Fighting the many smoke-less wars : a comparative study of the origins, conceptualizations and practices of cultural security in China and Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Why are China and Saudi Arabia embracing the concept of ‘cultural security’ in a simultaneous, comparable yet independent manner since the late 1990s? Does this embrace tell us anything about the nature of their political regimes? What are the origins of cultural security? How is it conceptualised and actualised in practice by the state? The dissertation explores these various questions through a qualitative comparative study of cultural security discourse and practice. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Riyadh in 2017-2018 and over 697 Chinese and Arabic-language primary sources, the dissertation investigates the historical evolution of the concept in the Chinese and Saudi intellectuals contexts, its institutionalisation by the state, and the underlying reasons and structural forces that led to the production of similar discursive and actualised practical outcomes in environments that are seemingly incomparable The study argues that the embrace of cultural security by the Chinese and Saudi states arises from the interaction of three critical variables influencing each of these political regimes: (i) their inheritance of a pre-existing holistic and coherent view of culture informed, in large part, by the ‘colonial encounter’ with the West; (ii) the ideocratic-type of these political regimes; and (iii) the intellectual zeitgeist or ‘historic moment’ of the post-Cold War 1990s which saw the spread of new ideological threats to these political regimes on the one hand, and the popularisation of a new language regarding culture and security on the other. The embrace reflects the incorporation of a new language to describe a pre-existing or inherited view and approach to culture, defined by state-led management and securitisation, that is itself congruent with the tendencies of these ideocratic-type political regimes and more suitable for dealing with the ideological challenges of the current era, such as the threat posed by (Western) liberal democracy and political or jihadist Islamism. The study, which is the first comparative political work examining the Chinese and Saudi political regimes in juxtaposition to one another, contributes to the fields of area and comparative studies in three ways. First, it sheds light on historical structures and processes that led to the formation of similar views and approaches to culture in the Chinese and Arabic discursive traditions. Second, it contributes to the existing literature on cultural security by examining various previously neglected aspects of the concept, including its distinct Chinese and Saudi Arabic-language conceptualisations as well as its actualised state-level practices as filtered through two cross-national case studies. Finally, the study posits a fundamental point of comparison between China and Saudi Arabia on the basis of their ideocratic political regime type which offers an explanation for their production of similar, simultaneous yet independent discourses and practices of cultural security. This study ‘de-exceptionalises’ the two states and supplies new ways of understanding their comparable political processes and behaviours, in this particular instance, the discursive and practical expressions of cultural security, with reference to a common logic of ideocracy.