Modernity

If modernity and modernization were characteristically Weberian concerns, they had little place in Marxist thinking, since their generality blurs the distinction between capitalism and socialism as forms of postfeudal society that is central to Marx's theory of history. Thus the major historical controversy within the communist movement in the two countries developed quite independently of debates over modernity, and without reference to them. The Chinese Revolution might be objectively responsible for a vast modernization of the country, but for a quarter of a century the notion itself was essentially foreign to its vocabulary.

With the strong reaction against the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) that came in the early seventies, this changed. The government adopted the slogan of the "Four Modernizations": industrial, agricultural, techno-scientific, and defense. In time the function of this semantic shift became increasingly clear—to cancel the long-held distinction between socialism and capitalism, as Mao had feared. But in doing so, it reopened the classic "wound" in the concept itself, which was first painfully exposed in Meiji times. Was modernity just a "rich country and a strong army," as the quartet of official goals implied? Dissidents did not think so. In 1978, Wei Jingsheng (b. 1950) called for a "fifth modernization"—the institution of political democracy—and was punished with a long prison sentence. Rapid economic growth and political repression have continued to date.

By the 1990s, debates on postmodernity had reached China, but in the early 2000s the principal stake in discussion remained the concept of modernity itself. The historian of theology Liu Xiaofeng (b. 1956) in his work Xiandaixing shehui lilun xulun (1996; A preface to social theory of modernity) believes that modernity manifests itself in the form of a social structure, whose inherent contradictions can never be put to rest by actions of "overcoming," but will regenerate themselves endlessly, and which is European in origin only through a series of historical accidents. Other countries then initiated modern processes of social change under external pressure, albeit with their own varied historical legacies. Since the late Qing period most Chinese intellectuals, Liu argues, failed to grasp the logic of modernity because they tended to accord priority to the nation instead. In his view, the moralistic party-state that came into being after 1949 is now decaying, and to fill the vacuum it has left, a religious community needs to be rebuilt through religion at the local level, both in order to protect individual freedoms and to ensure an ethical basis for people to cope with an ever-changing society. The modern human without God must find salvation in religion again.

Approaching the issue from another perspective, the intellectual historian Wang Hui (b. 1959) worked for more than a decade on his study Xiandai Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi (2003; The rise of modern Chinese thought). In this work he traces the origins of ideas of modernity in China back to the eleventh century, with the aim of showing that capitalism can hardly lay claim to everything that is today associated with the modern. Himself the author of a work on Lu Xun, he champions a spirit of resistance, similar to that in Takenuch, though without emphasizing the "double," to mystifying discourses of global modernization, and the historical teleology that he argues they always entail, with an obligatory class structure and empty representative institutions at the end of the road. Alternative modernities remain necessary and possible, even if these will now require a different international order, sustaining national innovations, rather than crushing them in a neoliberal straitjacket.

In Japan, on the other hand, the success of postwar capitalist development did not put an end to questioning of modernity. Among significant debates, one centered on literature. Karatani K̄on (b. 1941), in his study Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (1980; Origins of Modern Japanese Literature) emphasized the "nearness" of the "origins" of Japanese modernity, instead of tracing it to a genealogically distant past. Pointing to a global simultaneity of multinational modern experience, he sought to unravel the historical specificity of the Japanese case. Karatani almost immediately drew sharp disagreement from a number of Japanese scholars, including Kamei Hideo (b. 1937), who charged him with disregarding the continuities in the Japanese experience of modernity. For Kamei, exclusive attention to a uniformly identified "modernity" has suppressed the multiple possibilities latent in the flourishing creativities of Meiji Japan, which developed out of Edo culture and still require an intellectual effort to recover. The national component of modernity, projected by Takeuchi, acquired a new level of depth for inquiry.

With the consumer boom of the eighties, many intellectuals began to wonder whether Japan was not witnessing a new way of "overcoming the modern"—entrance into postmodernity. In a famous intervention, Asada Akira (b. 1957) has given the interlinked problems of subjectivity and historicity a critical postmodern twist. Drawing playful inspiration from Nishida Kitar̄o, he has contrasted a senile capitalism in Europe, under the sway of transcendental traditions, and an adult capitalism in America, marked by an inner-directed sense of individual responsibility, with an infantile capitalism in Japan, displaying the "nearly purely relative competition exhibited by other-directed children." Asada has described the postindustrial psyche of Japanese society in the following way: "Children are running around, each as fast as possible, at the front lines of the history of capitalism as infantilization proceeds. They are enveloped by a 'place' whose age is hardly known—the 'place' that is transhistorical in the sense Nishida demonstrated" (1989). Debates on modernity in East Asia have plainly not yet run their course.