This essay focuses on the notion of “historicism” and its importance to contemporary China. Historicism is a worldview that appeared first in early nineteenth-century Germany as a response to the Napoleonic invasion following the French revolution. Against the French insistance that their values were universal, the Germans argued instead that local culture, as manifested particularly in the state, remained primordial. Xu’s argument is that China’s current defense of the “uniqueness” of Chinese culture is in fact a reenactment of the original German reaction, and serves the same purpose: to rally a weaker people around a state so as to resist calls to embrace universal values. Xu’s argument is that such claims open the door to political manipulations that exagerate the differences between China and “the West” in order to strengthen the state at the expense of the individual or of civil society. Xu insists that the dichotomy between local “culture” and universal “civilization” is false, and that China, as a great power, must embrace universality and make its own contribution to world civilization.