This article presents a systematic analysis of the original bases of the Chinese political mentality, traditions of power and politics in the context of change. The phenomenon of the Chinese mentality is examined in its historical, theological, philosophical, political and psychological aspects. A model of the Chinese mentality is conceptualized by the authors as an anthropocentric, polytheistic (adogmatic), naturalistic, adaptive-imitative, reproductive and utilitarian system with high assimilative and regenerative potential, strategically set on borrowing vital innovations from the outside. The significance of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism as adogmatic, subjectless, orthopraxic and inclusive cults is addressed and legalism is described as a political doctrine in the positivist sense. The article discusses the legitimizing, prescriptive and protective role of traditions and the installation-programming value of the rituals and ceremonies system in the structure of the Chinese mental model. The authors advance the thesis that the absence of the foundations of transcendental, dogmatic thinking in China’s political mentality determines its inability to perform effective mental-political expansion on a global scale.

In this second part of their article the authors examine the particularities of power in the Chinese ritualistic society, it impersonalism, the mental capacity of the political community and the problems of its modernization. The article concludes that beginning in the second half of the 20th century, China sought for the first time in its history to combine adaptive-imitative and reproductive-utilitarian tradition with the realization of a subjective role, adapting and repeating the lessons of the achievements of the Soviet Union and copying the principles of economy, the turnover of political elites and standards of consumer civilization from referenced subjects of the West. Keeping the basics of Chinese identity, taking from outside and calculating mental models, the Chinese Communist Party is organizing the construction of a bourgeois society on borrowed models. In the 21st century the Chinese mentality, with its pragmatism, orientation towards material benefits, Sino-centrism and arrogance is not producing innovation and does not offer the world civilizational alternatives, creative ideas, cultural landmarks, philosophical meanings or images of a desirable future.