Li Xintong: An Analysis and Critique of the Dilemmas facing British Neo-Marxist Cultural Studies
The roadmap of British New Marxist cultural studies follows a trajectory of research paradigms from culturalism to structuralism, and subsequently to cultural hegemony and articulation theory. Regardless of the specific system of thought, all aimed to resolve the problem of cultural "reflectionism" (fǎnyìnglùn). So-called "reflectionism" treats the developmental state of the productive forces as the basis for examining all social issues, while relegating all other aspects—including culture—to the superstructure, viewing them as reflections of the economic base and regarding the economic base as an absolute existence. This article will track and evaluate the intellectual course of British New Marxist cultural studies from a critical perspective, attempting to reveal its theoretical dilemmas and the causes underlying them.
I. The Paradigms of British New Marxist Cultural Studies
(i) The Culturalist Research Paradigm
To resist both indigenous British elite culturalism and the vulgar reductionism of Marxism within the Second International, a British New Marxist culturalist research paradigm emerged in British academia, represented by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson. The theoretical characteristics of culturalism are, first, the situating of cultural studies within the concrete context of Britain, and second, the study of culture as a whole. That is to say, the theoretical foothold of the culturalist research paradigm lay in breaking the mechanical determinism between the economic base and the superstructure, bursting through the "reflectionist" thought that treated culture as purely material residue.
Culturalism emphasizes the liberating power of culture and the subjective agency and creativity of human beings, even suggesting that culture is a force that plays a certain governing role in social development. For instance, Williams argued that the creative factor in humanity is the root of both individual personality and external society; it can neither be restricted by art nor excluded by systems of political decision-making and economic life. Similarly, Thompson pointed out that culture is "an active process—the process by which men make their own history." Methodologically, culturalism emphasizes the importance of concrete, objective, and empirical description. For example, in Culture and Society, Williams directly selected elements such as industry, democracy, class, art, and culture, linking them directly with history, life, and experience to conduct cultural analysis, thereby forming a historical and empirical culturalist research paradigm. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson also conducted a detailed examination of the wages, labor, living standards, leisure, and entertainment of the British working class from 1780 to 1832, concluding that the formation of the working class was not only a fact of economic history but also a fact of political and cultural history. Culturalism adheres to the principle of cultural materialism—that is, the identity of cultural forms with material life—and takes "meaning" as its core category, viewing it as the product of human cultural activity within social life. In The Long Revolution, Williams viewed "culture" as "the sum of all the descriptions of different societies, descriptions which enable societies to gain meaning and reflect their common experiences." Later, Williams endowed culture with a second level of meaning, exploring the relationship between culture and practice, arguing that "culture is a whole way of life." In this way, the concept of culture was expanded, exceeding the "determinist" orientation of traditional historical materialism to penetrate all social practices and become the sum of "relationships," thus being defined as "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life." Later, although Stuart Hall criticized culturalism’s erroneous tendency to overemphasize experience, reduce practice to cultural experience, and essentialize experience, he nevertheless employed this research paradigm in his early cultural studies, particularly in The Popular Arts.
In short, culturalist scholars attempted to "grasp the way in which all practices and social forms interact as a whole empirical existence in a specific era" through the relationships between social elements, granting culture (consciousness and experience) a central position, championing human subjectivity, and valuing experience, thus manifesting the humanist stance of culturalism.
(ii) The Structuralist Research Paradigm
The structuralist paradigm of cultural studies developed against the backdrop of introducing intellectual resources from Continental European Marxism. Its characteristics are primarily manifested in the following aspects. First, structuralist cultural studies relied on the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure to challenge reflectionism, arguing that humans speak through "structures." Consequently, this research is based on the systemic characteristics of "structure," emphasizing the problem of unity (the "whole") within complex structures constructed through difference. Second, structuralism holds that culture is a realm of creation; it is precisely through culture that social reality can be produced, constructed, and interpreted. Furthermore, the constitutive relationships within the system serve as the "grammar" where meaning is generated; ideology, as a conceptual framework, shapes our lives and essences. Third, structuralism opposes culturalism's emphasis on "experience," arguing that people exist within cultural categories, classifications, and frameworks, living and experiencing their own conditions of existence through culture; experience is nothing more than the result of constructed cultural ideology.
Leading figures of the structuralist paradigm exhibited the aforementioned characteristics from different angles in their cultural studies. Perry Anderson, on the one hand, paid immense attention to the independence of the superstructure, while on the other hand, he followed traditional Marxism’s emphasis on the determining role of the economic base. Terry Eagleton completed the structuralist transformation of cultural theory through the linguistic turn in cultural studies. Hall shifted his cultural research from the "meaning" of human activity to the "signification" of linguistic operations, thereby exploring the essence of language and the meaning of cultural production. He identified with the idea that linguistic systems precede and determine "reality," arguing that discourse is not a "transparent presentation of 'reality,' but rather the construction of knowledge through 'symbolic operations,'" subsequently emphasizing the specificity and irreducibility of culture. At the same time, Hall believed that ideology is a system for generating meaning that defines the practical rules of society.
In short, structuralism provided an original interpretation of the concept of ideology, causing cultural studies to revolve largely around ideology. Moreover, relative to the culturalist view that "culture is the expression of lived experience," structuralism argued that culture is the prerequisite for generating experience and the foundation of our consciousness and experience, "thereby completing the decentralization of experience and culture."
(iii) The Hegemony and Articulation Theory Paradigm
The culturalist and structuralist paradigms' understandings of "culture" and "ideology" were both intertwined and antithetical, finally achieving "transcendence" through Antonio Gramsci’s idea of "cultural hegemony." Gramsci's "hegemony" introduced factors of power and ideological struggle into the "whole life" of culturalist research, while also correcting the anti-historical abstract forms of structuralism. Gramsci elucidated the operational mechanism of dominant ideology within mass cultural practice, arguing that it incorporates the control of consent to manipulate "intellectual and moral hegemony"—that is, through mass cultural practice, ideology becomes a form of "common sense" and is subsequently accepted by the subaltern classes. Therefore, in Gramsci’s view, popular culture is a balanced product of "negotiation" between the ruling and the ruled classes for their "common" interests. It is neither the expression of the authentic interests of the ruled class from the bottom up (as culturalists believed), nor is it simply burdened with the dominant ideology of the ruling class (as structuralists believed). Furthermore, the process of ideological consent is necessarily filled with negotiation and struggle. Simultaneously, Gramsci’s idea regarding the active "consumption of cultural commodities" restored the subject that was missing in the structuralist paradigm. In summary, Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony proposed a new way of understanding popular culture within the dialectical relationship between structure and agency, production and consumption, and resistance and incorporation.
Similarly, Williams' cultural studies underwent self-correction, moving from a pure emphasis on subjective agency to directly facing dominance and subordination within culture, as well as the struggles, negotiations, and compromises between them. He subsequently extended the structuralist understanding of ideology to all social consciousness. Furthermore, based on hegemony theory, Williams re-interpreted every term in the metaphorical proposition of "base-superstructure" and the relationships between them, arguing that the "base" is a dynamic process of development containing all concrete activities carried out by individuals and classes, even including struggle and negotiation. Thus, emerging forces—as the subjects of individuals or social groups—carrying unrealized desires and demands, also exert their own influence.
Hall likewise creatively applied Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony and excavated Ernesto Laclau’s theory of articulation—the idea that "if we call any practice that establishes a link between elements an 'articulation,' then the identity of the elements is defined as the result of the articulatory practice"—thereby guiding British cultural studies Toward articulation theory. Hall believed that correlations exist between different elements within an ideology; they inevitably aggregate and move or change in a cooperative manner. The identity of an ideology is the result of articulatory practice, formed by the combination of different elements into a discourse of "identity in difference." Formal differences and the recombination of various elements can destroy existing meanings and create new ones: "One of the ways ideological struggle occurs and transforms is by articulating elements in different ways to produce different meanings: breaking the current fixed chain of meaning." Hall also developed the idea of "autonomy" within structure through the theories of Louis Althusser, Gramsci, Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. He "superimposed the autonomous signifying system of structuralism with the autonomous signifying subject of culturalism, while retaining the 'economic' autonomy inherited from economistic Marxism and bourgeois economics." To Hall, only when ideology and free, conscious subjects correspond with each other can they be "hailed" (interpellated) by ideology. In this way, the question of ideology is given dynamic consideration. Because elements can be re-articulated in different ways, there is always a fluid process of dis-articulation, articulation, and re-articulation; meaning is generated within this dynamic process. However, Hall also emphasized that articulation is not an arbitrary linkage of any forces, but a union carried out in a specific context through "structured" relations (relations of dominance and subordination). Thus, articulation theory opened up research space for identity, representation, the politics of difference, and other theories.
II. The Original Dilemmas of British New Marxist Cultural Studies
From the three paradigms of British New Marxist cultural studies, we see that all have elucidated core issues of cultural research while exhibiting distinct practical characteristics. However, we also see that the first two paradigms—the culturalist paradigm and the structuralist paradigm—are intertwined with numerous problems and have fallen into an "either-or" paradox. Even when the theory of articulation [6], represented later by Stuart Hall, attempted to rescue them from this predicament, it failed to escape the mire of antinomy.
Specifically, the culturalist argument is as follows: the experiential life of human beings produces meaning; culture, as a result, possesses a generative quality and serves as the prerequisite for ideology. Furthermore, as a mode of social organization, culture permeates all practices within society; it is a living tradition "through which those 'understandings' (of existence) are expressed and manifested." Thus, culturalism emphasizes the concreteness of experience, complexity, and subjective agency. In its view, new elements that produce and manifest the meaning of human existence and originate from experiential practice are absorbed into culture, all of which are grounded in the manifestation of human agentic power.
On the other hand, while structuralism similarly views culture as meaning, this meaning is an objective system of signs that precedes and determines individual experience—that is, "signification" [7]. Structuralism holds that the constitutive relations within a system are the linguistic syntax through which meaning is produced. It accords "ideology" a prior status, arguing that experience is merely the result of constructed cultural ideology; experience is not the cause of meaning, but its effect. Structuralism reduces the subject to the uniqueness of a specific structure, such that human purpose, planning, consciousness, and reason are suppressed by and subordinated to the ideological framework.
From this, it is evident that, on one hand, the humanist tendency of culturalists stands in necessary opposition to the anti-humanist tendency of structuralists. On the other hand, culturalism’s understanding of historical materialism as a temporal process stands in necessary opposition to structuralism’s understanding of historical materialism as spatial fixity. This is the confrontation between the logic of history (man as the active agent creating his history) and the logic of structure (man as the recipient who speaks and is situated by his structure).
Although Hall later attempted to unify culturalism and structuralism—inheriting the culturalist idea that "meaning" is the response of social subjects to their conditions of existence, while agreeing with the structuralist idea that ideology forges the relational structure of various elements to construct the meaning of the social subject—the "articulation" ultimately became neither fish nor fowl because the two were inherently incompatible. This is because structuralist theory lies in the principle of construction; elements themselves have no substantive meaning, and only present themselves when the structure places them in relation to one another. Therefore, the conclusion that the subject can reorganize elements to produce different meanings is absurd.
We discover here many issues that remain unclear. For example, culturalism emphasizes human agentic power, but how does it represent the fact that humans are limited by objective matter? The loophole of suspending the question of the economic base or declaring the "autonomy" of the economy in order to extol the agency of the superstructure, such as culture, cannot, after all, withstand scrutiny. Furthermore, in order to critique mechanical materialism and reflection theory [8], culturalism emphasizes the relations between elements; but is this interaction situated between different elements already separated into economic base and superstructure, or is it an interaction between all social elements that breaks the framework of historical materialism? Culturalism provides no answer to this.
In fact, all these disagreements revolve around an original predicament: how to understand the relationship between the economic base and the superstructure, and how to define the culture associated with them. People have tried to interpret this in various ways, but they remain confused, narrowed, and constrained by a series of concepts and their mutual relations within historical materialist theory, such as "base" and "superstructure," or "determination" and "reflection." Facing the narrow interpretation of "economic fatalism," British New Marxist scholars took their stand in the realm of culture, emphasizing the meaning of culture, even at the cost of breaking the boundaries between base and superstructure—either integrating society through culture, viewing culture as a realm for producing and experiencing meaning, or constructing an articulation between forms such as the economic, political, and cultural through the generation of ideological discourse.
Raymond Williams re-evaluated Marxism, intending to break through the images of the "base" as fixed and abstract, and the image of culture as a determined reflection or representation. He advocated for a practical, real-world orientation for the "base," attempting to construct the content of the superstructure through cultural practice. By shifting the elements of historical materialism from a spatial architecture to a temporal horizon, Williams released the static arrangement of these elements into a dispersed, dynamic process. "We have to re-evaluate 'determination' as the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, and away from a predictable and controllable content; we have to re-evaluate 'superstructure' as a related range of cultural practices, and away from a reflected, reproduced or specifically dependent content; and, most crucially, we have to re-evaluate 'the base' away from a fixed economic or technological abstraction, and toward the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships." In Williams’s reconstruction, the "base" is no longer a state, but a process; society is no longer a determined structure, but a constitutive process mediated by practice.
Terry Eagleton, conversely, explains the historical role of culture within the framework of the economic base and superstructure. In his view, the historical role of culture can only be rationally explained within this framework. When the economic base is underdeveloped and material scarcity exists, culture can only be subordinate to the superstructure, functioning as a supporter of ideology. Only when the economic base is sufficiently developed can culture achieve autonomy, thereby making it possible to transcend ideology and possess the capacity to change the world. By the time of communism, where material wealth is in great abundance, the constraints of the economic base on the superstructure are torn asunder, culture becomes dominant, and people will rely on cultural life to a much greater extent.
Stuart Hall, however, turned toward Post-Marxism, arguing that the political, economic, social, and cultural constitute the "engines" of modern society, among which no single element is granted priority. He believed that the pluralization of key concepts marks intellectual progress. Both culturalism and structuralism questioned the metaphor of base and superstructure found in Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, focusing instead on the counter-effects of the superstructure and treating culture as a prerequisite, thereby transcending the referential language of base and superstructure.
Regarding this, Hall argued that merely replacing the oscillation between "reductionism" (including "reflectionism") and "idealism" was insufficient; cultural studies must turn toward the specific characteristics of different practices and the form of the articulated whole they compose—that is, "the form of the explained unity of a composition" of different practices. Hall intended to use Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the articulation theory of Laclau and Mouffe to combine the two paradigms of culturalism and structuralism, unifying the historical logic of culturalism with the structural logic (logic of thought) and proposing a rethinking of the relationship between society, economy, and culture.
However, Hall's so-called "transcendence" was merely a superposition of the two aforementioned paradigms, and discussed the "identity of difference" between elements only within ideology. That is to say, Hall attempted to move from "a lingering connection with a modified version of the 'base and superstructure' binary metaphor toward a total theoretical turn toward a radical concept of ideological discursive power." Moreover, Hall’s reconstruction of cultural studies (granting culture a higher explanatory status and viewing it not merely as a reflection of social life but as a constitutive element of the modern world and an element of economic, political, or social change) eventually drifted away from Marxist political economy and moved toward Post-Marxism—that is, a turn toward the political and cultural realms exploring "the relationship between the social and the symbolic, and the 'play' of power and culture." Ultimately, he treated culture as the signifier of social life (the production of social meaning) as a necessary condition for the functioning of all social practices, thereby departing from the Marxist research paradigm.
I contend that the superiority of historical materialism lies in its reflection on social relations, and the dialectical relationship between matter and consciousness is precisely the foundational issue of cultural studies. This is because culture can only be produced when human beings engage in specific practical activities within a certain historical background and set of social relations. Furthermore, whether products of the economic realm (non-cultural) or products of the superstructure (cultural), both are the materialization of human practical activity and the "common labor products" of the objectifying activity of the human cultural essence. As Colin Sparks pointed out, one cannot avoid or depart from the question of the relationship between "the mode of production and civil society and cultural forms" and that of "civil society and culture itself."
If cultural studies separates the economy, civil society, and culture, it will inevitably lose its criticality. Society is a dynamic and conflictual system of social relations, and an object of resources, fields, and significations. If one only proceeds from Althusser’s structuralist Marxism to criticize historical materialism, how is the autonomous production of cultural practice—detached from other practical activities—even possible? Cultural studies must be both historical and synchronic research, and this necessarily cannot be detached from historical materialism.
The various problems mentioned above require us to trace the roots of these ideological divergences, return to historical materialism, and clarify the position of culture within it. To this end, we must answer the following: In historical materialism, does culture exist only in the realm of the superstructure above the economic base? Does the principle that "the economic base determines the superstructure" signify the passivity of culture? Is there a more ontological understanding of culture hidden in Marx’s thought? In what sense exactly did Marx discuss culture? Can we break through the many misinterpretations of "the economic base determines the superstructure" to allow culture to emerge from its cocoon and move actively? Can we, in turn, analyze Marx’s historical materialism through his view of culture? Is the historical materialism it contains a single-level understanding, or an interlacing of multiple problematics? If practice is the core of Marxist philosophy, can we re-examine the connotations of historical materialism and culture based on a broad sense of "practice"? Furthermore, facing the two paradigms of structuralist cultural ideology and culturalist experiential meaning—or the dichotomy between abstraction and anti-abstraction, rationalism and empiricism—can we find or deduce from Marx’s thought a brand-new concept of culture and its corresponding interpretive mode? This would encompass the many definitions of culture, making cultural studies clearer, more definite, and grounded in sufficient theoretical evidence, while maintaining the unity of the logic of theoretical thinking and the logic of historical process.
III. The Epochal Dilemma of Cultural Studies
British New Marxism expanded Marx’s thought in cultural studies and elucidated various issues to varying degrees. However, in addition to facing the original predicament of cultural studies, British New Marxism must also confront epochal issues—the identity and openness of culture. They remain in an "either-or" dilemma between structuralism and culturalism.
For structuralism, each element in an interdependent structure must submit to a totalizing pattern and maintain consistency with norms—the so-called "identity" (rendong). That is to say, the ideological characteristics and the "closure" of the structure manifest the necessary rationality of identity. For culturalism, the openness of experience resists structure, and subsequently resists consistency with the normative totality—that is, it resists identity. Moreover, the opposition between the internal and external elements of a system is the opposition between certainty and uncertainty, which brings the focus of the problem back to the contradiction between cultural identity and openness.
If one follows the structuralist paradigm, cultural identity is often understood as a "belonging" that is obtained without the need for struggle, striving, or defense. This belonging is limited to a local world, and thinking belongs to a totalized social consciousness that has been ideologized. Of course, this understanding actually statisizes and narrows the meaning of cultural identity. According to the culturalist paradigm, culture should possess openness; cultural choice is an open question, and the cultural choices permeating all social life have priority. Therefore, culturalism emphasizes openness, which keeps cultural elements in a state of constant flux, rendering cultural identity a mere name without substance.
If structuralism and culturalism remain trapped in an either-or dilemma regarding the issues of cultural identity and openness (which is, in fact, a continuation of their original dilemma), this only serves to demonstrate the inherent narrowness of their theories. In reality, as a profoundly important cultural fact in the contemporary era that demands deep reflection, the true connotation of cultural identity must be expanded. The fluidity of modernity itself necessarily shatters traditional understandings of cultural identity, because "modernity is also an era that transcends local totalities, an era that seeks the aid of power or yearns for 'imagined communities' [9], an era of nation-building and of composing, assuming, and constructing cultural identity." If different nations and races are like containers that organize culture, endowed with different contents and forms within different socio-cultural systems, then identity manifests as "belonging." It requires a convergence of boundaries derived from the national cultural tradition—that is, a top-down cohesion. Moreover, it is precisely the cultural boundaries of a nation that determine the boundaries of community members or groups; it is an identity of holistic characteristics or uniqueness, such as the identification with one's own national cultural tradition. As a cognitive existence, it governs the spiritual and practical activities of the individual, as well as the possible scope within which these activities can unfold. Rules participate in the social structure; thus, they necessarily appear before the individual as a priori laws. Within this, the individual’s identity endows the self with meaning, and social identity guarantees a sense of security, because the individual is included, accepted, and self-confirmed. It is only within the community and its consensus on values that "we" come into being. Meanwhile, the openness of cultural choice manifests as the fluidity of social interaction, which still needs to be continuously absorbed into the "structure" to become a dynamic element of cultural identity.
Does cultural belonging, then, exist only within a locally restricted world? Can cultural identity not maintain a balance within the tension between belonging and openness? In this sense, Stuart Hall endowed cultural identity with a broader meaning, suggesting a distinction between a "naturalistic" and a "discursive" understanding of the process of identification. This was undoubtedly an attempt to unify culturalism and structuralism and constitutes a relatively wise reading of cultural identity. He interpreted the "naturalistic" understanding as: "Identity is established on the basis of recognizing common origins or shared characteristics with others or groups, or an idea, or the natural boundaries of solidarity and alliance established on this basis." He interpreted the "discursive" understanding as: "Identity is a construction, a process never completed—always 'in process.' It is not 'determined' in the sense that it can always be 'won' or 'lost,' retained or abandoned." Zygmunt Bauman argued that it is precisely this second understanding that grasps the true characteristics of the contemporary identification process.
Therefore, cultural identity in a broad sense lies in the dialectical tension between top and bottom, inside and outside—that is, the dialectical relationship between the top-down norms of ideology and the bottom-up cultural choices of the masses, as well as the dialectical relationship between a relatively stable totality of internal value norms and the dialogical integration of external elements. It is precisely within tension that vitality and freshness exist; only in this way can culture avoid becoming inert to the point of eventual extinction. According to structuralist theory, elements within a system are interrelated and interact with one another; every element depends on all others, and elements must submit to the pattern of the whole to maintain equilibrium. The possible range of movement for any element must remain within the limits determined by the network of interdependence and be restricted within a constrained, bounded system. Consequently, when facing problems of identity or assimilation, a "one-way street" emerges that simply submits to the structural whole, because external factors can only enter the process of assimilation—and subsequently integrate—on the premise of submitting to the holistic norms. In such cases, the assimilation of external factors is, for the system (the holistic cultural imagery), nothing more than a deepening of its degree of self-confirmation.
To resolve the contemporary social issue of cultural identity, one must first break the simplified and solidified framework of structuralism and understand structure as an open "field" (yu)—and this structure-as-field is a "dashed line." That is to say, the changes in the separation and aggregation of social entities are both bounded and boundless; it is not a closed system but manifests openness and totality, possessing generative significance. This is also Jacques Derrida's perception of structure: "Values and meanings are reconstructed and awakened in their proper historicity and temporality." Thus, "identity in the broad sense" manifests as the fusion and unity of historical succession and the openness of the era. While maintaining a certain stability, it establishes a non-stable pattern, where the distinction between the internal and external of socio-cultural entities is merely determined by the speed of fusion. In this era of construction, separation, and reconstruction, it is the unceasing "liquidity" that is at work—what Bauman described as "the role played by time, space, and those means that place us in the formation, instability (or flexibility), and final disappearance of social/cultural and political totalities." Furthermore, culture is a structure composed of many choices; it is "a matrix composed of a numerically finite but practically incalculable number of permutations." Structure (the field) should not be a cage, but rather an elastic, endless generation. Only in this way can culture be creatively combined with the subject. This structure (field) implies an openness to unfinished infinite meaning, an evaluative and discerning demand for openness toward change. It is constructed through discourses, practices, and positions that are both intertwined and mutually opposed: top-down and bottom-up, from the historical to the modern, and from historicity to synchronicity.
In summary, British New Marxist cultural studies underwent a shift in research paradigms from culturalism to structuralism, and then to cultural hegemony and articulation theory. Culturalism and structuralism unfolded discussions on culture and the "non-cultural," and on culture and social totality, through different practical characteristics to expose the problem of reflectionism [10]. However, in Hall’s view, the core issue was the integrated form of the "articulation" between culturalism and structuralism. Yet, because Hall’s "articulation" remained unable to clarify the relationship between the economic, social, and cultural, it was fundamentally impossible to merge these two originally parallel and confronting paradigms into one. By the 1990s, British New Marxist cultural studies further attempted to use "autonomy" to oppose "reflectionism"; however, this produced a rupture with the Marxist problematique. That is, it developed from the relative autonomy of the superstructure (culture) over the economic base (the non-cultural) into a singular autonomy of the economic, while historical necessity surrendered before contingency. At this point, reflection on historical materialism was completely suspended. This article contends that it is only meaningful to explore culture within the horizon of historical materialism—within social relations and historical reality. Only on this basis, through continuous cultural practice, can we adopt the proper attitude toward the issues of cultural identity and openness in today’s world.
Facing the individualism, the "law of the jungle," and the ecological crises caused by the instrumental rationality of Western modernity, the sustainable development of human culture is being constrained. The beautiful future promised by the spirit of human culture is becoming increasingly blurred, and Western cultural values will inevitably lose their core status. In contrast, while building on a consensus of values, socialism with Chinese characteristics both continues the traditions of Chinese civilization, forming the "belonging" of the Chinese nation, and incorporates an open choice of Marxism and the borrowing of other cultures. This has formed an open cultural space capable of harmonious dialogue and mutual consultation.