The uses of “modernity” in contemporary Chinese intellectual history

Abstract The complex question of what it is to be modern has had an intimate connection with China's history at least since the defeats at the hands of Western powers in the Opium Wars of the 19th century. Joseph Levenson, who remains one of the leading Western intellectual historians of China, made the question central to his analysis with his famous delineation of a tension between history, what is specifically one's own, and value, what is universal. Through the second half of the 19th century and all of the 20th, Chinese thinkers have wrestled with the problems of how to be at once both Chinese and modern. The problems are all the more complex because what is modern appears to come from the outside, from the West. Hence issues of time, and place, of pre-modern/modern, of East/West, have run together in the Chinese experience. Further, just when, in the last two decades, China has been turning away from much of its experience with socialism, Chinese intellectuals have encountered the ideas of postmodernism and its critique of modernity. Thus, for the Chinese themselves, to the dimensions of time and place is added that of criticism, of revolution/reform.