Few nations in the history of our planet have experienced change as rapid as that ongoing in China today. This change affects all walks of life. The beliefs held by China’s citizens can change as quickly as the Shanghai skyline - a new tower blots out the sun with each passing week. Indeed, some complain that the ideologies found in China today have little in common with the political mindset that established a communist government in 1949. Certainly, the recent, explosive economic growth of China owes little to socialist principles. The influence of Western commercialism makes it difficult to fully understand or even identify the economic mindset behind China’s drive into the future. The problem of modernity is at the heart of this conundrum. But what role does it play?

Modern or Western?
When we use the word ‘modern’ to describe China, we very often simply mean ‘Western’. China, in the West, especially in cinema and the arts, has so often been sold on the basis of its ancient past. We therefore easily assume that anything modern is not really China. This is the problem with modernity in China: how do we begin to discuss it without immediately associating the modern with the West? It is very hard to imagine a modern aspect of China that does not relate to the West in some direct way. The question of China’s modernity raises that age-old question of how China can free itself from Western influence and achieve cultural independence. And on the subject of Western influence, the meteoric rise of the US at the beginning of the 20th century, so often compared to the changes ongoing in China, was, lest we forget, considerably less troubled by thousands of years of civilization. Where the US built itself from nothing in a matter of centuries, China has millennia to contend with.

Attitudes to the past
Yet it is the struggles in China’s recent history that most profoundly affect the way its citizens view the past. A desire to shy away from past suffering and emerge as a stronger, more complete nation seems to lead to an embrace of all things modern. Chinese people often react very differently to the ancient and the modern.  The European enthusiasm for old-fashioned buildings and ways of life is rarely seen to the same degree in China, and when it is, it is often part of an industry driven by Western tourism.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution did away with the past, to some degree, and that movement and its various meanings are now inscribed in the fabric of Chinese culture. Yet this is not one-way traffic. There are some who openly oppose the race into the future. Relatively recently in 2007, the government official Qiu Baoxing controversially observed that China is becoming ‘the land of 1000 identical cities’, and that modernity is ravaging the nation’s cultural heritage. Beyond the aesthetics of town-planning, modernity raises pressing concerns surrounding the history of ideas.

What better symbol for China’s conflicted approach to its own past than the legacy of one of the most celebrated images of Chinese culture - Confucius, who himself tells us to ‘study the past if you would define the future’. The philosopher often became a figure of ridicule during the Cultural Revolution, and the study of his work was dismissed. As China catapults itself into the forefront of the modern world, however, Confucius seems to play an increasingly important role in the nation’s self-identity. As China becomes more influential it may seek to more closely rediscover its own history, if only as a means of asserting its own independence. It seems that, for whatever reason, the past cannot be unwritten.

Old meets new
Sometimes, when faced with such difficult questions, the only answers can be hinted at through personal experience. I recently visited the Yuejiang Tower in Nanjing. When I first saw the tower, I could not believe my luck. For a long time I had been searching for the ancient China. When I chanced upon the Yuejiang Tower, I thought I had found it. I spent the best part of an afternoon congratulating myself for having finally discovered a traditional Chinese temple, idyllically seated atop an isolated hill, elegantly balanced against the surrounding city.

My self-congratulatory air was soon shattered. I encountered a sign which informed me that the temple had been built in 2001. As I sorrowfully trudged home I realised that this brief experience conveniently expresses the problems that surround China’s embrace of modernity. I had been seeking out some relic of the past that, I believed, had survived capitalism’s relentless onslaught. Upon closer inspection, the temple turned out to be as modern as any skyscraper or neon KTV. I realised that the temple itself seemed to have been built in order to satisfy the very kind of expectations I had harboured. There is a dizzying circularity about all this. China’s sense of its own modernity and its own history is endlessly confused by Western expectation.

Opposites attract
This paradox-of-sorts runs throughout China. What seems to always accompany any discussion of China’s modernity is the need to balance diametrically opposed ideas and concepts: Confucianism and Socialism; the West and the East; the urban and the rural; the imported and the exported; the glories and the dangers of wealth. The modern China, it seems, is unique in its capacity to weave multiple strands of culture, of old and new, together and allow them to make sense, as, I must finally admit, the Yuejiang Tower managed to do - a tower that is as impressive and pleasing on the eye as any of those built millennia ago. This joining of opposites seems rooted in an attitude that pervades discussions of modernity: China strives to lead the world, but at the same time it has an inevitable fear of what modernity will bring and what it will destroy. Modernity, for China, is both a holy grail and a poisoned chalice.

The tower, however, successfully managed to be old and new at the same time. I’m not sure much in the West can achieve something similar. This kind of cultural balancing act may turn out to be one of the few ways in which China can separate itself from the legacy of its Western-determined history, and, in Confucian terms, begin to ‘define its own future’.
 

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Keywords: modernity in China modern China culture affected by modernity in China how culture and modernity clash in China socialism and capitalism in China