When China Rules the World полностью

Giddens also argues that with modernity, ‘Kinship relations, for the majority of the population, remain important, especially within the nuclear family, but they are no longer the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space.’ [326] That may be true of the West but it is certainly not the case in mainland China, or Taiwan, or the Chinese diaspora: in each instance ‘kinship relations’, especially in the form of the extended family, are frequently ‘the carriers of intensively organized social ties across time-space’. The Chinese diaspora, for example, has relied on the extended family as the means by which to organize its globally dispersed business operations, whether large or small. Taiwan, the Chinese diaspora and the more advanced parts of China are, moreover, unambiguously part of the modern world. [327] The fact is that kinship has always been far more important in Chinese than Western societies, whatever their level of development. Or take belief-systems. In his second BBC Reith Lecture in 1999, Giddens argued:

Such views, of course, don’t disappear completely with modernization. Magical notions, concepts of fate and cosmology still have a hold but mostly they continue on as superstitions, in which people only half-believe and follow in a somewhat embarrassed way. [328]

This certainly does not apply to modern Chinese societies: superstition and traditional beliefs – as we saw earlier with the worship of ancestral spirits and the prayers offered to various deities in the hope of good fortune – remain an integral part of the thinking and behaviour of most Chinese. [329]

The arrival of modernization in different parts of the world and in diverse cultures obliges us, therefore, to rethink what is meant by modernity and to recognize its diversity and plurality. We can no longer base our concept of modernity simply on the experience of North America and Europe. Our understanding of modernity is changed and expanded by the emergence of new modernities. The Chinese scholar Huang Ping argues that Chinese civilization has been so different from Western societies in so many ways that it is impossible to comprehend it, and its modernity, simply by the use of Western concepts. ‘Is it not a question of whether the concepts/theories are far away from Chinese reality? China ’s own practice,’ he concludes, ‘is capable of generating alternative concepts, theories, and more convincing frameworks. ’ [330]

In his book East and West, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, writes: ‘I find myself driven to the conclusion that what we see when we compare West and East is a consequence more of time lags than of profound cultural differences.’ [331] The implication of his argument is that timing is a relatively transient question and that culture matters little. As we have seen, however, the timing and speed of industrialization and urbanization, far from being merely transient phenomena, have real and lasting effects. More fundamentally, it is a mistake to believe that cultural difference does not have a far-reaching impact on the nature of modernity. When countries are much less developed than the West – before or in the early stages of economic take-off – then it is plausible to argue that the disparities are primarily a function of their backwardness rather than any cultural difference. But the transformation of the Asian tigers, with countries like Taiwan and South Korea now at least as developed as many European nations, means that the proposition that cultural difference counts for little can now be tested in practice. The classic exemplar is post-war Japan. As we saw in Chapter 3, Japan remains, notwithstanding the fact that it is at least as advanced as the West, very different from its Western counterparts in a myriad of the most basic ways, including the nature of social relations, the modus operandi of institutions, the character of the family, the role of the state and the manner in which power is exercised. By no stretch of the imagination can Japanese modernity be described as similar to, let alone synonymous with, that of the United States or Europe. [332]

The same can be said of China. Its path towards and through modernity has been entirely different from the route followed by the West. The state is constructed in a different way and plays a different kind of role. The relationship between the present and the past is distinct, not simply because of the way in which the past bears on the process of modernization but also because, more than any other society, China is deeply aware of and influenced by its history. [333]