China and Alternative Modernity

LOCATING CHINA, A COUNTRY OF "CONTINENTAL CHARACTER" (WEBER 1951,100), in relation to the spatio-temporal notions of "modernity" and "modernization" is no easy task. This is especially the case because the concept of "history" itself has come to be so contested. The construal of history is now more than ever loaded with epistemological, methodological, and ideological controversies (cf. Dirlik 2000). Writers who mount a contemporary defense of attainable objectivity and "truth telling" gesture toward three main schools of twentieth-century historical interpretation-Marxism, the French Annales, and U.S. modernization theory—which share a conviction of the scientific nature and universal applicability of their respective theories. This shared conviction "helped foster a Western history that aimed to homogenize the study of all other places and times into general Western models of historical development" (Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob 1994, 78-79). Without engaging the relevant debates, here I will posit the minimal intellectual need to sustain a "grand narrative" constituting elements of each of these schools while bearing in mind their constant internal tensions. Such a narrative is indispensable, for within the limit of conceptual tools presently at our disposal, no specific trajectory could otherwise be intelligibly counted. The notion of modernity is itself a profoundly universal generalization premised on a broad understanding of historical movements. But the price of accepting (as critically as we may try to do) a "master scale" of European origin that has dominated thinking and communicating elsewhere (and everywhere) is, of course, that non-European histories are made compliant with the teleology of modernization.

This metahistorical paradigm has been a problem, politically and psychologically, for modern thinkers in the Global South since long before postcolonial theory or multiculturalism became fashionable. Many of those involved in national liberation lived with the paradox of being at once revolutionary nationalists and devoted learners of Western modernity. Chinese development is not free of the modern teleology, yet what distinguishes it from its counterparts in most third world societies is the way in which it presents an alternative to capitalist development on the one hand, and to capitalist or noncapitalist underdevelopment on the other. This alternative, in the mold of the Bolshevik revolution but also a deviation from Stalinist statism, breaks down the received equation between third world modernization and capitalism, thereby liberating the meaning of modernity in the peripheries from the interpretive confines of a false Eurocentric universality. The use of such common terms as "developed" and "underdeveloped" (and "first" and "third"; "advanced" and "backward") requires an awareness of their ideologically charged implications. Dependency theorists, for example, insist on a causality between the developed core of the world system and "the development of underdevelopment" in the subordinate zones, pinning down global exploitation through unequal accumulation and exchange. But if a time-bound developmental perspective projected spatially is nothing but a "colonial representation," to discard it would first entail normative socioeconomic and political-institutional measurements established in the capitalist West being redefined and reclaimed—if not altogether replaced.

I begin my argument by situating China's modern path in the epochal conditions created by international capitalism. In so doing I critique the notion of singular modernity, and I clarify Eurocentrism in an open perspective of history. In stressing that the globally transformative power of capital cannot be limitless, I next trace China's twentieth-century revolutions in their nationalist resistance to imperialist impingement as a manifestation of the fragmentation of the "totality" of capitalism. It is, however, the political and social dimensions of the communist revolution that set China apart from its neighbors undergoing capitalist colonial or conservative modernization. In the final pages of this chapter I briefly discuss the problematic discourse of "Asia," which ignores these differences.

Globalization and Noncapitalist Development

Capitalism, emanating from Europe, is intrinsically globalist in its drive to conquer new markets. In its earlier stages this conquest took the form of direct colonization; later, other forms of globalization came into play. The world's present political, economic, and financial order (as well as a great deal of cultural production) has been largely shaped by global capitalism and various responses to its expansion. Indeed, as noted by Marx, "world history" began with the epoch of capitalism. This "epoch" has been characterized by an unprecedented amount of communication and interaction, dictated by market forces and their ideology of free trade, which no longer preserves any "Chinese walls" or permits effective "delinking" by regions from the globe. The continuities between domestic affairs, on the one hand, and external, "epochally specific transnational parameters" on the other increasingly outweigh traditionally sustained discontinuities. The impact of world capitalism on any sizable human societies as both political-economic units and sites of cognitive-cultural trends is inescapable to the degree that long-term isolated development becomes impossible. Consequently, in the "age of capital," postindustrial problems intertwine with problems of industrialization while at the same time there is a lessening of the many previously rigid demarcations that had been understood to mark different developmental stages in culture, imagination, and identity.

That said, capitalism is not stable and cannot homogenize the globe despite its ability to convert, absorb, or eliminate dissent. It has, rather, evolved and reformed through triumphs and crises, and has itself been in flux or hybridism at its expanding frontiers. Globalization, if taken as the incorporation of the global market into national and regional communities (not a new phenomenon), is a two-way movement. Local-global interactions have been instruments of change for both parties. Individual states and societies as willing or reluctant participants, if led by a legitimate regime with determination and public support, may retain their specific goals and identities. In such cases, the agenda and consequences of globalization are modified by local conditions. World history, locally based and accommodating, encompasses "localized spaces, globalized places" (Luke 1997), and is at most a "paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity" (Berman 1983,15). Capitalism with inherent contradictions never was, and still cannot be, a monolith. It splits not least between a welfare democracy gradually nurturing a "social model" (as germinated in the European Union) and a structural North-South divide, a divide that is often also internal to rich and poor nations alike. The newly industrialized countries (NICS) scattered here...