China, Simulacra, and the Death of Authenticity

When copies triumph and the last ember of taste fades

Alexander Dugin argues that China produces only simulacra, exposing the West’s empty claims to authenticity and revealing that true discernment belongs to the aristocratic spirit alone.

If one looks closely at China, it becomes obvious that it produces only simulacra. One can try Chinese whiskey or drive a Chinese car. It seems like the thing, and yet not the thing at all. Here we find ourselves at a loss. After Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese learned to copy absolutely anything with perfect accuracy. But they do not create anything new. Do you know why? Because in Chinese tradition — in Confucianism, in Daoism, and even in Buddhism, which is Indo-European in origin but tamed by China — the new belongs to the cursed domain. And it is rightly placed there.

Copying is safe. Creating is dangerous. That is why, as art critic Dmitry Khvorostov aptly observed, Chinese art — even avant-garde art — produces only ornament. Where the European experiences a psychic (or aesthetic) rupture, the Chinese produces ornament. Nothing more.

The Chinese are a profoundly mentally healthy people. Therefore, they produce only simulacra.

But how can one distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic? Here the question extends far beyond China.

For someone whose Dasein¹ exists inauthentically, originals and fakes do not exist. He simply has no capacity to tell the genuine from the cheap imitation. Because he himself is a fake. Even if he is at the peak of wealth and possesses enormous sums of money. Super-rich people are surrounded by pitiful trinket-like counterfeits, while convinced that they live their lives amid originals. Because their very being is worthless. Their Dasein exists as das Man,² and therefore their taste and their ability to discern are deeply plebeian.

What distinguishes an aristocrat from a plebeian is neither social status nor wealth, but the ability to discern. I think this is exactly what Lord Henry said to Dorian Gray, though I am not sure. Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin³ definitely said it to me (or maybe not; I am beginning to confuse personal history with world history…). He emphasized, above all, the ability to discern between copy and original. It is in this sense that we have Henry Suso’s The Exemplar.⁴ That something exists as an exemplar is given only through subtle inner experience. The experience of God.

The Chinese have settled the matter: they produce counterfeits, setting the mystery of the original aside. It is not their concern.

Russian consumers are even more foolish — resembling cheerful Ukrainian peasant girls from the most provincial backwater villages: they breathe in the aroma, savor the aftertaste, and distinguish the expensive from the cheap. Yet they themselves are nothing more than trinkets, mass-produced objects with greater or lesser flaws.

For the Chinese, this poses no problem. In fact, for them, there is no problem at all.

The European ability to distinguish the original from the fake is the last fading ember of aristocratic taste. A distant echo of an epoch when it still mattered. Only, perhaps, Princess Vittoria de Aliata⁵ with her marvelous castle or the father of our splendid Grand Duke George Mikhailovich⁶ are capable of perceiving this difference. The rest — no way.

That is precisely why China is invincible. It has exposed the modern West. The West claims authenticity, while having not the slightest understanding of it.

Baudrillard was very perceptive. We live in the third order of simulacra.⁷ You should not claim authenticity. That only makes you even more foolish and vulgar.

Whiskey, wine, and perfume now have no flavor except the one you are told they have.

Abandon this chimera of conscience — sales managers do the thinking for you.

(Translated from the Russian and annotated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)

1. Translator’s note (TN): Dasein (“being-there”) is Martin Heidegger’s term for human existence understood as the unfolding of Being itself. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger uses it to describe the unique mode of being through which humans encounter the world and disclose meaning.

2. TN: Das Man (“the They”) is Heidegger’s term for inauthentic existence, in which individuals conform to impersonal social norms rather than choosing authentically. It denotes the everyday condition of dissolving into the anonymous collective voice of society.

3. TN: Yevgeny Vsevolodovich Golovin (1938-2010) was a Russian poet, essayist, and esoteric thinker associated with the Yuzhinsky Circle, an underground intellectual group in Moscow from the 1960s to the 1980s. Drawing on hermeticism, German Romanticism, medieval mysticism, and Nietzschean philosophy, Golovin cultivated an aristocratic aesthetic opposed to Soviet materialism and mass society. Known for blurring personal biography with historical myth, he became a cult figure of post-Soviet esoteric culture.

4. TN: Henry Suso (Heinrich Seuse in German, ca. 1295-1366), a German Dominican mystic, wrote The Exemplar as an autobiographical mystical treatise. Composed in the third person to avoid pride, it presents the “Servant of Eternal Wisdom” (Suso himself) as a living model for the soul’s ascent through suffering, renunciation, and divine union. By invoking Suso here, Dugin suggests that the capacity to recognize the authentic depends on a cultivated inner perception akin to mystical discernment.

5. TN: Princess Vittoria Colonna di Paliano de Aliata (1953–2012) was the last resident of the Villa Valguarnera in Bagheria, Sicily, one of the island’s great aristocratic villas. More than a noblewoman, she was also a translator of Ernst Jünger and an active participant in European traditionalist circles. Her villa became a gathering place for writers, artists, and thinkers, including figures from the European New Right, and she herself was close to Guido Giannettini and other Italian right-wing intellectuals.

6. TN: Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov (b. 1981) is the only son of Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia, heiress of the Romanov line, and Prince Franz Wilhelm of Prussia, a member of the German Hohenzollern dynasty. His father converted to Eastern Orthodoxy upon marriage, taking the name Mikhail Pavlovich, and has been styled a grand duke in monarchist circles. Through his Russian mother and German father, George unites the Romanov and Hohenzollern traditions, linking two of Europe’s most prominent dynastic houses, and his family remains closely associated with monarchist and traditionalist currents. Today George resides primarily in Moscow, while his father lives in Germany.

7. TN: Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was a French philosopher and cultural theorist best known for his concept of simulacra and hyperreality. By the “third order of simulacra,” he meant a stage in which signs and images no longer represent reality but instead generate their own self-referential reality.