Abstract：Modernization is a global process. It’s a goal pursued by every country and region in the modern times. This modernization process inevitably presents a wide range of diversity as the world culture differs. In the last hundred years, with the increasingly frequent communication between the East and the West, debates on how to achieve modernization arise in China, such as debates on objects and debates on the system. In fact, they are all debates on the merits of culture and the paths of modernization underneath. Ever since the concept of modernization entered China, the binary opposition between China and the West has been inherent, especially the orientalism argument. The Western modernity development was established in the duality of modernity versus tradition, the West versus the East. Western society judged China with Western reality as the standard. Since the First Opium War, the West has been constantly making China realize its backwardness and stagnation, using military power. With the gradual collapse of China’s traditional tributary system, Chinese intellectuals had a certain cultural identity with the West and believed that the East should learn from the West. For China, the May 4th New Culture Movement was an experiment of modernization entering Chinese society in the 20th Century. The experiment, however, placed Chinese intellectuals in the midst of an unusually exclusive cultural confrontation. In the process of pursuing modernization, China accepted that the West versus the East equals modernity versus tradition. Chinese culture did not stand on its own conceptual basis during self-reflection, whereas completed reflection in the process of learning from the West. Thus, the historical task of realizing China’s modernization through cultural reflection on this basis seemed impossible. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, as its comprehensive power improves, the concept of neo-orientalism has arisen under the influence of the Western ethnic racism. The neo-orientalism is more about taking China as a rival in order to contain its development. It is obvious that from the past Orientalism to the present neo-orientalism, the goal of the West has remained the same, although the presentation style and the context of time and space have changed a lot.As a matter of fact, modernization should not be the only one single way to achieve. There should be a Western modernization plan as well as a Chinese plan. China’s modernization integrates traditional Chinese culture, the excellent Western ideological achievements and Marxist ideological resources. The socialism with Chinese characteristics redefines the concept and character of modernization. It is a pathway neither Western nor Chinese traditional, but surpassing the West, in achieving national prosperity. In the course of China’s modernization, the important initiative of building up a human community with a shared future provides a Chinese solution to the duality between China and the West. The human community with a shared future initiative provides a new paradigm for world communication. It rejects the zero-sum game of the Westphalian system and, instead, achieves a win-win situation in the process of mutual benefit, common prosperity and integrated development.
王鑫. 另一种现代化：西方现代性自我想象中的中国[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2024, 54(1): 21-31.
Wang Xin. The Other Modernization: China in the Eye of Western Modernity. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2024, 54(1): 21-31.
2024, Vol. 54 
