ABSTRACT

In December 1978 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) determined to shift the country’s emphasis to modernization, marking the beginning of the latest major phase of modernization in China. It is not the first, and is most unlikely to be the last. Indeed, one scholar (Anagnost 1993: 61) has written that ‘the encounter between “modernity” and “tradition” has dominated Chinese intellectual discourse’ over the last century ‘setting the terms of cultural and political debate’. While I certainly accept the importance of the dichotomy between tradition and modernity, I suspect that it has loomed large in China’s intellectual discourse even longer than a century, and that it will go on being of extreme importance for some time to come. Moreover, the term ‘China’ here includes not only those people residing within the borders of the PRC, but also those many people who in some way regard themselves as ‘Chinese’ but do not live in China.