In the document of recommendations for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30), adopted at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee from October 20 to 23, the goal of building a Beautiful China has been brought to the center of the national vision. It is more than an environmental aspiration. It represents a philosophical return through the lens of the present—a renewal of China’s traditions that view beauty, order and virtue as inseparable.

The emphasis on a Beautiful China reaffirms that modernization must be measured not only by prosperity, but by the quality of harmony—between people and place, economy and ecology, and material life and spiritual cultivation. It evokes a civilization axiom: Beauty is the highest form of order.

The cosmology of place

Few spaces express this worldview more vividly than the city of Beijing.

Its design, with the central axis roughly following the meridian, manifests a cosmological geometry that has shaped both urban experience and political meaning. The line that courses through the Drum and Bell Towers, the Forbidden City (the imperial palace complex—Ed.) and other ancient landmarks is as much a spatial axis as it is a moral and metaphysical one.

Here, the city becomes a diagram of the cosmos. The orderly layout of the Forbidden City symbolizes heaven and earth. Governance itself was architectural—an act of aligning space with the universe’s rhythm.

Beijing is where cosmology, architecture and affect converge. The built environment is not inert; it organizes how people dwell, perceive and feel. The rhythm of courtyards, the repetition of gates and the quiet balance of symmetry give aesthetic form to the moral ideal of harmony.

This intertwining of cosmology and design reveals something essential about Chinese governmentality: To govern well is to dwell well. Governance is not only an exercise of authority but of cultivation—the crafting of environments in which beauty and virtue can appear.

Beauty and moral order

This idea has deep roots in China’s philosophical tradition. The two-millennia-old Book of Rites (a foundational text of ancient Chinese ritual, governance and social ethics—Ed.) teaches that proper order in ritual and conduct is itself an aesthetic act. Beauty here is not ornamental; it is ethical. The harmonizing of music, movement and form mirrors the harmonizing of emotions and intentions within the individual and the community.

Similarly, the Book of Songs (China’s first anthology of?poems—Ed.) locates beauty in the everyday rhythms of life: the changing seasons, the songs of farmers and the flow of rivers. These poems portray a world where emotion and environment are entwined, where feeling takes shape through participation in the cycles of nature.

To appreciate beauty, then, is to dwell rightly within the world. The philosopher Zhang Zai of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) expressed this vision in his essay Ximing (Western Inscription): “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I find an intimate place in their midst.”

This is the principle of tian ren he yi—the unity of heaven and humanity. Beauty arises when human aspiration aligns with law of nature. It is a way of knowing and being that binds aesthetics, ethics and ecology into one.

From ecology to?phenomenology

The contemporary call for a Beautiful China embraces this lineage and extends harmony into the phenomenological realm—the lived experience of place.

Beauty today is not confined to temples or gardens; it emerges in the affordances of everyday life—everything the environment offers to the individual. Beauty creates invitations: It draws people to notice, to care and to engage. A clean riverbank, a restored wetland or a tree-lined street does not simply exist—it calls to us. It awakens what ancient thinkers called gan tong, the resonance between self and world.

When governance cultivates such environments, it is shaping more than the physical; it is nurturing attentiveness, empathy and belonging. Beautiful China thus seeks to create spaces that reconnect people with the living world—particularly within the urban fabric. It reminds us that the good life is one of participation and experience.

The aesthetics of?governance

Over the past decade, China’s concept of ecological civilization has guided national policy, embedding ecological principles in law, planning and technology. The emphasis on beauty adds a new dimension: It grounds the initiative with deep aesthetic and moral foundations.

From the design of “sponge cities” that breathe with water, to the rural revitalization strategy that covers aspects including culture and ecology, these programs exemplify governance as cultivation. They echo the belief that moral order and aesthetic order are one and the same. In other words, that a well-governed state should be, in the deepest sense, beautiful.

Beauty thus becomes a measure of good governance: not the luxury of the few, but the shared condition of collective flourishing. Beautiful China is central to common prosperity.

A civilizational offering

Modernization, if it is to endure, must also nourish the soul. The Beautiful China vision suggests that prosperity without grace, or progress without resonance,?is incomplete.

Confucius (551-479 B.C.) said, “The wise find joy in water; the benevolent find joy in mountains.” (This is from The Analects of Confucius, a collection of the revered Chinese philosopher’s sayings—Ed.)

The wise flow with the world’s rhythms; the benevolent dwell in its constancy. This is the art of living that Beautiful China seeks to recover—a civilization of flow, balance and stillness amid motion.

In an age of ecological crisis and spiritual fatigue, this orientation carries global significance. It reminds the world that beauty is not a luxury, but a necessity. Beauty is the condition for sustaining life in harmony.

Civilization itself is a work of art, and to govern well is to design the world so that beauty may appear.

The author is an adjunct professor at the Queensland University of Technology.