Western readers often assume that the Chinese Communist Party governs through Marxism. Having worked through these volumes, I am no longer convinced that Marxism is the central organising principle. Lenin supplies the institutional framework. Marx provides an economic vocabulary. The emotional core of Xi’s thought is something much older and much deeper. It is memory.

History, Xi repeatedly insists, is not an academic subject but a practical guide.

历史是最好的教科书。

“History is the best textbook.”

Elsewhere he writes:

不忘历史，才能开辟未来。

“Only by not forgetting history can we open the future.”

To many British readers such language may sound theatrical. Politicians everywhere claim to learn from history. Xi means something more literal. Throughout these volumes the nineteenth century is treated not as distant history but as living experience. The Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the destruction of the Summer Palace, the foreign concessions, the Boxer indemnities, and the Japanese invasion are not isolated episodes but chapters in one continuous narrative known to every Chinese schoolchild as the 百年国耻—the Century of National Humiliation.

This historical consciousness can be difficult for Britons to appreciate because we remember the same events very differently. For Britain, the First Opium War occupies relatively little space in popular memory. Schoolchildren may encounter it briefly as one imperial conflict among many. Even educated people often know little more than that Britain fought China over trade and acquired Hong Kong. It is a regrettable episode, perhaps, but hardly one that shapes British national identity. For China, it is the beginning of modern history. That asymmetry matters. One nation largely forgot. The other built an entire political philosophy on remembering. It is impossible to understand Xi Jinping without recognising this difference.

The Opium Wars were not merely military defeats. They represented the collapse of an entire worldview. For centuries China had regarded itself as 中国—the Middle Kingdom—the civilised centre around which lesser peoples revolved. European merchants were tolerated because they wished to trade with China, not because China required anything from them. The Qianlong Emperor’s famous reply to George III expressed this confidence without embarrassment:

“We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious.”

Within fifty years that confidence had disintegrated. Steam-powered gunboats demonstrated that industrial Britain possessed military capabilities beyond anything the Qing dynasty could imagine. Ports were opened by force. Territory was surrendered. Extraterritorial rights placed foreigners beyond Chinese law. The imperial government found itself unable to defend either its sovereignty or its dignity. As later defeats accumulated—the Second Opium War, the defeat by Japan, and the Boxer Protocol—the lesson became increasingly brutal.

Xi often summarises that lesson in six simple characters.

落后就要挨打。

Literally translated, the phrase means, “If you fall behind, you will be beaten.”

To Western ears it sounds almost like a proverb. In China it functions more as a national diagnosis. Military weakness, technological backwardness, economic dependence, and political division are not merely unfortunate conditions. They invite aggression. The world, Xi assumes, is not organised around goodwill but around power. Nations unable to defend themselves eventually discover that others will make decisions on their behalf. Everything else in these five volumes follows from that diagnosis. And this is where British readers should become uncomfortable.

It is easy to dismiss Xi’s conclusions. One may object, with good reason, to censorship, political repression, the treatment of dissidents, or the Party’s pervasive control over Chinese society. I have no wish to minimise those concerns. Yet disagreement should not prevent understanding. Before asking whether Xi’s remedies are justified, we should first ask whether his diagnosis contains any truth. After all, Britain itself once understood history in remarkably similar terms. Nineteenth-century Britain did not become wealthy through self-reproach. It believed in scientific progress, commercial freedom, industrial innovation, and institutional confidence. It also had grave social problems, deep inequalities, and periods of imperial overreach. It was hardly a utopia. Nevertheless, it possessed an extraordinary confidence in its own capacity to solve problems through industry, education, and technological advance.

Whether Britain has now lost that confidence is a question upon which reasonable people may disagree. Yet one cannot read Xi Jinping for very long without wondering whether China now studies Britain’s rise with greater seriousness than Britain studies either its own rise or its subsequent decline. There is an irony here that neither side always recognises. Xi Jinping’s China has probably reflected more deeply upon Victorian Britain than modern Britain has reflected upon itself.

That, perhaps, is the real reason these books deserve to be read. They are not enjoyable books. They are repetitively dull and unapologetically ideological. They are often frustrating and occasionally unreadable in either language. Yet they offer the clearest available statement of how China’s present leadership understands its own history and what it believes must be done to prevent that history from repeating itself.

For Britain, which played such a decisive role in creating the Century of Humiliation, and, as a response to this, the rise of modern China, they are also an unexpected mirror. They invite us to ask not only how China became weak, but how Britain became strong—and whether we still possess the qualities that once made us worthy of such careful study.