This paper presents a legal-civilizational prosecution of Xi Jinping's doctrine of "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming), which he has elevated into a defining claim of his rule and written into the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. It does not measure China against Western liberal or humanitarian standards, which the state has learned to deflect as foreign imposition. It measures China against the moral standard China claims for itself: the inheritance of Heaven and Shangdi, of Confucian benevolence, of Daoist harmony between humanity and nature, and of compassion toward sentient life, together with the constitutional and civilizational claims the state actively invokes for its own legitimacy. Judged by that internal standard, the paper establishes, the doctrine does not describe the civilization that exists. The argument proceeds by setting the doctrine beside the documented conduct of the state toward those who cannot compel their own protection: the tyranny masked as sovereignty in Xinjiang; the theft, trafficking, compression, terror, torture, and violent killing of dogs and cats across China, Vietnam, and the wider regional trade, of which the Yulin festival is the annual public spectacle rather than the whole of a year-round commerce; the trafficking of human beings shielded by connection and selective enforcement; and the state's retention of legal form without protective force. The paper demonstrates that these are not disparate failures but expressions of a single governing logic: the selective withdrawal of state protection from life that lacks the power to demand it, in a state whose surveillance, administrative, and infrastructural capacity is otherwise unmatched. The failure is therefore not incapacity but a direction of capacity, and the silence of the law is not neutrality but permission. To analyze this condition the paper develops and applies a set of forensic concepts extending the author's Soltani Order framework: the Sovereign Defect, the condition of a state that claims comprehensive authority but withholds it where the vulnerable require it; Legal Forfeiture, the abandonment of protective force where defenseless life depends on it; the Protection Fallacy, the false appearance that protection is universal when its distribution follows power; the Reversal of Sovereignty, the passage of practical authority from the sovereign that will not protect to the actor it will not restrain; the Self-Incriminating Defense, the structural condition in which every defense available to the state reverses into evidence for the indictment; the Primitive Disease beneath proclaimed advancement; and Civilizational Fraud, the falsification of a civilizational claim by the conduct it cannot survive. The paper concludes that what stands at the end of the examination is not an ecological civilization but Civilizational Fraud, and it directly addresses Xi Jinping with the only response capable of refuting that finding: not the suppression of the charge, but the correction of the condition that made it true.
Sahar Soltani (Fri,) studied this question.