ABSTRACT
China is unique in its historic development. A society that, in just 100 years, has suffered the various vicissitudes of imperial rule, internecine violence, wartime destruction, Communist revolution, a brutal Cultural Revolution, societal regimentation and capitalist expansion has resulted in a strangely individuated society. Its communitarian pretensions are still very much in evidence on the surface, but actually, individual survivalism is regularly a pragmatic response to these ideological mood swings. Just as the Chinese state has had to develop rigid social structures to cope with autarkic tendencies over the years, so the people themselves have developed attitudes of mind to deal with autarky. The Western model of individualism in education has led to an increasingly relativized conceptualization of knowledge, and so China is sucking up lots of bad habits as well as good from its pedagogical plundering of Western universities.
