China Power | Politics | East Asia

How China Became the First Airtight Empire

Beijing rewrote two slogans before it sealed the country – once to rewrite history, once to prewrite the future.

This is Part I of a four-part series on “The First Airtight Empire” – analyzing the historically unprecedented closure that the Chinese Communist Party is constructing in 2026, and how that closure has rendered American policy assumptions obsolete. Subsequent installments will examine the three lockdowns through which the Chinese population was conditioned to accept the airtight closure that followed (Part II), the four-dimensional architecture by which the closure has been mechanically engineered (Part III), and the long historical frame and policy implications that follow (Part IV).

By “airtight,” in this series, I mean a closure engineered to ensure that any politically consequential outside “fresh air” – any information, any human contact, any idea capable of forming a basis for organized dissent – is structurally eliminated from circulation inside the country. Innocuous traffic is permitted; politically active traffic is engineered out of the system. The selectivity is the point. 

The first place to see this closure being constructed is not at the border or in the Great Firewall, but in the language Beijing has been using to explain closure to itself. As George Orwell famously observed, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” True to this maxim, Beijing prepared the narrative for its airtight closure first by rewriting history, and then by prewriting the future. Crucially, this narrative re-engineering is deployed strategically – sometimes prospectively before an action to authorize it, and sometimes retrospectively afterward to justify it – ensuring any physical closure is thoroughly normalized.

An Innocuous-Looking Historical Correction

In 2022, the State-affiliated journal Historical Research (历史研究), the highest-profile official venue for Chinese historiography published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, released a special article authored by the Research Group of the Chinese Academy of History – an institutional writing team operating under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guidance, not an individual scholar. The article, titled “A New Investigation of the ‘Closed-Country’ Question in the Ming and Qing Periods,” advanced a single core proposal: the standard Chinese term for late-imperial closure – 闭关锁国, bìguān suǒguó, “seal the gates, lock the country” — should be replaced with 自主限关, zìzhǔ xiànguān, “sovereignly restrict the gates.” The historical events under discussion – the Canton System, the Macartney refusal, the prohibition on coastal trade – were not in dispute. What was being changed was the moral and political weight those events carried.

“Seal the gates, lock the country” – the term embedded in Chinese textbooks since 1949, the term anchoring the post-1978 reform consensus – frames China’s late-imperial closure as a civilizational catastrophe. It produced the Opium Wars, the unequal treaties, the entire century of humiliation. It is the negative pole against which the entire reform-and-opening narrative defined itself. 

“Sovereignly restrict the gates” reframes the same events as a sovereign choice – measured, defensive, dignified, exercising what the article explicitly calls a state’s prerogative over “whether to open, how to open, the scope of opening.” The narrative authority has been transferred from one script (closure was bad; opening saved us) to another (closure was a sovereign choice we may well have to make again).

The article generated immediate controversy among Chinese historians; the Financial Times Chinese edition published a critical response within weeks. The political function of the linguistic substitution was clear to Chinese intellectuals at the time. 

What was less obvious then was the pointed timing. The article appeared in the months immediately following the Shanghai lockdown of spring 2022 – a two-month closure of a city of 25 million, executed at the cost of the city’s standing as an international financial center – and immediately preceding the 20th Party Congress of October 2022, at which Xi Jinping secured his unprecedented third term. 

Looking backward, the historical reframing legitimized the Shanghai closure as a sovereign right rather than a failure. Looking forward, it prepared the historical script for the political closures the 20th Party Congress would formalize. When a regime begins to reframe its predecessors’ closures as sovereign choices rather than as failures, it is preparing the historical justification for its own.

Prewrite the Future: Three Layers, Three Audiences

Four years later, in March 2026, a second substitution appeared – but in a way that reveals more about how narrative re-engineering actually proceeds in the Chinese political system than the 2022 episode did. This time it is prewriting the future of China’s economic and technological trajectory.

For most of the past decade, the central organizing concept of Chinese industrial policy was 弯道超车, wāndào chāochē, “overtaking on the curve” – a metaphor from auto racing in which China was the trailing car closing the gap on Western leaders at technological inflection points. The metaphor required a shared track: to overtake a rival on the curve, you must both be on the curve. It required Chinese researchers published in Nature, Chinese students at MIT, Chinese factories in global supply chains. It presumed the world’s race was a race China would win.

In the 2026 Government Work Report delivered by Premier Li Qiang on March 5, 弯道超车 is conspicuously absent. So is its emerging replacement, 换道领跑 (huàndào lǐngpǎo, “switching lanes to lead”). The earlier slogan,........

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