In recent months, Islamist extremists’ killing of Christians in Nigeria have captured international headlines. When President Trump called for U.S. military support to protect Nigeria’s Christians and later delivered on those words, his actions reverberated far beyond Western audiences. While many endorsed the strikes on extremist strongholds, African and Chinese media reframed them as “civilizational aggression”; Western intrusion disguised as defense of freedom, and when Trump ordered the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Beijing drew from the same propaganda playbook, attacking the United States as a blatant bully.
In this recasting, Western civilization—rooted in Judeo-Christian belief—remains imperious and dangerous. Beijing’s alternative narrative, amplified in major African and Chinese outlets, elevated “non-interference” as the superior moral path to peace. Citing China’s Foreign Ministry, Chinese media condemn U.S actions as violations of “civilizational equality” and instances of “naked hegemonic bullying,” while denying the plight of persecuted Nigerian believers as a fabrication by American conservatives.
A Civilizational War
Despite China’s deep financial and military investments in Global South countries, its hard power remains limited in these areas, especially militarily. What Beijing can do is launch aggressive propaganda warfare against the United States, with civilizational struggle at the core of CCP’s narrative.
Chinese state media and scholars often portray U.S. interventions as a “civilizational push,” claiming Washington’s appeals to democracy masked a “God-given” belief in Western hegemony. Chinese diplomats declared that “the American empire cannot coexist with other civilizations,” while Beijing poses as the protector of “civilizational sovereignty,” an atheistic Marxist state presenting itself as guardian of peace, religious diversity, and tolerance against a civilization grounded in faith.
Underneath this rhetoric lies a clash between two beliefs. On one side stand Western Judeo-Christian convictions that all humans are created equal in God’s image and thus possess inherent dignity and rights that no state can revoke. On the other stands Marxism’s claim that history is driven by class struggle and material power: individuals are not bearers of inalienable rights but instruments in a collective struggle, with rights supplied and withdrawn by the Party.
Xi’s Four Initiatives: A Civilizational Strategy
From Africa to Latin America and beyond, Xi Jinping’s Global Civilizational Initiative (GCI) is reshaping how religious societies understand civilization, sovereignty, and their relationship with China. The goal is to sell China’s “non-interference” model as morally superior to Western ideas of democracy, rule of law, and human rights, while defining which religions or civilizational views are acceptable and which must be limited.
The GCI sits alongside the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, and the Global Governance Initiative as pillars of the CCP’s long-term strategy to reshape global order. As a Marxist, atheist regime that views religion as a source of instability, Beijing shows little genuine concern for African Christian or Muslim welfare. Yet Xi presents China as the post-colonial answer to Judeo-Christian civilization—a model that promises dignity granted by a regime rather than a Creator, order sustained by surveillance and suppression, and equality without individual rights. The GCI’s softer language of equality and pluralism obscures its Marxist origins and the CCP’s domestic practice of religious control.
By recasting “religion” as mere “culture,” the CCP blurs the spiritual and moral stakes of belief. It portrays the atheist state as a respectful partner while labeling Western defenders of religious freedom and democracy as intrusive moralizers. For the West, human rights arise from the conviction that all humans are created equally by God and thus possess inherent freedom of conscience, worth, and dignity. The CCP’s Marxist atheism denies individual rights, granting moral legitimacy only to the collective—and its representative, the Party—as the arbiter of social freedom, with individual liberty expendable when it conflicts with Party interests.
The CCP notion of “civilizational equality” is therefore a bluff. Behind talk of cultural diversity lies a monopoly on interpretation: Beijing decides which “civilizations,” religions, and truths are legitimate. The CCP reframes western intervention as aggression while exporting an authoritarian model that denies genuine pluralism, praising regimes like Maduro’s for upholding a “multipolar civilizational order” defined by Beijing.
Weaponizing Post-Colonial Grievance
Xi’s key instrument for winning hearts in the Global South is post-colonial grievance. Many nations still bear deep scars from Western racial hierarchies and imperial history. China presents itself as a fellow victim of colonial humiliation that rose through self-reliance and CCP-led class struggle. Xi’s message flatters Global South elites by offering equality and “brotherhood” without Western interference—while replacing the Judeo-Christian ethics with a Marxist relativism in which power and material interests, not God-given rights, determine truth and justice. The GCI is a calculated tactic: downplay spirituality, emphasize cultural heritage, and tap into resentment toward the West and demands for equal partnerships.
Many Global South leaders do not see the Marxist-atheist hand beneath this otherwise benign civilizational rhetoric. Behind the scenes, Party-aligned universities, schools devoted to Marxism, and think tanks translate Xi’s domestic ideological campaigns into exportable frameworks for Africa, the Arab world, and beyond. Their conferences, publishing platforms, and “people-to-people” exchanges produce language about civilizational exchange that dilutes explicit Marxism while preserving its assumptions about class struggles. Elites encounter curated environments designed to “tell China’s story well,” hearing constant reassurances that Beijing respects religion, culture, and sovereignty more than Washington.
This propaganda pays strategic dividends. The uncritical media coverage in the Global South of Beijing’s support for authoritarian governments—even as Christian massacres are denied or downplayed—often comes from outlets cultivated through direct investments, all-expenses-paid exchange programs, “friendship” collaborations with Chinese propaganda agencies. The CCP builds loyalty with global South diplomats, academics, business leaders, through curated dialogues and paid showcase tours that tout Chinese civilizational governance and “harmonious” religious and ethnic relations.
At the core, this is a war over what it means to be human. Beijing defames a civilization that believes in God-given human dignity while propagating another that claims legitimacy and peace emerge only from class struggle, guided by a Party that decides whose rights count.
Carrots Abroad, Sticks at Home
Beijing’s civilizational bluff is exposed by its domestic practice. Abroad, the CCP’s global outreach uses carrots to preach civilizational coexistence; at home, it uses sticks—surveillance, regulation, and ideological instruction—against its own religious communities. Chinese Christians have faced a new wave of repression since October, marked by intensified surveillance, closures of unregistered churches, and detentions of prominent pastors.
This escalation coincides with the rollout of the September 2025 “Norms for Religious Personnel Online Conduct”—the most restrictive internet regulations to date for Chinese believers. Under the new rules, all online religious activity must conform to CCP doctrine, prohibit foreign contact, restrict individual usage of online tools for religious purposes, ban religious education for minors, forbid religious outreach, further limiting faith in digital space. Further AI-enabled surveillance supercharges these efforts.
Why Washington and Its Partners Should Care
Xi’s GCI is not an abstract cultural theory but a sophisticated campaign harnessing post-colonial grievance, Marxist doctrine, and new technology. It assures developing nations of respect for religious diversity, sovereignty, and partnership while exporting a domestic template of control that normalize authoritarianism and sideline Western influence. When Washington Speaks out for persecuted Christians or defend the rule of law, Beijing counters with propaganda by accusing the United States of “God-given” arrogance and bullying, while depriving its own citizens from practicing religion freely.
Washington and its allies must put moral clarity at the heart of engagement. Religious liberty should be a core element of the United States’ strategy toward the Global South, not a peripheral cause. Diplomacy should expose the Marxism nature of CCP’s civilizational push, revealing the inconsistency between Beijing’s rhetoric abroad and its domestic action. Finally, the United States and its partners should empower Global South communities by recognizing and countering propaganda while articulating their own visions of freedom rooted in the belief of equal worth of every human.
