Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe what China understands is that it is in the fight of its life against decadence. It correctly sees decadence as the product of liberalism, something that afflicts dying societies as they transition to some new illiberal regime. In that new, illiberal regime, the CCP will (most likely) not be in charge, and Chinese society as a whole may not survive as a united entity. Now liberalism starts by people who no…
People wishing to dismiss this should look up Wang Huning. It is (as far as I can tell as a non-Chinese person relying on translations and secondary sources), a good summary of his thought. My trouble with this view, and its Western equivalents, is that viewing religion (religio, that which binds) as something “good for the commoners,” while true in its own way, is also a religion’s undoing. When the primary perceive…
If you take Hunings' "America against America", you will see that the diagnosis for what he calls "Cultural Nihilism" (see also the CCP notion of "historical nihilism") is ultimately rooted in not much more than the orthodox concept of alienation from the economic dimension.
Hence his opposition to liberalization, moreso in the economic than social sense.
He doesn't impune the younger westerners from turning away from Religion or said broadly Tradition, but from the intellectual tradition of Europe, that is to be said, the broad current of the Enlightenment and what followed from it.
Indeed you should read Huning's impunement of liberalism as a political economy as broadly similar to Marx, with the exception that instead of Marx's general reliance on the European tradition for ethics, even appropriating the criticism of the Sophists on the basis of character, Huning would rather blend them with the Chinese tradition.