ABSTRACT
China was faced in the 19th and 20th centuries with two related problems. One was how to establish national strength in order to fight off the vast menace of outside forces which were, unusually, treating China not as a center but as a periphery. The other was how to modernize, in view of new technologies and modes of production conveyed into Chinese consciousness by those selfsame marauding powers. A religious tradition is of course primarily concerned with religious, ethical and spiritual issues. Confucian traditionalism did not accord with the spirit of modern education, which was largely Western in ethos. There were further obstacles to modernization in the social setting of the ideology. China became a strong international-class power because of the Maoist revolution, but unlike India's and Japan's modernization it did not carry over much of its traditional values.
