Just as the initial driver of the desire to tell positive stories and increase Chinese soft power was a defensive one, so too was the Chinese rejection of the truly universal nature of dominant norms and practices of international politics. Rather than consider China against supposedly universal definitions and concepts, the aim was to ‘Sinify’ them. To establish understandings and definitions that emerged from China's own history and thinking and reflected China's specific developmental experiences. This would then generate specific China relevant definitions that should provide the basis for any consideration and/or evaluation of Chinese policy and practice rather than using those developed and deployed by others that had emerged from Western philosophies and histories.

The logical extension of this thinking, continually repeated by Chinese leaders and scholars, is that all countries need to do the same to develop individual bespoke nationalized norms and theories. The same reasoning applies to political systems and economic models as well. So, for example, just as China developed its own developmental path and did not follow any other pre-existing model – even socialist models explored elsewhere – so ‘other countries should not copy the Chinese model’ (Xiao Xinfa, 2018: 26). They should not follow the specifics of what China did, but instead copy the same methodology and ‘embark on a political development path that suits its own national conditions and conforms to its own characteristics’ (Zhou, 2018: 13). The outcome should be a system of normative, theoretical and developmental anarchy. Anarchy is used here in its IR theoretical meaning of an absence of a higher form of authority above the sovereign state where no interpretation dominates, and each country pursues its own development path and defines its own set of national norms and principles. The result should be a global order characterized by massive diversity, with the common nature of values, norms and principles stripped back to very basic elements and only the most basic components of the ‘common values’ of existence (Yan Shuhan, 2018: 20).

The need to embrace diversity is one of the core principles of the CSFM, and marks it out as a very different type of global ambition than those that conceive of building a community of common (liberal) values.