Circulating Discussion Draft: "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界]

 

Pix credit here (1954, We are proud to participate in the founding of China's industrialization)

 

I am delighted to shared a roughed out discussion draft of a paper I will be presenting at the upcoming meeting of the European China Law Studies Association Annual Conference (Barcelona 8-9 September 2026).  

The title of my paper is  "Modernization (现代化) as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism" [现代化作为中国宪政的生活世界 ].  The paper considers an aspect of Chinese socialist constitutionalism, one that flips the traditional focus of analysis on constitutional text. The object is to rethink constitutional cognition beyond, or above, its text and its conventional “lifeworld,” its Chinese Leninist lebenswelt in the New Era of Chinese historical development. The hope is that this “rethinking” exercise may enrich our understanding of constitutional forms and practice within China (and elsewhere) as some sort of higher law. It is in this sense, and more formally, a semiotic-phenomenological analysis of modernization discourse in Chinese Marxist-Leninist political-legal theory."

The abstract  perhaps gives a clearer picture:

Pix credit here

This paper argues that modernization is not simply one policy goal among many in contemporary China. It is the organizing framework — the taken-for-granted horizon — through which the Chinese Communist Party and the state define problems, justify institutions, evaluate governance, and project China's future. The paper's central claim is that modernization functions as what phenomenology calls a "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt): the pre-given background of shared assumptions so deeply embedded in institutional practice that it operates as a condition of intelligibility rather than an object requiring justification. Within this framework, the Party's periodic reformulation of the "principal contradiction" — the system's official diagnosis of its most pressing social problem — serves as the mechanism by which the modernizing framework recalibrates itself to new conditions without ever being abandoned or fundamentally questioned.

The paper proceeds in two registers. The first is historical and textual: six sections trace how the concept of modernization traveled from Soviet Marxism-Leninism through its Chinese transformation, evolved across twenty Party congresses, and was progressively embedded in legal texts from the Constitution down to local regulation — a process the paper calls "juridification." The second register is theoretical: a final major section draws on these findings to construct an argument about how modernization organizes meaning within Chinese constitutionalism, using tools from phenomenology (Husserl's lifeworld, Li Zehou's concept of cultural sedimentation), semiotics (how signs relate to one another in systems), Foucault's analysis of how governmental power shapes conduct, Nietzsche's genealogical method for uncovering buried struggles beneath apparently natural arrangements, and Luhmann's systems theory.

The paper advances five innovations. First, it identifies nine historical layers of political meaning — from early experiences of national vulnerability through revolution, socialist construction, reform, and the current "Chinese modernization" — that persist simultaneously rather than simply replacing one another, forming what the paper calls a "sedimentary ontology." Second, it argues that modernization functions as a "metasignifier": a sign that organizes the relations among other political concepts (socialism, Party leadership, reform, rule of law, common prosperity, ecological civilization, national rejuvenation) without emptying them of their distinct content. Third, it proposes a four-level model showing how abstract political theory becomes lived experience — moving from Party doctrine through institutional practices and evaluation systems down to the formation of subjects who experience their world through modernization categories, with feedback loops running back to the top. Fourth, it reconceives the Constitution not as a "container" holding political propositions but as an "expression" of an already-constituted political lifeworld — one that the Constitution simultaneously articulates and helps to reproduce. Fifth, it defends the paper's central claim of necessity ("must") as interpretive rather than empirical or causal: the system's internal relations become unintelligible if the modernizing lifeworld is bracketed, but this does not mean modernization mechanically causes every outcome or that the word literally appears in every document.

For comparative constitutional theory, the most immediate consequence is diagnostic: analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit what the paper calls a "Lebenswelt category error" — they project the assumptions of one constitutional order onto another and mistake the resulting mismatch for criticism. The paper does not defend Chinese constitutionalism or endorse its institutional choices. It insists that accurate reconstruction must precede normative evaluation: one cannot meaningfully criticize a system one has not first correctly identified.

Pix credit here

I will suggest that expressing modernization in and as the substructure of the Party Constitution and the State Constitution gives it a status different from an ordinary policy preference. The Party Constitution supplies the political direction and the current account of the project; the State Constitution gives that direction formal legal expression. National laws then translate general commitments into rules for education, science, national security, development, and governance, while provincial and local measures adapt them to particular places. The practical result is a chain of translation: political theory becomes constitutional purpose; constitutional purpose becomes legislative method; legislation becomes administrative organization; and administration becomes local practice, planning targets, evaluation standards, educational priorities, and governance measures. Modernization is not merely mentioned at the top of the system. It helps determine what counts as an adequate law, a capable institution, a successful plan, or a correct implementation. This embedding also explains apparent contradictions. Market mechanisms can be accepted as tools for developing productive capacity without being treated as a replacement for Party leadership. Opening can be pursued as a way to obtain knowledge, capital, and technology while national security is emphasized as protection for the conditions of development. The relationship is not necessarily liberalization versus control; within the Chinese framework, both may be judged by whether they advance the modernizing project. A consideration of the product of the 3rd and 4th Plenums of 2024 and 2025 provide context for the application of the insights.

Poster generated with ChatGPT

 Comments, reactions, engagement always welcome. The paper is available in the original English and a Chinese translation [中文翻译]. The Table of Contents, Executive Summaries and a portion fo the paper (in English) follow below.

 

  

“Modernization” (现代化) and Chinese Constitutionalism’s “Lifeworld”; Constitutionalism as the Institutionalized Phenomenology of Modernization

A Semiotic-Phenomenological Analysis of Modernization Discourse

in Chinese Marxist-Leninist Political-Legal Theory

 

 

Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)[1]

W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs

Penn State Dickinson Law, a unit of The Pennsylvania State University system | 239 Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA 16802

 

 

Working Paper Draft

 

August 2026

 

 

 

 

 

[Draft for Discussion — Not for Citation Without Permission]

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Abstract

Keywords

Executive Summary: For Policymakers and the General Public

Executive Summary: For Specialists in Philosophy and Political Theory

Introduction

Section I: The Genesis of the Notion of Modernization from Soviet to Chinese Leninist Theory

A. Modernization as Revolutionary Imperative: The Soviet Foundation

B. Transmission and Transformation: The Chinese Reception

C. From Industrial Teleology to Civilizational Project

Section II: The Connection Between Modernization and (a) Marxist Theory, (b) Leninist Theory, and (c) ‘Socialist’ Modernization

A. Modernization Within Historical Materialism

B. The Vanguard Party as Agent of Modernization

C. ‘Socialist Modernization’ as Distinct Discursive Category

Section III: Differences Between Socialist Modernization, Chinese-Style Modernization, and Modernization/Development as Used Outside China

A. Socialist Modernization in CPC Discourse

B. Chinese-Style Modernization as Theoretical Innovation

C. Western Modernization Theory and Development Discourse

D. Ideological, Epistemological, and Normative Divergences

Section IV: The Evolution of the Concept of Modernization as Textually Evidenced in CPC Documents (Constitution and Congress Reports, 1st–20th)

A. The Revolutionary Period: Absence and Implication (1st–7th Congresses, 1921–1945)

B. The Construction Period: Emergence and Subordination (8th–11th Congresses, 1956–1977)

C. The Reform Period: Centrality and Systematization (12th–17th Congresses, 1982–2007)

D. The New Era: Modernization as Central Task (18th–20th Congresses, 2012–2022)

E. The CPC Constitution as Living Text

Section V: The Current Idea of Socialist or Chinese Modernization in Chinese New Era Theory

A. Xi Jinping Thought and the Theorization of the New Era

B. The Five Features of Chinese-Style Modernization

C. High-Quality Development and the Two Centenary Goals

D. Chinese-Style Modernization and the Chinese Dream

Section VI: The Concept of Modernization as Found in Legal Texts (From Constitution to National, Provincial, and Local Regulations and Legislation)

A. The PRC Constitution: Modernization as Constitutional Mandate

B. The Legislation Law and the Legislative Framework

C. National-Level Legislation: Modernization as Statutory Obligation

D. Provincial and Local Regulations: Operationalizing Modernization

E. The Juridification of a Political Concept

 

Section VII: A Semiotic-Phenomenological Argument — Modernization as the Lebenswelt of Chinese Constitutionalism

A. The Central Semiotic Proposition: Modernization as Metasignifier

B. The Phenomenological Framework: Lebenswelt, Sedimentation, and Li Zehou’s Jidian (积淀)

C. The Semiotic Architecture: Modernization as Sign-System

D. The Relational Semiotics of 现代化

E. Genealogy, Biopolitics, and the Naturalization of the Modernizing Lebenswelt

F. The Dialectics of Telos and Process

G. The Principal Contradiction as Semiotic Operation

H. The Dual Constitutional System as Semiotic Unity

I. The Luhmannian Dimension: Modernization as Second-Order Coding

J. From Destination to Condition of Political Reproduction

K. The Constitution as Expression Rather than Container

L. The Four Constitutional Functions of Modernization

M. Implications for Comparative Constitutional Theory

Section VIII: Conclusion: Modernization as the Ground of Chinese Constitutional Meaning

 

Appendix: Computational Reconstitution — The Paper’s Architecture in Machine-Representable Terms

A. The Argument as Directed Graph

B. Layered Network Architecture

C. Temporal Dynamics

D. Quantitative Analytics Framework

E. The Translation Problem: What Is Lost and Gained

 

Abstract: This paper argues that modernization is not simply one policy goal among many in contemporary China. It is the organizing framework — the taken-for-granted horizon — through which the Chinese Communist Party and the state define problems, justify institutions, evaluate governance, and project China's future. The paper's central claim is that modernization functions as what phenomenology calls a "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt): the pre-given background of shared assumptions so deeply embedded in institutional practice that it operates as a condition of intelligibility rather than an object requiring justification. Within this framework, the Party's periodic reformulation of the "principal contradiction" — the system's official diagnosis of its most pressing social problem — serves as the mechanism by which the modernizing framework recalibrates itself to new conditions without ever being abandoned or fundamentally questioned.

The paper proceeds in two registers. The first is historical and textual: six sections trace how the concept of modernization traveled from Soviet Marxism-Leninism through its Chinese transformation, evolved across twenty Party congresses, and was progressively embedded in legal texts from the Constitution down to local regulation — a process the paper calls "juridification." The second register is theoretical: a final major section draws on these findings to construct an argument about how modernization organizes meaning within Chinese constitutionalism, using tools from phenomenology (Husserl's lifeworld, Li Zehou's concept of cultural sedimentation), semiotics (how signs relate to one another in systems), Foucault's analysis of how governmental power shapes conduct, Nietzsche's genealogical method for uncovering buried struggles beneath apparently natural arrangements, and Luhmann's systems theory.

The paper advances five innovations. First, it identifies nine historical layers of political meaning — from early experiences of national vulnerability through revolution, socialist construction, reform, and the current "Chinese modernization" — that persist simultaneously rather than simply replacing one another, forming what the paper calls a "sedimentary ontology." Second, it argues that modernization functions as a "metasignifier": a sign that organizes the relations among other political concepts (socialism, Party leadership, reform, rule of law, common prosperity, ecological civilization, national rejuvenation) without emptying them of their distinct content. Third, it proposes a four-level model showing how abstract political theory becomes lived experience — moving from Party doctrine through institutional practices and evaluation systems down to the formation of subjects who experience their world through modernization categories, with feedback loops running back to the top. Fourth, it reconceives the Constitution not as a "container" holding political propositions but as an "expression" of an already-constituted political lifeworld — one that the Constitution simultaneously articulates and helps to reproduce. Fifth, it defends the paper's central claim of necessity ("must") as interpretive rather than empirical or causal: the system's internal relations become unintelligible if the modernizing lifeworld is bracketed, but this does not mean modernization mechanically causes every outcome or that the word literally appears in every document.

For comparative constitutional theory, the most immediate consequence is diagnostic: analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit what the paper calls a "Lebenswelt category error" — they project the assumptions of one constitutional order onto another and mistake the resulting mismatch for criticism. The paper does not defend Chinese constitutionalism or endorse its institutional choices. It insists that accurate reconstruction must precede normative evaluation: one cannot meaningfully criticize a system one has not first correctly identified.

 

Keywords: Chinese constitutionalism, modernization, Chinese-style modernization (中国式现代化), lebenswelt, semiotics, phenomenology, CPC Constitution, Marxism-Leninism, principal contradiction (主要矛盾), dual constitutional system

*       *       *

 

 

Executive Summary: For Policymakers and the General Public.

This paper argues that modernization is not simply a Chinese policy for increasing wealth or adopting technology; it is the organizing framework through which the Party and state define problems, justify institutions, and describe China’s future.

 

This matters because outside observers often read Chinese governance through categories developed for liberal democracies or Western development policy. That can make Chinese conduct appear inconsistent: economic opening alongside strong Party control, market experimentation alongside socialist commitments, and international engagement alongside a sharper emphasis on security. The paper’s claim is not that these tensions are imaginary. It is that they become more intelligible once modernization is understood as the framework that connects them.

 

(a) What does “modernization” actually mean in Chinese political and legal discourse?

 

In Chinese official discourse, modernization does not mean only the transition from a traditional economy to an industrial or technologically advanced one. It carries a century of political meaning: experiences of national weakness and foreign domination; revolution and national independence; socialist construction; industrialization and the Four Modernizations; reform and opening; the socialist market economy; governance modernization; ecological civilization; common prosperity; national rejuvenation; and, most recently, Chinese modernization.

 

This is why the word cannot be read as a neutral synonym for the language used by Western development economists. Chinese discourse recognizes familiar tasks—industrial capacity, science, infrastructure, education, and economic growth—but places them inside a Party-led socialist and civilizational project. Modernization is therefore both a destination and a method: it names the future China seeks and the institutional activity through which the Party claims that future can be reached.

 

The term is also flexible without being empty. Reform, law, security, science, redistribution, environmental protection, and national rejuvenation can each be described as modernizing activities because each is assigned a place within the larger project. The Party’s reformulation of the principal contradiction—the system’s official diagnosis of its most important social problem—changes what modernization must address at a particular historical moment.

 

(b) Why does it matter that modernization is embedded in China’s constitution and legal system at every level?

 

Embedding modernization in the Party Constitution and the State Constitution gives it a status different from an ordinary policy preference. The Party Constitution supplies the political direction and the current account of the project; the State Constitution gives that direction formal legal expression. National laws then translate general commitments into rules for education, science, national security, development, and governance, while provincial and local measures adapt them to particular places.

 

The practical result is a chain of translation: political theory becomes constitutional purpose; constitutional purpose becomes legislative method; legislation becomes administrative organization; and administration becomes local practice, planning targets, evaluation standards, educational priorities, and governance measures. Modernization is not merely mentioned at the top of the system. It helps determine what counts as an adequate law, a capable institution, a successful plan, or a correct implementation.

 

This embedding also explains apparent contradictions. Market mechanisms can be accepted as tools for developing productive capacity without being treated as a replacement for Party leadership. Opening can be pursued as a way to obtain knowledge, capital, and technology while national security is emphasized as protection for the conditions of development. The relationship is not necessarily liberalization versus control; within the Chinese framework, both may be judged by whether they advance the modernizing project.

 

(c) What are the implications for engagement with China?

 

For trade negotiators and diplomats, the first implication is interpretive discipline. When Chinese officials describe a measure as supporting high-quality development, governance modernization, security, or national rejuvenation, the terms carry institutional and historical assumptions. A negotiation that addresses only the immediate commercial issue may miss the political purpose attached to it. The relevant question is not whether China is moving toward a Western endpoint, but what role the measure is assigned within China’s own modernizing sequence.

 

For development institutions and other external partners, the analysis counsels against assuming that institutional borrowing implies political convergence. China may adopt a market instrument, a legal technique, a technology standard, or an administrative practice while assigning it a different purpose and placing it under a different authority structure. Engagement is more likely to be intelligible when it distinguishes agreement about a tool from agreement about the political direction in which the tool is used.

 

The analysis also helps identify the limits of likely compromise. The Party can revise methods, priorities, timetables, and institutional arrangements when new contradictions appear. But because its legitimacy is structurally tied to directing modernization, compromise about means does not necessarily imply compromise about direction. This distinction helps explain why the system may change substantially while preserving Party leadership as the condition of the project’s identity.

 

Key takeaways

 

Modernization has a long memory. When Chinese officials invoke it, they invoke a century of political experience, not only the vocabulary of development economics.

 

Modernization organizes the whole program. It is not one policy goal among many. It is the framework through which economic growth, law, security, ecology, distribution, and foreign relations are related.

 

Legitimacy is tied to direction. The Party’s authority is connected to its claimed capacity to lead China through modernization, which makes adaptation of means more likely than abandonment of the project’s direction.

 

Do not misidentify the system. Calling Chinese governance “failed democracy” or “transitioning authoritarianism” assumes that liberal-democratic principles are the system’s unfinished operating model. The paper argues instead that the system is organized around modernization and should first be understood on that basis.

 

Accurate interpretation is not endorsement. The framework does not require approval of China’s institutions or outcomes. It requires that criticism address the system that exists, including its distribution of power and its consequences, rather than a misidentified liberal version of it.

 

Limitations. This is an analytical paper, not a policy prescription. It describes the internal logic through which Chinese political and legal discourse organizes meaning; it does not endorse that logic, verify every official claim, or resolve the normative questions that the system raises.

*       *       *

 

Executive Summary: For Specialists in Philosophy and Political Theory.

 

The paper’s precise claim is that modernization has become the historically sedimented semiotic horizon—the Lebenswelt—within which contemporary Chinese constitutionalism constitutes the intelligibility of its own signs, and that the CPC’s periodic reformulation of the principal contradiction is the recursive operation through which that horizon is recalibrated without being abandoned.

 

The claim is immanent and semantic, not empirical, causal, or normative. “Must” means that an interpreter working within Chinese constitutionalism’s own historical architecture cannot adequately relate socialism, Party leadership, productive forces, law, governance, common prosperity, ecology, security, and national rejuvenation without locating them within the modernizing horizon. It does not mean that modernization is the sole cause, value, or final foundation of the order.

 

Position within existing debates

 

In comparative constitutional theory, the argument engages Frankenberg, Tushnet, and Ginsburg by challenging universalist assumptions about what constitutional meaning must be. Or at least it assumes that these are confined tto their own liberal democratic lebenswelt, from which they, quite correctly, seek to understand and rationalize the world around them. Constitutional orders are not only different institutional arrangements; they are different fields of intelligibility. The paper therefore treats constitutional meaning as Lebenswelt-relative. This does not prohibit comparison or normative judgment. It requires reconstruction of each order’s horizon before its provisions are measured against an external standard.

 

In Chinese political theory, the paper distinguishes structural-semiotic analysis from substantive cultural-interpretive projects. Wang Hui’s account of modernity as a contested problem and of “anti-modern modernity” deepens the history of the modern, but does not itself specify the constitutional sign-system. Gan Yang’s tong san tong identifies Confucian, Maoist, and Dengist resources as a usable cultural archive; Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia supplies substantive civilizational content; Jiang Shigong’s written-and-unwritten constitutionalism clarifies differentiated constitutional forms. The present argument asks how such resources become operative as constitutional meaning through modernization.

 

In phenomenology, the paper extends Husserl’s Lebenswelt into political-constitutional analysis. Husserl supplies the pre-given, intersubjective horizon and the account of sedimentation. Li Zehou’s jidian addresses the naturalization problem: historical and rational content becomes embedded in practical, cognitive, aesthetic, and affective dispositions rather than remaining at the level of explicit doctrine. The paper acknowledges the Heideggerean dimension of project-character and futurity, especially modernization’s practical orientation toward a projected future, but does not attempt a full Heideggerian development.

In semiotics, Saussure and Peirce perform different but coordinated work. Saussurean structural analysis supplies langue and parole and the differential constitution of meaning: modernization is a sign-system within which other constitutional signs acquire their positions. Peircean pragmatism supplies icon, index, symbol, interpretant, and unlimited semiosis: each constitutional articulation produces an interpretant that can be reinterpreted in subsequent practice. Together they specify how modernization can be both a relatively stable structure and a moving process of constitutional meaning-constitution.

 

Foucault supplies the missing passage from macro-signification to lived conduct. Governmentality explains how modernization becomes evaluation systems, planning targets, curricula, administrative routines, and spatial arrangements; biopolitics explains how population, bodies, mobility, reproduction, education, and health become objects of modernizing intervention. Nietzschean genealogy adds the critical dimension. Umdeutung shows that sedimentation is also appropriation and struggle, while the ascetic ideal illuminates how projected futures discipline present conduct. Genealogy prevents the phenomenological reconstruction from becoming apologetics.

 

Luhmannian systems theory is deployed alongside, not as a substitute for, phenomenology. Second-order observation and autopoietic reproduction describe how the political system observes its own distinctions, generates criteria of adequacy, and reproduces modernization discourse through its operations. Husserl, by contrast, describes the horizon inhabited by experiencing subjects. Their tension is irreducible: communication and consciousness are not interchangeable objects. The paper treats that tension as theoretically productive and as an analogue of the computational/cognitive divide rather than resolving it by verbal synthesis.

 

These engagements do not produce a single grand synthesis. They establish an analytical division of labor. Phenomenology identifies the horizon; sedimentation explains historical persistence; semiotics specifies relational meaning; genealogy exposes struggle; governmentality and biopolitics explain embodiment; and systems theory models recursive observation and reproduction. The argument’s coherence lies in the circuit among these registers, not in reducing them to one vocabulary.

 

Original contributions

 

(1) The metasignifier thesis. Modernization is a sign that organizes other signs without becoming empty. Socialism, Party leadership, reform, opening, law, governance, common prosperity, ecology, security, and rejuvenation retain distinct histories, but modernization supplies the relational field in which their contributions to one project can be specified. Its breadth is an effect of articulation, not the absence of content.

 

(2) The sedimentary ontology. The paper identifies nine layers—backwardness; revolution; socialist construction; industrialization and the Four Modernizations; reform and opening; the socialist market economy; governance modernization; Chinese modernization; and national rejuvenation. These are not merely chronological stages. They are a thick archaeological structure in which prior categories remain available, are reinterpreted, and constrain later intelligibility.

 

(3) The four-level naturalization model. The argument moves from abstract theory to collective-institutional practices, from those practices to individual-embodied dispositions, and from embodied experience back to feedback. This abstract → collective-institutional → individual-embodied → feedback sequence supplies the mechanism by which a political sign can become a lived horizon without implying uniform belief or eliminating resistance.

 

(4) The immanent-semantic “must.” The paper defends necessity within an interpretive framework. The Constitution and the Party’s fundamental political line must be read as expressions of modernization not because their words are lexically dependent on it, and not because modernization is a monocausal force, but because their internal relations become unintelligible if the modernizing lifeworld is bracketed.

 

(5) Recursive non-foundationalism. Modernization is not the final signified. It is simultaneously signifier and signified, historical product and producer of history, object and method, destination and condition of political reproduction. Its meaning depends upon revolution, socialism, national experience, Party organization, contradiction, development, governance, civilization, and rejuvenation, even as it subsequently organizes those elements.

 

(6) The Lebenswelt category error. The paper offers a diagnostic for comparative constitutional analysis. Treating Chinese texts as failed liberal constitutionalism imports a rights-bearing-individual and social-contract horizon into a constitutional order whose signs are organized differently. The diagnosis does not immunize Chinese institutions from criticism; it makes criticism more exact by directing it toward the operative logic rather than toward an imagined liberal object.

 

Unresolved tensions and directions for further work

 

First, the phenomenology/systems-theory articulation remains underdeveloped. The paper preserves the tension between lived horizon and autopoietic communication, but it does not yet provide a rigorous translation rule between the two registers. The analogy to computational and cognitive architectures is suggestive rather than a completed theory.

 

Second, the empirical dimension is incomplete. The paper proposes how modernization might function as a horizon, but it does not establish how non-elite subjects actually inhabit, negotiate, resist, or reinterpret that horizon. Sociological, survey-based, and ethnographic work is needed to test the four-level model beyond official texts and institutional designs.

 

Third, internal critique requires further theorization. If actors are formed within a Lebenswelt, under what conditions can they achieve critical distance from it? Genealogy identifies buried alternatives and governmental power, but the paper does not yet explain when immanent critique becomes possible or how it moves from dissonant experience to institutional transformation.

 

Fourth, the possibility of fragmentation remains open. Different regions, classes, generations, professions, and digitally mediated communities may inhabit different or competing horizons of meaning. A common official vocabulary does not prove a common lifeworld. Further work must determine whether modernization remains a sufficiently shared horizon to organize the whole constitutional field or is becoming a contested language connecting partially divergent social worlds.

 

The framework is therefore best understood as a disciplined research program rather than a closed explanation. Its contribution is to identify the semantic infrastructure that must be reconstructed before Chinese constitutional texts can be compared, criticized, or modeled with theoretical precision.

*       *       *

 

 

Introduction

The concept of modernization (现代化) occupies a peculiar position within the discourse of Chinese political-legal theory. It is at once ubiquitous and under-theorized—present in virtually every significant political document produced by the Communist Party of China since 1978, embedded in the state constitution, operationalized in legislation at every level of the normative hierarchy, and yet rarely subjected to the kind of rigorous analytical scrutiny that its centrality would seem to demand. Western scholars have tended either to dismiss Chinese modernization discourse as mere rhetoric decorating an authoritarian project, or to assimilate it unreflectively to the categories of Western development theory. Neither approach is adequate. The former fails to take seriously the operative force of political-theoretical categories within a Marxist-Leninist system; the latter commits the category error of reading Chinese modernization through a conceptual lens that the discourse itself explicitly rejects. [NOTE: cite Backer, "Party, People, Government, and State" (2012)]

 

This working paper proposes a different approach. It takes modernization seriously as a political-theoretical concept with its own genealogy, internal logic, and constitutive function within Chinese constitutionalism. The argument proceeds in two registers. The first is historical-textual: Sections I through VI trace the genealogy of modernization from its Soviet Marxist-Leninist origins through its Chinese transformation, its articulation across twenty national party congresses, and its juridification in Chinese legal texts. The second register is theoretical: Section VII draws on these historical-textual findings to construct a semiotic-phenomenological argument that modernization functions as the lebenswelt—the pre-given horizon of meaning—within which Chinese constitutionalism constitutes itself and produces meaning.

 

The central thesis may be stated as follows: within the Chinese constitutional order—understood as the dual system of the CPC Constitution and the PRC State Constitution—modernization is not merely one policy goal among others. It is the fundamental sign-system through which all other constitutional concepts acquire their meaning. The periodic reformulation of the "principal contradiction" (主要矛盾)) by successive party congresses is the mechanism by which this sign-system recalibrates itself to changed material and ideological conditions. The consequence for comparative constitutional theory is significant: external analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit a phenomenological category error—they misidentify the lebenswelt and therefore systematically misread the signs. [NOTE: cite to Backer, "The Party as Polity" (2012); Backer, "Governance Without Government" (2009)]

 

A methodological note is in order. This paper does not seek to legitimate or delegitimate Chinese constitutionalism. The semiotic-phenomenological analysis undertaken here is descriptive and interpretive, not normative. To identify modernization as the lebenswelt of Chinese constitutionalism is not to endorse the particular content that modernization has been given at any historical moment, nor to validate the political arrangements through which modernization is pursued. It is, rather, to make an analytical claim about the conditions under which Chinese constitutional discourse becomes intelligible—to itself and to external observers. The failure to recognize these conditions produces not criticism but incomprehension.

 

*       *       *

 

Section VIII. Testing the Thesis: The 3rd and 4th Plenums of the 20th Central Committee — Modernization as Fetish, Phenomenology Without the Fetish Term, and the Recursive Constitution of Reality

 

I. Introduction

This supplementary section examines how the 3rd and 4th Plenums of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China demonstrate the thesis developed in the foregoing working paper — that modernization functions as the Lebenswelt of Chinese constitutionalism. But the examination must be conducted correctly. The question is not whether the plenum documents “mention modernization” — they do, relentlessly, and lexical frequency proves nothing about phenomenological structure. The question is whether the documents demonstrate the phenomenological, semiotic, and fetishistic operations the paper theorizes: the constitution of reality through deeply naturalized assumptions; the operation of modernizing logic where the fetish term itself is absent; and the recursive production of a world that appears to confirm the categories through which it is apprehended.

 

The primary texts are: the Decision of the 3rd Plenum (July 15–18, 2024), titled “Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization” (中共中央关于进一步全面深化改革、推进中国式现代化的决定); and the Recommendations adopted by the 4th Plenum (October 20–23, 2025), titled “Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development” (中共中央关于制定国民经济和社会发展第十五个五年规划的建议). Supplementary analysis draws upon Xi Jinping’s Explanation of the Recommendations, the 4th Plenum Communiqué, and contemporaneous institutional texts — a State Council press conference on market regulation (February 2026), Xi’s address to the PLA delegation (March 2026), and a People’s Daily elaboration of science-technology-industry integration (November 2025) — that illuminate the modernizing Lebenswelt precisely where it operates without being named. [NOTE: cite official Xinhua sources for plenum dates and decision titles]

 

B. The 3rd Plenum: Reform as an Operation Within the Modernizing Lebenswelt

 

The 3rd Plenum Decision’s title alone — “Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese Modernization” — confirms the relational structure the paper theorizes. Reform is not positioned as an autonomous goal with its own internal logic; it is explicitly positioned as a means of advancing (推进) modernization. The verb 推进 denotes propulsion, advancement, movement toward — it is a verb of instrumental subordination. Reform acquires its meaning not from its own internal coherence but through its articulated relation to the modernizing project. This is the metasignifier at work in its most transparent discursive form. But what is more significant than the title’s explicit content is what it does not do: it does not argue for modernization. It does not defend modernization as a worthy telos or justify it against alternatives. It simply deploys modernization as the self-evident horizon within which reform makes sense. This is the Lebenswelt at work — a horizon so thoroughly naturalized that it functions as the condition of intelligibility rather than as an object requiring justification.

The Decision’s comprehensive scope deepens this observation. The document addresses economic system reform, scientific and technological innovation, opening to the outside world, whole-process people’s democracy (全过程人民民主), rule of law construction (法治建设), cultural development, social governance, ecological civilization (生态文明), and national security [VERIFY: complete list of domains]. These heterogeneous domains are articulated as dimensions of a single modernizing project — their co-presence in a unified Decision performs the architectonic function the paper attributes to the metasignifier. The emphasis on “systemic integration” (系统集成) [VERIFY: exact term used] is particularly revealing: it is the CPC’s own recognition, at the level of practical governance discourse, that the signs must function as a system rather than as isolated propositions. The metasignifier’s work is to produce precisely this systemic coherence.

 

The Decision also demonstrates the sedimentation thesis. It draws upon accumulated sedimentary layers — revolution, socialist construction, the Four Modernizations, reform and opening (改革开放), the socialist market economy, scientific development, governance modernization — as inherited resources conditioning the meaning of current reforms. When the Decision invokes “high-quality development” (高质量发展) or “new quality productive forces” (新质生产力), it does so within a discursive formation whose prior layers have already established what these terms mean within the modernizing horizon [NOTE: cite Decision sections on high-quality development]. Each formulation is not an ex nihilo creation but a reconfiguration of inherited semiotic material — the sedimentary dynamics the paper theorizes operating in real time.

 

Crucially, the approximately 300 reform measures reportedly contained in the Decision [VERIFY: exact number] are not mere policy announcements. They are proto-technologies of governmentality — embryonic forms of the performance metrics, regulatory instruments, planning targets, and evaluation mechanisms through which macro-level modernization discourse will be translated into micro-level institutional practice. Each measure is a capillary through which the modernizing imperative circulates at the level of everyday governance. The 3rd Plenum Decision thus provides evidence not merely for the metasignifier thesis but for the full juridification cascade the paper theorizes: Party theory translating into constitutional purpose, then into legislative specification, then into governmental technologies, and ultimately into the subject-forming practices that constitute citizens as modernizing agents.

 

C. The 4th Plenum and the 15th Five-Year Plan: The Clock Cycle of the Lebenswelt

 

The 4th Plenum of the 20th Central Committee (October 20–23, 2025) adopted the Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2026–2030). The Five-Year Plan is one of the most important institutional mechanisms through which the modernizing Lebenswelt reproduces itself temporally. It is, in the paper’s vocabulary, the clock cycle of the system — the mechanism that periodizes the modernizing project, translates abstract commitments into time-bound targets, and creates the evaluative framework against which institutional adequacy is measured. Xi Jinping’s Explanation of the Recommendations states with remarkable directness: “Formulating medium- and long-term plans to guide economic and social development is an important means by which our Party governs the country.” [NOTE: cite Xi Jinping, Explanation of the Recommendations, Section I] This is planning acknowledged as a technology of governance — and, within the paper’s framework, as a technology of Lebenswelt-reproduction. The plan does not merely describe what will happen; it constitutes the temporal framework within which institutional action becomes meaningful.

 

The 4th Plenum Communiqué positions the 15th Five-Year Plan period as “critical” for “reinforcing the foundations and pushing ahead on all fronts toward basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035.” It is described as “a key link between the past and the future” — a formulation that reveals the temporal logic through which the Lebenswelt sustains itself. The present is constituted not as autonomous but as a stage in a larger trajectory: it derives its meaning from its position between past achievements (the 14th Five-Year Plan period, described as having allowed China to “get off to a successful start on our new journey toward the Second Centenary Goal”) and projected future states (basic socialist modernization by 2035, a “great modern socialist country” by mid-century). This is temporalized Lebenswelt in action: the present is never simply the present; it is always already positioned within the modernizing trajectory, evaluated by its adequacy to the projected future. [NOTE: cite 4th Plenum Communiqué for quoted formulations]

 

The Communiqué also announces: “Socialist modernization can only be realized through a historical process of gradual and ongoing development. It requires the unremitting hard work of one generation after another.” This formulation performs a critical semiotic operation: it removes modernization from the category of achievable goals and repositions it as a permanent horizon — an ongoing process that transcends any individual generation or plan period. This is precisely the shift from telos to Lebenswelt that the paper theorizes. Modernization is no longer a destination to be reached and thereby completed; it is the condition of the system’s political reproduction, the permanent framework within which each generation’s effort acquires its meaning. The Five-Year Plan is not a step toward the completion of modernization; it is one iteration of a process whose horizon recedes as one advances. The plan’s function is not to complete the project but to reproduce the project’s organizing force for another cycle.

 

The sectoral coverage of the 4th Plenum Recommendations — industrial modernization, scientific and technological self-reliance, new quality productive forces, the domestic market, economic structure, opening up, rural modernization, regional coordination, cultural development, public wellbeing, green transition, national security, defense modernization, and Party governance — provides further evidence of the metasignifier’s architectonic function. That a single planning document can coherently organize these heterogeneous domains into a unified five-year program is itself evidence that modernization functions as the relational field the paper describes. The People’s Daily elaboration of “the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation with industrial innovation” (推动科技创新和产业创新深度融合) [NOTE: cite People’s Daily, November 26, 2025] explicitly frames this integration as “supporting and guiding Chinese modernization through scientific and technological modernization” (以科技现代化支撑引领中国式现代化). The grammar is revealing: scientific breakthrough → technological application → industrial transformation → productive force development → modernizing capacity. This is the Leninist developmental grammar — from Lenin’s electrification thesis through the present — now operating as a naturalized interpretive framework for 2025 policy discourse. [NOTE: cite Text 7 for full elaboration of this chain]

 

D. The Phenomenology of Modernization Where the Fetish Term Is Absent

 

The strongest evidence for the Lebenswelt thesis is found not where modernization is named but where its logic operates silently. A Lebenswelt that must be constantly invoked is not yet fully naturalized; one that operates as the taken-for-granted background of discourse — structuring what counts as a problem, what constitutes a solution, how institutional adequacy is evaluated — without being named has achieved the condition the paper describes. The texts examined below demonstrate precisely this condition: institutional discourse in which the modernizing grammar operates as background without centering the fetish term.

 

Xi Jinping’s address to the PLA and Armed Police delegation (March 2026) discusses military construction, cadre discipline, anti-corruption, and talent development. The word “modernization” (现代化) appears in the speech’s framing — it is, after all, situated within “the 15th Five-Year Plan period” (“十五五”时期) and the goal of “high-quality advancement of national defense and military modernization” (高质量推进国防和军队现代化) — but the operative content of the address concerns anti-corruption (反腐败斗争), supervision of capital flows and power operations, military budget management reform (军费预算管理改革), performance evaluation (绩效评估), and the cultivation of “revolutionized and professionalized talent” (革命化专业化人才队伍). [NOTE: cite Xi Jinping speech, March 7, 2026, Xinhua] What is phenomenologically significant is that these activities — supervising procurement, evaluating cadres, managing budgets, cultivating talent — are conducted entirely within a grammar of phased development, systematic institutional capacity-building, target-setting, and evaluation against developmental criteria. The modernizing Lebenswelt is operating as the taken-for-granted background: cadres are evaluated not by loyalty alone but by their capacity to advance the project; institutional arrangements are judged not by stability alone but by their developmental adequacy; anti-corruption is framed not as moral purification but as ensuring that resources serve the modernizing imperative (“every cent spent where it counts” — 每一分钱都用在刀刃上).

 

The State Council press conference on market regulation (February 2026) provides an even more striking example. This is bureaucratic discourse at its most routine: consumer protection, fair competition, platform economy governance, quality standards, inspection metrics. The word “modernization” appears only peripherally, yet the entire evaluative framework presupposes the modernizing horizon. Market regulation is evaluated by whether it supports “high-quality development” (高质量发展) and “building a strong domestic market” (建设强大国内市场). Consumer protection is framed through “unleashing consumption potential” (释放消费潜力). Quality standards are connected to “modernizing the industrial system” (现代化产业体系). Platform governance is articulated through “winning the strategic initiative amid intense international competition.” [NOTE: cite State Council press conference, February 5, 2026] The market regulator is not discussing modernization; the market regulator is operating within modernization. The evaluative criteria, the problem-definitions, the metrics of success — all presuppose the modernizing horizon without needing to name it as such. This is what full naturalization looks like: the Lebenswelt is invisible precisely because it is doing the work of making the discourse intelligible.

 

The theoretical significance of these observations cannot be overstated. The prior draft of this supplementary section made the error of treating the explicit appearance of “modernization” in plenum documents as evidence for the thesis. But lexical frequency is not phenomenology. A word that appears in every document might be mere formula — verbal ritual, institutional boilerplate, discursive decoration. The stronger evidence is the operation of modernizing logic where the word itself is absent or peripheral: the developmental temporality, the phased-construction grammar, the evaluation-against-projected-future structure, the assumed chain from institutional reform through capacity-building to systemic advancement. When a military commander discusses anti-corruption through the grammar of developmental efficiency, or a market regulator evaluates consumer protection through the metrics of high-quality development, the Lebenswelt is demonstrating its constitutive force — not by being named but by structuring what can be thought within the system.

 

E. Modernization as Semiotic Fetish

 

The paper’s framework requires a concept that captures how modernization functions not merely as a descriptive term but as a sign invested with organizing power by the community that produces and consumes it. The semiotic concept of fetish provides this. A fetish is a sign that has been invested by a community of the faithful with powers that exceed its referential content—powers to organize, ground, amplify, incite, and manage the objects, processes, and guardrails that it is infused with. “Modernization” (现代化) functions as precisely such a semiotic fetish within the CPC’s discursive universe. It is not merely a word that describes a process; it is a sign that has been invested with the power to organize institutional reality. The fetish does not represent modernization as an external referent; it constitutes the field of institutional meaning within which reform, governance, development, and security become intelligible as elements of a single project. To name an activity as contributing to modernization is not to describe it but to invest it with significance, to locate it within a grammar of collective purpose that the sign itself makes possible.

 

The fetish-work of modernization is demonstrable across five dimensions in the plenum documents. It organizes: the 3rd Plenum Decision connects economic reform, technological innovation, democratic governance, ecological civilization, and national security within a single relational field—no other sign in the CPC’s repertoire can perform this connecting function with equivalent authority. It grounds: the 4th Plenum Communiqué’s statement that “socialist modernization can only be realized through a historical process” does not argue for this ground but presupposes it—modernization is the foundational assumption that makes the entire planning discourse possible, the unquestioned premise upon which the architecture of Five-Year Plans, reform cycles, and developmental periodization rests. It amplifies: routine bureaucratic activities—market regulation, consumer protection, cadre evaluation, budget management—are transformed into contributions to a civilizational project by their connection to the modernizing horizon. A market regulator is not merely enforcing standards; she is contributing to “high-quality development” (高质量发展) in the service of “basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035.” The fetish magnifies significance by connecting the quotidian to the epochal.

 

The fetish also incites or initiates: it generates new institutional activities by making “problems” visible within its grammar. The 3rd Plenum’s approximately 300 reform measures [VERIFY: exact number] are not responses to independently existing problems; they are responses to problems that become visible only when institutional reality is evaluated against modernizing criteria. “Unbalanced and inadequate development” (发展不平衡不充分) is a “problem” only within a framework that demands balanced and adequate development as the criterion of institutional adequacy. The contradiction between development capacity and “the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life” (人民日益增长的美好生活需要) creates the problem-space that reform addresses—but this contradiction is itself constituted by the modernizing framework, which renders it legible as the principal contradiction of the current epoch. And the fetish manages: it disciplines the boundaries of legitimate discourse. Reform must advance modernization; activities that cannot be articulated within the modernizing grammar cannot be evaluated as successes. What cannot be said within the grammar of modernization cannot be recognized as a contribution to governance. The fetish defines what counts.

 

The “community of the faithful”—the Party, its cadres, its institutional apparatus, and to varying degrees the broader population formed by governmental technologies—encounters the fetish not as arbitrary or contingent but as self-evident, necessary, and productive. This is not false consciousness in the vulgar Marxist sense; it is how a Lebenswelt constitutes itself through its central organizing sign. The external observer who sees “mere repetition” when the CPC deploys modernization for the fourteenth Five-Year Plan cycle is observing the fetish from outside the community of the faithful. From within, the sign is alive—it continues to organize, ground, amplify, incite, and manage because the community continues to invest it with these powers through iterative institutional practice. And this continued investment is not irrational: the fetish produces real institutional effects—resources flow, cadres are evaluated, legislation is enacted, subjects are formed. The sign works. That it works is what sustains the community’s investment. The circularity here is not vicious but constitutive: it is the structure of every functioning Lebenswelt, which maintains itself precisely by producing the conditions that make its continued maintenance appear natural and necessary.

 

F. The Harder Question: How Naturalized Assumptions Create Reality

 

The Lebenswelt thesis claims not merely that modernization interprets reality but that it constitutes it—that the categories through which the system encounters its world also produce the world it encounters. The prior draft of this section treated this as a “confirmation bias” risk to be guarded against. This fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between Lebenswelt and what other vocabularies call confirmation bias. A Lebenswelt is, in its essence, the structure that produces what would appear from outside as confirmation bias. It is the pre-given horizon that causes everything encountered within it to be interpreted through its categories—and more fundamentally, it is the horizon that determines what can be encountered at all. This is not an error of reasoning to be corrected by methodological vigilance; it is the condition of situated cognition as such. The system’s actors necessarily encounter their world through modernization categories—and this is not a deficiency but the way a lifeworld works. The question is not whether the Lebenswelt “biases” perception (it does, constitutively) but what the consequences of this particular constitution are for institutional practice and human experience.

 

The harder question—the genuine critical challenge—is therefore not “are we committing confirmation bias?” (yes, structurally, we are; the framework is the bias) but: how does one demonstrate that deeply naturalized assumptions do not merely interpret reality but create it? The answer operates through concrete institutional mechanisms, visible in the plenum documents themselves. When development is evaluated by modernization criteria, resources flow to activities that meet those criteria—and the institutional landscape is thereby shaped to confirm the criteria. When cadres are evaluated by modernization metrics, they orient their behavior accordingly—and institutional practice thereby conforms to modernizing expectations. When legislation must serve modernization, legal categories are constructed to enable modernizing activity—and the juridical order thereby produces the legal reality that modernization requires. When Five-Year Plans periodize action into phases toward “basically achieving socialist modernization,” every institutional actor experiences time as a progression toward modernization—and the temporal experience of governance is thereby constituted by the modernizing horizon. The Lebenswelt produces the reality it appears merely to describe. Each institutional mechanism—evaluation, resource allocation, legislation, temporal periodization—is simultaneously a mechanism of world-constitution and a mechanism of world-confirmation.

 

The critical question is therefore not “is this confirmation bias?” but: what are the consequences of this particular Lebenswelt constituting reality in its own image? What is excluded? What is rendered invisible? What costs are normalized? What alternatives are foreclosed? These are empirical and normative questions that the paper’s semiotic-phenomenological methodology can identify but cannot itself resolve. The framework demonstrates that modernization constitutes reality; it does not—and does not claim to—adjudicate whether the reality so constituted is just, sustainable, or desirable. That adjudication requires supplementary normative and empirical resources that lie beyond the scope of the present analysis [NOTE: cite relevant critical theory frameworks—Fraser, Sen, Nussbaum—that might supply such normative criteria]. But the framework does establish that the question must be posed—that the system’s apparent success in meeting modernization criteria cannot be taken as independent evidence for modernization’s value, since the criteria produce the evidence that appears to validate them. The circularity of self-confirmation is not a contingent defect but a structural feature of the Lebenswelt’s operation.

 

G. The Discourse-Reality Gap

 

A qualification must be sustained from the earlier analysis: the paper operates at the level of semiotic structure, not empirical verification of policy outcomes. The 3rd Plenum Decision may perform modernization’s architectonic function flawlessly at the level of discourse while the actual implementation of its reform measures remains fragmentary, contradictory, or incomplete. The 4th Plenum’s 15th Five-Year Plan Recommendations may organize heterogeneous domains into elegant temporal coherence while the actual five-year period unfolds through contingency, improvisation, and failure. The gap between discursive architecture and institutional practice is not a flaw in the paper’s methodology—the paper explicitly disclaims empirical verification of governance outcomes—but it is a limitation that must be acknowledged with full theoretical seriousness. What the documents evidence is the structure of official signification, not the state of institutional reality. The distinction is not incidental but methodologically constitutive: it delimits what the semiotic-phenomenological approach can and cannot claim.

 

Within the paper’s four-level model, this gap is structural rather than accidental. The plenum documents operate at Levels 1 and 2—abstract theoretical commitment and programmatic translation. The correspondence between these levels and Level 3 (individual-embodied experience) and Level 4 (subject-formation through governmental practice) is not guaranteed by semiotic coherence at the upper levels. A perfectly architectonic discourse may coexist with fragmented, resistant, or incoherent lived experience at the levels where governance touches individual subjects. The discourse-reality gap is therefore not a refutation of the thesis but a specification of its scope: the paper demonstrates how the Lebenswelt operates at the level of institutional signification; whether and how it successfully reproduces itself at the level of lived experience remains a research agenda requiring ethnographic, sociological, and implementation-evaluative methodologies that supplement rather than replace the semiotic-phenomenological approach [NOTE: cite this paper’s own discussion of the four-level model and its methodological limitations]. The gap is, moreover, itself a site of theoretical productivity: it is precisely in the space between discursive architecture and institutional practice that the dynamics of governance—compliance, resistance, adaptation, improvisation—become visible as objects of inquiry.

 

H. The Constitution of Confirmation Bias in Modernization

 

The plenum documents do not merely “support” the thesis—that formulation, characteristic of the prior draft’s engineering mentality, reduces phenomenological analysis to the accumulation of confirming instances. What the documents demonstrate is the thesis in action: the Lebenswelt reproducing itself through its institutional mechanisms; the fetish organizing reality for the community of the faithful; the modernizing grammar operating silently beneath the explicit discourse of reform, planning, and governance; and the recursive constitution of a reality that appears to confirm the categories through which it is apprehended. The 3rd Plenum Decision, the 15th Five-Year Plan Recommendations, and the supplementary institutional texts examined here are not evidence for the thesis; they are exhibits of the thesis—demonstrations of the phenomenological, semiotic, and fetishistic operations the paper describes, caught in the act of constituting the world they appear merely to interpret.

 

 

Section IX: The Constitutional Framework as Expression Rather than Container

 

The phenomenological consequence is that the Constitution should not be understood simply as a container into which political propositions are placed. A container model imagines a prior political reality on one side and a textual instrument on the other: the political system formulates its commitments, and the Constitution stores or announces them. The expression model reverses the emphasis. The constitutional text is a constitutive articulation of an already existing political lifeworld. It does not create modernization ex nihilo; it selects, stabilizes, translates, and institutionalizes meanings accumulated through Party theory, political practice, material development, and encounters with contradiction.

 

This explains the peculiar relationship among the Party Constitution, the Party’s fundamental political line, Congress reports, the constitutional preamble, constitutional provisions, legislation, planning, and administrative institutions. They are not isolated sources arranged only by formal hierarchy. They are stages in a process of semantic transformation. A contradiction is experienced; the Party diagnoses it; a political line gives the diagnosis programmatic form; theory condenses the line; a Congress resolution or report authorizes its doctrinal circulation; constitutional articulation gives it durable political-legal form; legislation distributes it into operative rules; administration implements it; social practice tests it; and the resulting practice generates a new contradiction.

 

The recursive circuit can therefore be stated in full: historical contradiction → Party diagnosis → political line → theoretical formulation → Congress resolution/report → constitutional articulation → legislation → administrative implementation → social practice → new contradiction → new theoretical articulation. The arrows should not be read as a mechanical sequence in which each stage merely transmits an unchanged message. Each stage translates and modifies the sign. The Constitution sits within the circuit as a site of stabilization and rearticulation, not as the point at which meaning ceases to move.

 

The Constitution’s authority is therefore not exhausted by its capacity to command. It also lies in its capacity to make a historically accumulated project appear as a coherent institutional present. It compresses the traces of revolution, construction, reform, opening, development, governance, civilization, and rejuvenation into a form that can guide legislation and administrative action. Compression inevitably produces abstraction and contestability. Yet that abstraction is precisely what permits the text to carry a changing project across time.

 

The expression model also clarifies why modernization appears differently at different constitutional levels. In the Party Constitution it can appear as a line, task, or theory of historical development. In the State Constitution it appears as a fundamental task, a civilizational orientation, and a distribution of institutional responsibilities. In legislation it becomes a purpose clause, a method of legal production, or a standard for governance capacity. In local regulation it becomes an account of how a particular place contributes to “Chinese modernization.” These are not repetitions in the narrow sense; they are translations across institutional contexts.

 

The Party’s fundamental political line is especially important within this structure because it mediates between ontology, contradiction, and institutional activity. It identifies China as a socialist order in a particular historical stage; identifies the historically specific contradictions that prevent that order from realizing its potential; and identifies modernization as the activity through which those contradictions are addressed. Modernization does not replace socialism or Party leadership. It is the operational form through which their relationship is rendered intelligible.

 

The Constitution therefore expresses a political lifeworld that it also helps to reproduce. It is neither a transparent mirror of social reality nor an autonomous command imposed upon society from nowhere. Its constitutional work is recursive: it gives durable form to inherited meanings, authorizes institutions capable of acting on those meanings, and supplies categories through which the consequences of action can later be recognized as new problems of political development.

 

A. The Four Constitutional Functions of Modernization

 

Modernization gives the Constitution at least four distinct but interdependent functions. These functions should not be confused with four separate clauses or textual techniques. They describe four ways in which the Constitution participates in the political-semantic life of the modernizing project: representational, constitutive, recursive, and temporal. Together they explain why the Constitution is neither merely descriptive nor merely a normative command. It is a temporalized institutional representation of an ongoing historical project.

 

First, the Constitution is representational. It represents the historically constituted modernizing project: the memory of national weakness and revolutionary transformation, the achievement of socialist construction, the developmental commitments of reform and opening, the institutionalization of governance, and the projected horizon of national rejuvenation. Representation here does not mean photographic description. The Constitution selects what the political order treats as historically decisive and presents those selections as the intelligible identity of the state and the Party.

 

Second, the Constitution is constitutive. It converts the modernizing project into legal-political institutions, powers, duties, fundamental tasks, and principles of organization. The movement from political line to constitutional text is not a change of vocabulary alone. It produces institutional subjects capable of carrying the project forward: state organs, legislative bodies, administrative systems, educational and scientific institutions, national defense structures, and legal mechanisms through which general commitments acquire operative form.

 

Third, the Constitution is recursive. It provides institutions capable of modifying themselves in response to changing contradictions. A recursive Constitution is not one that endlessly revises itself without continuity. It is one that incorporates mechanisms through which the political order can observe changes in society, economy, technology, ecology, and international position, then revise law, administration, planning, and political doctrine without abandoning the project that makes revision intelligible. The constitutional text stabilizes the possibility of institutional self-correction.

 

Fourth, the Constitution is temporal. It connects present institutional arrangements with projected future conditions. Its commitments are read against a developmental horizon in which the present is a stage, the future is an objective, and institutional adequacy is measured by the capacity to move between them. Temporalization permits the Constitution to be both authoritative and unfinished: authoritative because it stabilizes the direction of political action, unfinished because the meaning of that direction is re-specified as the political order encounters new contradictions.

 

The four functions become visible in the conceptual movement from the Four Modernizations to socialist modernization, from socialist modernization to socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics, from comprehensive construction of a socialist modernized country to Chinese modernization, and from Chinese modernization to modernization as the pathway to national rejuvenation. Each formulation represents continuity, constitutes new institutional emphases, permits recursive adaptation, and reorders the temporal relation between present achievement and future obligation.

 

The Constitution is therefore not best understood as a static container of a completed political order. It is an institutional form through which an ongoing project represents itself, builds its instruments, revises its capacities, and projects its continuity into an uncertain future. Modernization names the project, but the Constitution gives the project a durable form in which representation, institution-building, self-correction, and historical expectation can operate together.

 

B. Implications for Comparative Constitutional Theory

 

If the foregoing analysis is correct — if modernization functions as the Lebenswelt of Chinese constitutionalism in the phenomenological sense specified above — then significant consequences follow for comparative constitutional theory. The most immediate consequence is diagnostic: analyses that treat Chinese constitutional texts as failed or incomplete approximations of liberal constitutionalism commit what we may term a Lebenswelt category error. They misidentify the pre-theoretical horizon within which Chinese constitutional signs operate, and consequently misread those signs — attributing to them meanings drawn from a Lebenswelt (liberal individualism, social contract) that is not operative in the Chinese context.

 

Zhao Tingyang’s reconceptualization of the Tianxia system (天下) as a philosophical framework for political order provides important substantive content for understanding the civilizational self-understanding that underwrites Chinese-style modernization’s claim to distinctiveness. Tianxia supplies an account of an inclusive, hierarchical-but-not-exclusionary world-ordering principle rooted in Chinese philosophical resources. [NOTE: cite Zhao Tingyang, Tianxia Tixi: Shijie Zhidu Zhexue Daolun (天下体系：世界制度哲学导论) (2005); Zhao Tingyang, All Under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order (2021)]

 

The importance of Tianxia for this argument lies in the way it helps explain why Chinese-style modernization presents itself as a contribution to human civilization rather than merely as a national development strategy. Zhao provides a substantive account of what Chinese political order aspires to: an order that claims to integrate difference within a larger field of political coordination, and that refuses to treat the nation-state as the only possible horizon of political ordering. In this respect, Tianxia enriches the content-dimension of the civilizational claim and helps specify the signified toward which the language of a new form of human civilization points.

 

The critical qualification, however, is essential. Zhao’s Tianxia theory addresses the content of the civilizational claim, not the structure of the semiotic-phenomenological argument advanced here. It tells us something about what Chinese political order aspires to—the content of the signified—but it does not by itself theorize the sign-structure through which that content is constituted, transmitted, and reproduced as constitutional meaning. Tianxia does not analyze the semiotic mechanism of signification.

 

The paper therefore operates at a different analytical level. It asks not only “What does Chinese modernization aspire to?”—a question to which Zhao contributes substantially—but also “How does the sign-system of Chinese constitutionalism constitute and reproduce its meanings?” That latter question requires the semiotic-phenomenological apparatus developed here. Tianxia enriches the content of the analysis without displacing its structural framework; the two registers should be held together precisely because neither exhausts the other.

 

This category error manifests in several characteristic forms. The first is the 'implementation gap' narrative, which observes that Chinese constitutional provisions regarding rights, democracy, and rule of law are not 'implemented' in the manner that liberal constitutionalism would require, and concludes that Chinese constitutionalism is deficient — that it promises what it does not deliver. But this narrative presupposes that the signified of 'rights' in the Chinese constitutional text is the liberal signified (individual trumps against state power), and that the signified of 'democracy' is the liberal signified (competitive multi-party elections). If these signs are in fact signifying within a different Lebenswelt — if 'rights' signifies developmental entitlements to be progressively realized through modernization, and 'democracy' signifies consultative and participatory mechanisms that serve developmental governance — then the 'implementation gap' dissolves not because the gap does not exist empirically but because it has been mis-specified theoretically.

 

The second manifestation is the 'façade constitutionalism' narrative, which treats Chinese constitutional provisions as mere decorative cover for unconstrained authoritarian power. This narrative commits the inverse error: where the implementation gap narrative takes the signs too seriously (attributing to them liberal signifieds they do not carry), the façade narrative takes them too lightly (treating them as empty signifiers without genuine signifieds). Both errors derive from the same source — the failure to identify the Lebenswelt within which the signs operate and within which they are, in fact, doing meaningful semiotic work.

 

A third manifestation is the 'transitology' narrative, which reads Chinese constitutionalism as a way-station on an inevitable trajectory toward liberal constitutional democracy — as a regime 'in transition' whose constitutional arrangements are provisional and will eventually be superseded by genuinely liberal institutions. This narrative does not merely misidentify the Lebenswelt; it denies the existence of an alternative Lebenswelt altogether, treating liberal constitutionalism as the universal telos toward which all constitutional orders tend. The phenomenological analysis advanced here reveals this assumption for what it is: an ontologization of one particular Lebenswelt — an elevation of the pre-theoretical horizon of liberal constitutionalism to the status of a universal truth about the nature of constitutionalism as such. [NOTE: cite Frankenberg, Comparative Constitutional Studies (2018); Tushnet, Advanced Introduction to Comparative Constitutional Law (2014)]

 

The methodological implication for comparative constitutional theory is clear: comparison must begin not at the level of institutional arrangements or textual provisions but at the level of Lebenswelt identification. Before one can meaningfully compare constitutional orders, one must identify the pre-theoretical horizons within which they operate — the grounds of meaning that make their respective sign-systems intelligible. This does not mean that comparison is impossible or that evaluation is precluded — it means that comparison and evaluation must be grounded in an accurate identification of what is being compared and what standards of evaluation are appropriate to the objects under consideration. The failure to perform this preliminary Lebenswelt-identification produces not criticism but incomprehension — not engaged evaluation but categorical confusion.

 

This conclusion is methodological, not political. It is not a defense of Chinese constitutionalism, nor is it a claim that all Lebenswelten are equally desirable or that external criticism of a constitutional order is illegitimate. It is rather the claim that criticism, to be intelligible as criticism rather than mere miscomprehension, must be grounded in an accurate identification of what it criticizes. One may well conclude, after correctly identifying modernization as the Lebenswelt of Chinese constitutionalism and correctly interpreting its constitutional signs within that horizon, that this constitutional order subordinates values one holds dear — individual autonomy, political pluralism, constraints on state power — to developmental objectives one considers insufficient to justify such subordination. But this would be a genuine criticism, directed at the actual operative logic of Chinese constitutionalism, rather than a pseudo-criticism directed at a misidentified object.

 

The methodological posture can now be stated with greater precision. To identify modernization as the Chinese constitutional Lebenswelt is not to declare that modernization is the only value present, the only cause operating, or the only standard by which the order should be judged. It is to identify the horizon within which the order’s multiple values are arranged and through which their institutional relations become intelligible. The analysis therefore makes criticism more exact rather than less available: it directs criticism toward the operative logic of Chinese constitutionalism rather than toward an imagined liberal version of it.

 

It also prevents a false choice between treating modernization as mere rhetoric and treating it as an all-powerful explanatory cause. Modernization is neither a decorative vocabulary floating above institutions nor a deterministic force that mechanically produces every constitutional arrangement. It is a mediating semantic infrastructure. It links heterogeneous elements, orders their relations, and supplies the terms in which institutional adequacy and political failure can be recognized. Its force is therefore interpretive, organizational, and recursive.

 

The comparative task is consequently double. One must first reconstruct the Chinese sign-system from within its own sedimented history, and then one may evaluate the consequences of that system against external normative commitments. The order in which these tasks are performed matters. Evaluation without reconstruction risks category error; reconstruction without evaluation risks quiet naturalization. The semiotic-phenomenological method seeks to hold both apart long enough for each to become intellectually responsible.

 

Finally, the modernizing lifeworld should not be imagined as culturally uniform or socially uncontested. Sedimentation does not eliminate dissonance. It provides the vocabulary within which contestation is articulated: disputes over distribution become disputes about common prosperity; disputes over institutional design become disputes about governance modernization; disputes over development and ecological limits become disputes about ecological civilization; disputes over security and openness become disputes about the proper relation between self-reliance and reform. The existence of a common code does not imply the absence of struggle over its interpretation.

 

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[1] HarveyAI was used in the creation of this draft; prompt/response record on file with author; Poster created by ChatGPT