ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connections through five themes that reveal the distinctiveness of China's encounter with modernity and that set its experience apart from the west's other others: Japan as modernity's mediator; the imperial, the colonial and the quasi-colonial; nation-building and nationalism; the etymology of modernity; and modernity and time. Encounters with modernity outside the west are, by their very nature, multifaceted. For China, however, an added dimension has been the unique factor of its relationship with Japan. The incompleteness of China's colonial experience has led many scholars to treat foreign settlements homogeneously as colonial. Another facet of China's quasi-colonial condition emphasised by its foreign residents was its distinction from residents in other formal colonial settings. Foreigners in quasi-colonial settings would often distance themselves from the morally indefensible relationship that separated the coloniser and the colonised in official colonies. Further challenging China's 'colonised' designation is the distinction between 'colonialism' and 'imperialism'.
