By Phar Kim Beng, PhD

China’s economic future lies in more trade and exchange with the Global South. But such ties must be underpinned by deeper cultural understandings to be sustainable.

Hence, President Xi Jinping, shortly before his recent visit to Malaysia, said that China stands ready to promote “Confucian-Islamic Civilisational Dialogue”.

On 15 April 2025, Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim hosted an international symposium on Confucian-Islamic dialogue in Kuala Lumpur where both of us discussed ways to deepen this dialogue.

Here’s what we said. Prior to the twenty-first century, inter-civilisational “dialogue” often took the form of religious or political missionaries from the West engaging with the rest of the world for the purpose of converting them to Western ways.

Such approaches are no longer viable in a multi-polar world with no one civilisation that serves as the beacon for less-than-civilised others.

More Productive Exchanges

Hence, inter-civilisational dialogues need to take more respectful forms. They should aim to promote mutual understanding so as to deepen knowledge of similarities and differences and allow for respect of the other. They should also aim for mutual improvement, so that interlocutors learn from each other and generate new insights from the encounter.

If the interlocutors draw on thinkers from different times and places, the exchanges can be more productive if they were trying to answer similar questions and if those answers are still relevant today.

Hence, we chose to compare the ancient Confucian thinker Xunzi (c. 3rd century BCE), who was writing in the Warring States period before China was unified under the self-proclaimed First Emperor, and the ancient Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun (c. 14th century CE), who was writing in North Africa in what can be termed the “Warring Tribes” period.

Both thinkers were writing in times of global disorder and chaos and both were preoccupied with the question of how to promote communal solidarity in such times.

Today, we also live in times of global disorder and we face a similar question, and we can learn from the answers of both thinkers.

Political Realists

Xunzi argued for a society built on Confucian foundations and Ibn Khaldun for a society built on Islamic foundations. But both thinkers were political realists in the sense that they recognised the difficulty of realising their ideals in times of chaos and they proposed realistic mechanisms for improvement in less-than-ideal times.

Xunzi, perhaps China’s greatest political theorist, argued that humans have a tendency to selfishness. But we can improve – in the sense of caring for other people and become committed to social harmony – if we are committed to learning from the ancients with the aid of teachers who can model good behaviour.

Most important, the society should aim to establish rituals accompanied by beautiful music that can create bonds of kinship and communal solidarity beyond kinship times.

Such bonds can be helpful for victory in war and for motivating the powerful to care for the needy in terms.

But Xunzi neglected the importance of an external threat for binding people: think of the case of Canada, where the citizens have become unusually patriotic because they are united against the threat by Donald Trump to turn the country into the 51st state.

So, we can turn to the insights of Ibn Khaldun to complement Xunzi’s thought.

Ibn Khaldun provided what is arguably the first sociological theory of civilisation in his seminal work, the Muqaddimah. Like Xunzi, Ibn Khaldun had a fundamentally sceptical view of human nature. People are driven by material needs, pride and self-interest. Without external constraints, those impulses lead to competition, conflict and, eventually, civilisational decline.

To counteract this, Ibn Khaldun introduced the idea of asabiyyah – a form of group solidarity and social cohesion. In tribal societies, asabiyyah is strong because survival depends on collective loyalty and courage. This unity enables the tribe to conquer and establish political authority.

Temptations of City Life

However, over time, nomadic conquerors succumb to the temptations of city life and that is the beginning of the end. The once brave nomads become soft, fond of luxury, and docile to outsiders, and the dynasty eventually falls to new tribes bound by strong asabiyyah.

Today, in times of social disintegration and global chaos, we can agree Ibn Khaldun’s strong asabiyyah is necessary to establish communal solidarity and successful political communities.

Khaldun’s theory may be valid in certain contemporary contexts – if Western invaders of Afghanistan had been familiar with Khaldun’s theory, they would have known they were doomed to fail fighting against Taliban warriors bound by strong asabiyyah.

Communal Solidarity

But we need to recognise that desert hardship and bravery in battle are not the only means to generate a strong sense of communal solidarity.

In peaceful times and relatively modern societies, Xunzi’s suggestions for generating communal solidarity and social harmony are key: people can be made to feel as one by means of inclusive rituals accompanied by beautiful music, as well as a commitment to learning with great teachers.

But Xunzi’s suggestions are not sufficient. They need to be accompanied by Ibn Khaldun’s idea that social ties can be strengthened by means of struggle against decadent, hedonist and crassly materialistic societies.

So, Samuel Huntington’s prediction that Islamic and Confucian societies will unite in a “clash of civilisations” with the West may not be entirely off the mark.

Confucians and Muslims who strongly value communitarian ways of life can agree on the need to promote rituals and music that bind people as well as the need to struggle against a hyper-individualist society promoted by US-style capitalism.

-- BERNAMA

Phar Kim Beng, PhD, is Professor of ASEAN Studies at International Islamic University Malaysia.