Ideological engineering in the evolution of China's “Common Values of All Mankind” in the era of Xi Jinping

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has elaborated a panoply of global norms in the name of “mankind”. This includes the Common Values of All Mankind – peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom – propagated since 2015. The chapter asks how the concept has been crafted, by whom, for which underlying purposes and what this implies for the role of ideology in the Xi era. It employs an analytical approach of ideological engineering based on formalised language as a form of power to reconstruct the concept’s evolution along a ladder process of canonisation and to probe into its most contested normative claims.