Welcome

Emmanuel Dubois de Prisque

China and its Demons At the Source of Sino-Totalitarianism Publication date : November 2, 2022

Emmanuel Dubois de Prisque is an associate researcher at the Thomas-More institute. He co-wrote La Chine e(s)t le Monde, published by Odile Jacob in 2019, with Sophie Boisseau du Rocher. He has lived in Japan and Taiwan and, for the past thirty years, has focused his work on China.

Analysts have put forward several ideological (Marxism, Communism, etc.) and socio-political (authoritarian capitalism) arguments to explain China’s increasingly totalitarian government. As if, in their eyes, Chinese culture and civilisation was untouchable and had nothing to do with this evolution.
This book takes a different stance. It reveals the religious and sacrificial structure of the political sovereign that has shaped the current regime, by examining Ancient China and Imperial China. How else can one understand the “social credit system” that measures people’s virtue, the desire to “Sinicise” religion, the obsession with ideological “purity”, the battle against the pandemic’s “demon”, or the government’s disconcerting mix of good conscience and cruelty?
Emmanuel Dubois de Prisque draws on China’s founding myths and history to shed light on a darker side that contemporary China prefers to ignore. The author underlines the risks, as China seems determined to impose its own cultural standards on the world, faced with a weak West, mired in its own guilt.