Although parts of China are already prosperous and developed, around half of the population still lives in the countryside. China remains very much a developing country. As a consequence, Chinese modernity can only be regarded as work in progress. Some of its characteristics are already evident, others are only in embryonic form, while others still are not yet visible. It is abundantly clear, however, that Chinese modernity will differ markedly from Western modernity. The reasons for this lie not only in the present, but even more tellingly in the past. China has little in common with the West. It comes from entirely different cultural coordinates. Its politics, its state and its moral outlook have been constituted in a highly singular way, likewise its relationship with its neighbours. The fact that for many centuries the Chinese regarded themselves as constituting the world, as ‘all land under Heaven’, only serves to underline the country’s unique character. Unlike most developing countries, furthermore, China was never colonized, even though many of its cities were. Colonization was a powerful means by which countries were Westernized, but in China its absence from vast swathes of the country meant this never happened in the same manner that it did in India or Indochina, for example. The sheer size of China, both as a continental land mass and, more importantly, in terms of population, were, of course, indispensable conditions for enabling the Chinese to think in such autarchic and universalist terms. It might be argued that all these considerations lie in the past, but it is history that shapes and leaves its indelible mark on the present. Modernity is not a free-floating product of the present, but a function of what has gone before.
The fact that China, ever since 1949, but more significantly since 1978 and the beginning of the reform period, has been single-mindedly focused on the task of modernization – and, with remarkable self-discipline, allowed itself no distractions – has served to emphasize the extent to which China’s modernization is convergent with the West rather than divergent. Here, China ’s experience closely resembles that of its more developed East Asian neighbours. But as China progresses further down the road of modernization, it will find itself less constrained by the imperatives of development, increasingly at ease with the present, and anxious to find inspiration from its past for the present.
In August 1993, I visited Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong, for the first time. The experience is engraved on my memory. The road from Shenzhen to Guangzhou (the provincial capital, known as Canton in colonial times) was sometimes made up, occasionally little more than a mud track. Although we were in the middle of the countryside, the road was overflowing with pedestrians and vehicles of every conceivable kind. Played out before my eyes was the most extraordinary juxtaposition of eras: women walking with their animals and carrying their produce, farmers riding bicycles and driving pedicabs, the new urban rich speeding by in black Mercedes and Lexuses, anonymous behind darkened windows, a constant stream of vans, pick-ups, lorries and minibuses, and in the fields by the side of the road peasants working their small paddy fields with water buffalo. It was as if two hundred of years of history had been condensed into one place in this single moment of time. It was a country in motion, its people living for the present, looking for and seizing the opportunity, as if it might never be offered again. I was engulfed by an enormous torrent of energy, creativity and willpower. The British Industrial Revolution must have been a bit like this: speculative, chaotic, dynamic – and a complete bloody mess. Guangdong was certainly a mess. Everywhere you looked there was construction – seemingly everything was in the process of being changed: the half-made road along which we were travelling, the countless half-finished buildings, the land being cleared as far as the eye could see. Guangdong was like a huge construction site.
