Xi Uses Dujiangyan Visit to Press Cultural Confidence

Xinhua has republished a feature tying Xi Jinping’s December 2025 encounter with French President Emmanuel Macron at the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation works to a central theme of his cultural thought: that “only a nation with cultural confidence can stand firm, hold its ground, and go far.” The piece, published October 6 as part of the outlet’s “近镜头·习近平的文化足迹” (Close-up Lens: Xi Jinping’s Cultural Footprints) series, recasts the Chengdu meeting nearly ten months later around heritage, identity, and statecraft.

A Meeting by the Water

On December 5, 2025, Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan received Macron and his wife Brigitte at Dujiangyan in Sichuan Province. According to a Xinhua account of the visit, the two leaders walked the Yanzhong Path together and sat in the Huaigu Pavilion by the river, where they “tasted tea and discussed the world.”

It was there that Xi delivered the line now serving as the feature’s headline. Speaking of the relationship between cultural confidence and national rejuvenation, he said a strong nation requires “the accumulation of material civilization and also the elevation of spiritual civilization.” He described Chinese civilization as “the only great civilization that has continued unbroken and developed to the present day in state form,” citing its continuity, innovation, unity, inclusivity, and peacefulness.

Macron, for his part, called Dujiangyan scenic and praised the engineering skill behind a project built more than 2,000 years ago that still functions today. He noted that “French-Chinese cooperation can pursue shared development and benefit both peoples.”

Why Dujiangyan

Dujiangyan, on the Min River at the edge of the Sichuan Basin, was built around 256 BCE during the Qin state period and is traditionally credited to the engineer Li Bing and his son. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a showcase of ancient hydraulic engineering. Its governing maxim — “deep dredging of the channel, low construction of the weir” — is still carved on the stone wall of the Erwang Temple.

Xi leaned on that history as a metaphor for governance. “Each time I come to Dujiangyan,” he said, “I feel the greatness of our forebears — adapting to local conditions, following the flow, the unity of heaven and humanity, and managing water for the people — and draw wisdom for governance from it.”

The feature also points to the present: the Dujiangyan irrigation district is upgrading “from traditional experiential water management toward digital ‘smart water,’” using digital twin systems and big-data integration to monitor upstream Min River inflows and sluice-gate operations, according to Liu Qiang of the Sichuan Dujiangyan Water Conservancy Development Center. The message is of continuity — a 2,000-year-old system refreshed by modern technology.

A Familiar Frame

The “cultural confidence” formulation is not new. It is a pillar of Xi Jinping’s Cultural Thought, first formally articulated at the October 2023 National Conference on Publicity and Ideological-Cultural Work and often described as the “fourth confidence” alongside road, theoretical, and system confidence. The exact phrase on cultural confidence has been invoked by Xi and amplified across state media since at least 2024, including in a People’s Daily commentary from January of that year.

The “近镜头” series launched in July 2025 as a Xinhua domestic-department and “Xinhua First Studio” production, producing short, visually driven features that tie Xi’s inspection tours and diplomatic engagements to cultural themes — from the Grand Canal to the “Six-Foot Alley” to archaeological sites. The Dujiangyan piece is a later installment in the same effort.

Diplomacy Through Heritage

The setting itself carried diplomatic meaning. Hosting Macron outside Beijing at a culturally symbolic venue echoed Xi’s earlier decision to receive him in the Pyrenees in 2024 — a deliberate style of leveraging heritage sites for relational diplomacy. During the December 2025 visit, the two countries issued joint statements covering global governance, climate and environmental cooperation, peaceful nuclear energy, agriculture and food, and the situations in Ukraine and Palestine. Foreign Minister Wang Yi took part in the activities.

There was a practical follow-through as well: in March 2026, Dujiangyan kiwi and tea — both national geographic-indication products — appeared at the Paris Agricultural Expo in what was described as a continuation of the December exchange.

Reading the Framing

The feature is, by genre, an official narrative rather than neutral reporting — produced to advance Xi Jinping’s Cultural Thought, and sourced entirely from Chinese state and state-affiliated outlets. One factual claim in particular warrants care: Xi’s description of Dujiangyan as “the only ancient water-conservancy project in the world still in use today” is an official framing that has been publicly disputed by scholars who cite other still-functioning ancient systems, such as certain Roman aqueducts.

That caveat aside, the article’s underlying message is both cultural and political. By pairing a 2,000-year-old engineering marvel with state-of-the-art digital water management, and by pairing a historic civilization with a major-power relationship, the piece argues that heritage and modernization are complementary, not opposed — and that confidence in the former underwrites the latter.

What to Watch

For observers of Chinese messaging, the timing and packaging matter. The feature revives a high-profile diplomatic moment to reinforce a doctrine that runs through domestic ideological work, cultural policy, and foreign engagement alike. Whether the cultural-confidence frame continues to shape China’s diplomacy — and its self-presentation to partners such as France — will be visible in the coming series installments and in the next high-level exchanges.