Ibn Khaldoun Was Right: China Read Him. The West Did Not.

Seven centuries ago, on the arid plains of the Maghreb, a Tunisian scholar named Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldoun laid the foundations of what would become, unbeknownst to the West for centuries, the first genuinely scientific theory of civilisational history. In his Muqaddima (Prolegomena), written in 1377, he forged a central concept: Assabiyya, that collective energy, that irreducible social cohesion which allows a human group to rise, to conquer, to build, and, ineluctably, to decline. Seven centuries later, as the West digests with considerable unease what is politely referred to as "China's rise," it struck me that this medieval concept offers a reading key of troubling relevance. Not to celebrate, nor to condemn, this is not about passing political judgment on the regime in Beijing, but to understand: how did a civilisation that certain Western intellectuals had rather hastily buried in the rubble of the nineteenth century manage, in less than two generations, to shake a world order that everyone assumed was carved in stone?

Assabiyya: Back to a Founding Concept

Before setting Ibn Khaldoun in dialogue with Deng Xiaoping, it is worth recalling the architecture of his argument. For the Tunisian thinker, Assabiyya is the driving force behind dynasties and civilisations. It is born first among groups living harsh lives, nomads or peasants, shaped by adversity and the sheer necessity of collective cooperation for survival. This group solidarity, this shared will to defend and to conquer, is what propels new societies toward power. Over time, however, success turns against itself: the settling into sedentary comfort, the fragmentation of elites into internal rivalries, the luxury that softens character and feeds individualism, all of this gradually erodes the original Assabiyya until a new group, more cohesive and more hungry, comes to overturn the established order. This is what Ibn Khaldoun calls the cycle of dynasties, a wheel that no empire, however glorious, has ever managed to stop.

What his thinking adds beyond the mere observation of cycles is crucial: Assabiyya is not simply a military force. It is the moral and social substrate upon which all economic prosperity rests. Ibn Khaldoun is unequivocal: when a sovereign protects his subjects' property, guarantees justice and encourages productive work, collective wealth grows, population increases, and the power of the state is multiplied. Conversely, fiscal injustice, elite predation and the discouragement of productive labour mark the beginning of the end. One will recognise in this reasoning, seven centuries old, something that prefigures both Tocqueville and the institutional economists Acemoglu and North. That is Ibn Khaldoun's genius: having understood, long before Weber and well before the institutionalists, that social cohesion and the quality of governance are first-order economic variables.

Forty Years of Prodigious Catch-Up

Back to China. The country that set out in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, to tear itself free from Maoist isolation was then one of the poorest nations on earth. Its GDP per capita was lower than Bangladesh's. Its share of world trade was negligible, below 1%. Its infrastructure was archaic, its economic institutions frozen in the rigidities of actually existing socialism.

In the space of four decades, the transformation has been of an amplitude that has no precedent in the whole of human history. China is today the world's second-largest economy in nominal terms and the first in purchasing power parity, according to the World Bank and the IMF. Its share of global exports rose from 1.5% in 1990 to over 12% by 2015, a trajectory that has not reversed since. It has become the leading trading partner of more than 130 countries, ahead of the United States. On poverty reduction, it has lifted some 800 million people out of destitution in half a century, an achievement the World Bank describes without hesitation as the greatest poverty reduction in history.

On the industrial front, China today produces more steel, cement and glass than the rest of the world combined. It is the world's leading producer of solar energy, electric vehicles and batteries. National champions such as Huawei, CATL, BYD and DJI have established themselves in cutting-edge technology markets. Its high-speed rail network exceeds in total length the entire fast rail networks of the European Union combined. Its ports, bridges and airports embody a mastery of large-scale engineering that commands respect even from its most declared adversaries.

The scientific catch-up is equally striking. In 2003, China barely registered in global research rankings. It is now the world's leading country by number of scientific publications, and its R&D spending has reached approximately 2.5% of GDP, surpassing several EU member states. Across fields as varied as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, quantum physics and space exploration, with its lunar programme and its own national space station, China has established itself as a serious technological competitor to the United States. Its "Made in China 2025" programme reflects a clearly articulated national ambition: no longer to be the world's low-cost workshop, but to become its laboratory.

Geopolitically and in terms of soft power, the ascent is equally spectacular, even if it meets greater resistance. The Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, has enabled Beijing to invest in the infrastructure of over 140 countries, weaving a network of economic influence that Paul Kennedy, in his analysis of hegemonic cycles, would doubtless have recognised as the hallmark of a rising power. China is now a permanent member of the UN Security Council, an influential player within the BRICS grouping, the United States' principal technological rival, and its yuan has begun, tentatively but measurably, to carve out a place in international transactions long dominated by the dollar.

Reading All This Through Ibn Khaldoun

What strikes one when reading the history of China's catch-up through the prism of the Muqaddima is the almost vertiginous correspondence between the theoretical model and empirical reality. Post-1978 Chinese Assabiyya displays several characteristics that the Tunisian philosopher would have identified immediately.

The first is the memory of humiliation as a driver of cohesion. Contemporary China is pervaded by what its intellectuals and leaders call "the century of humiliation," the long period of colonial and semi-colonial subjugation stretching from the Opium Wars (1839-1842) to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. This collective memory, carefully cultivated by the Communist Party, plays exactly the role Ibn Khaldoun attributes to shared adversity and necessity: it binds the group together, gives it a common reference point, and provides a direction toward which to concentrate its energy. "The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" is not merely a political slogan; it is a promise made to that collective memory, the narrative of an Assabiyya recovered.

The second correspondence is the central role of the state as architect of social and economic cohesion. Ibn Khaldoun, as we have seen, holds that just administration, meaning the sovereign's capacity to channel the productive energy of his subjects toward collective ends, is a decisive factor of power. China over these past four decades has practiced, in its singular and authoritarian version, a form of this governance oriented toward collective production. The state has invested massively in infrastructure, protected nascent industries, directed credit, disciplined foreign capital and channelled domestic savings toward productive investment. It is neither Manchester liberalism nor French dirigisme; it is something properly Khaldounian, the mobilisation of Assabiyya in the service of a civilisational project.

The third correspondence, perhaps the subtlest, concerns the role of what Ibn Khaldoun calls the federating elites. In his theory, the first generations of a dynasty in full ascent produce leaders capable of drawing on collective solidarity, channelling its energy and giving it direction. Deng Xiaoping, then Jiang Zemin, then Hu Jintao each embodied, in their own ways and with important distinctions, the figure of the leader who adapts political practice to the opportunities of the moment without breaking the thread of national cohesion. The technocratic generation that governed China from 1980 to 2010 also shares a characteristic that Jared Diamond or Paul Kennedy would not have missed: it was composed, in a remarkable proportion, of engineers and scientists trained in the disciplines of rigour. This is not incidental. There is in this an Assabiyya of merit, a cohesion of the governing class around shared competence and a common project, which contrasts sharply with the financialisation and professionalisation of politics that characterised, at the same moment, Western democracies.

The Limits of the Model and the Question That Now Presents Itself

This is not about presenting Ibn Khaldoun as an infallible prophet, nor about falling into naive fascination with a determinist model that history, in its irreducible complexity, takes pleasure in confounding. Contemporary China displays fault lines that the Tunisian thinker would not have failed to identify. The rise of a personality cult around Xi Jinping, the recentralisation of power, the progressive sidelining of internal checks within the Party, the crackdown on independent economic elites (Jack Ma being the most visible emblem): this is precisely what Ibn Khaldoun describes as Phase 2 of his cycle, the moment when the ruler, having consolidated his power, begins to undermine the foundations of Assabiyya by concentrating authority and eliminating his peers. Declining demography, the middle-income trap, dependence on foreign technology in the most advanced segments of microelectronics: all of these are challenges that could, in time, erode the social cohesion that forty years of spectacular catch-up have built.

Human history offers no example of immortal Assabiyya. Every civilisation that believed it had found the formula for its own permanence eventually collided with what Ibn Khaldoun described, with implacable lucidity, as the cyclical nature of human time.

The question before us, at the outset of this twenty-first century, is therefore not so much whether China will "win" its competition with the West, framing things that way reflects a binary mode of thought too shallow to be taken seriously. The real question, the one Ibn Khaldoun would ask were he among us, is this: is China still in its ascending phase of Assabiyya, or has it already begun to consume the social capital that its catch-up allowed it to accumulate? And, as a mirror image, will the West find within itself the resources for a renewed Assabiyya, or will it continue to squander its own?

No algorithm can answer those questions. But a Tunisian scholar of the fourteenth century had, seven hundred years ago, already identified the right terms of the problem.

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References and sources

Ibn Khaldoun, Muqaddima (Prolegomena to Universal History), 1377

Daron Acemoglu et James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Publishers, 2012.

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Random House, 1987.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, Penguin Press, 2009.

Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, PublicAffairs, 2020.

Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline, Other Press, 2016.

Peter Turchin, Secular Cycles, Princeton University Press, 2009.

Banque mondiale, China's Remarkable Economic Transformation: Lessons and Challenges. Annual reports on China's economic transformation (2000-2023)