When China Rules the World полностью

Japan represents perhaps the most extreme form of this embrace of the future, or hyper-modernity. [322] Unlike Europe or the United States, you will find few old bangers on the roads, there being little demand for used cars – or anything secondhand for that matter. Instead there is a rapacious appetite for the new. Until the post-bubble crisis, Japanese car-makers thought nothing of introducing several model changes a year, rather than the Western norm of one, while the electronics firms that Japan is famous for are constantly changing their product lines. Where the Western fashion industry is happy to turn out two collections a year, one in the autumn and one in the spring, Japanese designers seem to believe in perpetual sartorial motion as one collection follows another at bewildering speed several times a year. Japanese youth have become the cognoscenti of fad and fashion, be it a new electronic game, a new look, the latest mobile phone or another Pokemon style craze. Take your chair in a Japanese hair salon and, be you man or woman, you will immediately be handed a very thick catalogue offering a seemingly infinite range of possible hairstyles and colours from which to choose. Japan is the virtuoso of consumer technology. Constant improvement and innovation are a national pastime: the scooter whose lights automatically switch on as it gets dark, the business card-holder whose lid spontaneously flips open, the toilet seat with its dazzling array of dials and controls, the virtual theme park with rides beyond one’s imagination, and the dance machine which renders the need for a partner redundant.

In his book The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens seeks to draw a distinction between the characteristics of modernity and pre-modernity. Speaking of pre-modern society, he argues:

The orientation to the past which is characteristic of tradition does not differ from the outlook of modernity only in being backward-looking rather than forward-looking… Rather, neither ‘the past’ nor ‘the future’ is a discrete phenomenon, separated from the ‘continuous present’, as in the case of the modern outlook. [323]

In East Asian modernity, however, the present and the past are not ‘discrete’, in terms of perceptions, in the way Giddens suggests, nor is the future: on the contrary, the present is layered with both the past and the future. In other words, the past and the future are combined in East Asian modernity in a way that is quite distinct from Western modernity. It is, at one and the same time, both very young and very old. This paradox is at its most extreme in China, the oldest continuous civilization in the world and yet now, in cities like Shanghai and Shentzen, also one of the youngest. There is a sense of enormous ambition, a world without limits, symbolized by Pudong, one of the most futuristic cityscapes, with its extraordinary array of breathtaking high-rise buildings. [324] According to Gao Rui-qian, professor of philosophy at East China National University in Shanghai, ‘China is like the adolescent who is very keen to become an adult. He can see the goal and wants to reach it as soon as possible. He is always behaving as if he is rather older than he actually is and is constantly forgetting the reality of his situation.’ [325] East Asian modernity, then, is a unique combination, in terms of social and economic realities, attitudes and consciousness, of the present, the past and the future. These countries might be described as ‘time-compression societies’, where the past and the future are squeezed and condensed into the present. Two hundred years of experience and history elsewhere are seemingly contained within the same place and the same moment of time. Everything is rushed. There is no time to reflect. Generational differences are a gaping chasm, society like a living geological formation.