Opinion How China challenges the modern world
China intends modernisation without becoming modern,and while rejecting Enlightenment values
This week,Tsinghua University celebrates its centennial. Founded in 1911 in deep national humiliation,Tsinghua University was initially funded by the infamous Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship,which was essentially war reparations China paid to the US. Since then,Tsinghua has epitomised the Chinese experience of modernisation. As Chinas emergence shakes the core of the international system as we know it,Tsinghuas centennial offers an opportunity for reflection.
Many see Chinas rise in political,economic and military terms. But the Chinese renaissance is in its essence a moral and intellectual challenge to the modern world. For nearly 300 years,the European Enlightenment was the intellectual and moral source of change,if not legitimacy,for mankind. Yet the tidal wave of Westernisation also brought about along with the glory of economic and technological transformation confusion,defeatism and even catastrophe to non-Western civilisations.
The product of the Enlightenment was modernism centered on individualism,rights and science a unique Western heritage.
The first division of Christianity and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire more than 1,500 years ago put the West on the road of separated political and religious authorities. The consolidation of power by the landed aristocracy,legalised by the Magna Carta,made balance of power a unique characteristic within Western political structure. The Reformation unintentionally contributed to making the individual the sovereign and basic unit of society.
All of these historic and cultural developments culminated during the Enlightenment and created the unstoppable meta-narrative: modernism. Modernism facilitated science and the industrial revolution and led to the greatest advancement of material power in the history of man: modernisation.
The individual,conceived as rational and endowed with God-given rights,sits at the center of the value system of modernism. These individuals,combined with the cultural traditions of their homelands,created the nation-state. Balance of power and electoral democracy became the defining political characteristics of these nation-states. The ownership of private property formed their social and economic foundation what we now call capitalism.
Almost all non-Western civilisations,including China,attempted to import the political,social and economic values of modernism to recreate their own cultures in order to achieve modernisation. For over a century,modernism was seen as the only route to modernisation. Even non-liberal experiments such as Soviet communism were essentially (though fundamentally flawed) derivatives of modernism. For many years and in many countries,the ideological hegemony of modernism was unchallenged and the desirable consequences of modernisation through modernism unquestioned.
Then came China.
In the same year of Tsinghuas founding,the Xinhai Revolution launched Chinas attempt to import and grow modernism on its ancient soil. Two generations toiled and bled only to see their country fall deeper into the abyss of national weakness,civil and foreign wars,and the unbearable sufferings of its people.
Then in 1949,the Chinese Communist Party took power with violence and continued to consolidate and centralise national political power in a fashion consistent with Chinas imperial tradition. Under its absolute rule the Chinese nation paid an enormous price,in famine and civil strife,yet achieved at last an unchallenged national independence.
Thirty years after the founding of the Peoples Republic,China began its current phase of development. Chinas modernisation received enormous Western influence. Yet its essence is not modernism.
In todays China,the individual remains part of the collective and by no means the independent and basic unit of society. Political power is not divided and balanced but centralised under a single political authority.
A market economy adapted from the West is delivering efficient allocation of resources and high rates of growth and has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Yet,it is pointedly not capitalism. Ordinary Chinese people enjoy as wide a range of personal liberties as those anywhere in the Western world. But those with political aspirations contrary to the collective objectives of the state and society are severely constrained,even repressed.
Language is life. Words contextualise our world and lend it meaning. The word modern is translated into Chinese as Xiandai which simply means the current generation. Xiandai does not and can not carry the rich meaning inherent to the word modern. And Xiandaihua modernisation carries only material meaning. Xiandaihua has been the overwhelming objective of the Chinese nation.
One of the founding fathers of the Peoples Republic,Premier Zhou Enlai,announced to the Chinese people at the end of the tragic Cultural Revolution that the four modernisations (Xiandaihua) were Chinas national aspirations: modernisations of agriculture,industry,national defence,and science and technology. These by no means add up to modernism.
Though Chinas rise is still not a foregone conclusion,its success to date is beyond dispute. When we understand how Chinese modernisation differs fundamentally from that in the West,it could provide the needed proof that modernism is no longer the only viable route to modernisation. If not modernism,then what is Chinas story?
At the moment,no one has the answer. But for those gathered for the centennial of Tsinghua and those watching Chinas rise from afar with intellectual fascination,this is perhaps an opportune time to begin this process of understanding.ERIC LI
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