ABSTRACT
China’s political and social development from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day may best be studied in terms of China’s “long modernization.” 1 This approach allows a focus on the working out of large problems that have analogies in most cultures. It eschews a definition of the political moment that divides the traditional and the modern, and in doing so, avoids the tendency to define China’s experience during the past 150 years in terms of impact of and response to the West.
