Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity

Wang, Hui; Karl, Rebecca E.

doi:10.2307/466684

Cited by 33 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…As a matter of fact, China's modernity is a result of its efforts to resist the invasion of Western modernity. That's why Wang Hui (1998) insightfully characterizes this process as a kind of anti-modern modernity which involves "a critique and reconceptualization of modernity" (p. 15). Due to the needs of historical situations, China has refused to follow the dictates of Western countries in the process of modernizing itself.…”

Section: Dewesternization and A Road With Chinese Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Challenges facing China and harmony as a state strategy

2015

Cultural Dynamics

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After its defeat in the Opium Wars, China was drawn into the orbit of Western influence. Since then, dewesternization has always been one of the hotly debated topics among Chinese intellectuals and politicians. With the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, China's economic take-off was almost instant due to its low-cost labor, rich resources, and the government's firm resolution to modernize. The booming of a market economy with Chinese characteristics can be quoted as a success story of China's dewesternization project. However, while enjoying the benefits of its attempts to modernize itself, China also begins to encounter the dark side of modernity. Problems like environmental deterioration, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and food safety are causing anxieties among Chinese people. In order to cope with the detrimental effects of the neo-liberal doctrines, harmony was put forward as a state strategy. Ostensibly disinterested, harmony aims at the well-being, happiness, and welfare of all. However, while harmony can serve as a national strategy to ameliorate the fermenting social discontent in China, it may also be a lofty ideal to attract, unite, and inspire people in other parts of the world. According to the spirit of harmony, different nations can pursue the well-being of their own people in their own ways which is in accordance with the notion of pluriversality as proposed by decolonial thinkers. Besides analyzing the social, economic, and political significance of harmony both within China and abroad, this essay also attempts to address the theoretical problems posed by harmony, if it is to be considered a productive ideal in this globalized world.

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Section: Dewesternization and A Road With Chinese Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Challenges facing China and harmony as a state strategy

2015

Cultural Dynamics

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“…Moreover, the concept is juxtaposed with industrial civilization , which early scholars on EC like Pan Yue equated with western, anthropocentric and destructive to nature (Pan, 2006). Many of these scholars selected portions of Chinese philosophy that emphasize the virtue of living in harmony with nature and an eco‐centric interpretation of Chinese history, philosophy and Marxism (Pan, 2006; Wang & Karl, 1998; Zou, 2013). While the CCP's focus for many years was on bullish economic growth, by 2010, environmental disasters in China had begun to cause a legitimacy crisis for the Party.…”

Section: The Idea Of An ‘Ecological Civilization’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transplanting China's ecological civilization to the Belt and Road Initiative: What will it take?

Brauteseth

Banik

2022

J of Intl Development

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This article focuses on how Chinese state actors understand the concept of sustainable development and implement policies for achieving the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We examine the concept of Ecological Civilization (EC) that has gained momentum within China and examine how EC is constructed around certain organizational principles that are difficult to export without expanding Beijing's political control abroad. Based on the example of a coal‐fired power plant in Kenya, we also explore the potential opportunities EC presents for African stakeholders to hold Chinese state actors to account for China's normative principles.

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“…If the cultural economy marks a new ideology of everyday life in China, then it is also important to note the harmony between such strategies and a broader neo-conservative intellectual agenda of re-evaluating traditional, pre-revolutionary models of localism and community as fundamental to promoting China's 'unique' path toward modernization (see Lin and Galikowski 1999: 23-30;Wang 1998). 'Culture' has become a term laden with associations of pre-revolutionary life, in which social hierarchies and polarization have become part of an organic system, a 'true path' to which localities feel encouraged to gradually return.…”

Section: Cultural Strategies Of Development In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural strategies of development: implications for village governance in China

Oakes

2006

The Pacific Review

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Since the early 1990s, culture has come to be recognized as a significant regional development resource in China. This paper raises the question of whether cultural strategies of development have ameliorated or exacerbated the government's increasing inability to provide for the public's basic needs. Specifically, it asks: what are the implications of China's cultural strategies of regional development for locallevel governance? Three case study villages in Guizhou are examined, each revealing different ways that villages have engaged state development strategies, each with different outcomes. I argue that cultural strategies of development in China introduce a capital logic that greatly influences village governance. Cultural strategies create economic value where none before existed and thus initiate new struggles over ownership among villagers, state actors and entrepreneurs. The privatization of cultural resources has presented new challenges to village governance even while it has been promoted as both an answer to the fiscal challenges faced by many rural communities and a key to the establishment of a new kind of rural citizen.

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Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity

Cited by 33 publications

References 0 publications

Challenges facing China and harmony as a state strategy

Challenges facing China and harmony as a state strategy

Transplanting China's ecological civilization to the Belt and Road Initiative: What will it take?

Cultural strategies of development: implications for village governance in China

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