Renowned historian Wang Gungwu’s Roads to Chinese Modernity: Civilisation and National Culture traces China’s transformation from an ancient civilisation into a modern nation-state shaped by revolution, reform and global engagement. Drawing on decades of scholarship and his unique perspective as an overseas Chinese intellectual, Wang reflects in this excerpt on Deng Xiaoping’s legacy and the enduring challenge facing China’s leaders today: how to build a modern national culture that embraces global ideas while remaining recognisably and distinctively Chinese.
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The genius of Deng Xiaoping in 1978 was to see that China could not go down the road of revolution again. The word he used was “reform”. By this, he was asking the Communist Party to recognise that the revolution had been successful in 1949; the time had come to consolidate what had been achieved by learning from the lessons and mistakes of the past. When Deng called for “reform and opening up”, there was a national sigh of relief.
The idea of no more revolutions was something so welcomed by most people that it may be described as the secret of China’s success in the decades that followed. What is still unclear, however, is whether the new generation of leaders are free of the idea that Chinese culture is holistic.
When I talk about the quest for a new cultural identity, I am not certain whether the Chinese people have really moved away from the heritage of culture as a holistic unity. Why do I stress this? Because it is a new challenge to build a new culture that can stand by itself in the world today. Globalisation has made the world much smaller. New ideas are transmitted very rapidly. They include some of the most advanced ideas in science and technology, which all the Chinese admire and are willing to learn without any hesitation whatsoever. For many, this has demonstrated to them that globalisation has enabled the world to be one.
There is a global process going on and one day, some kind of global culture that all human beings could subscribe to and believe in might be created. I am not yet sure if that is part of the popular vision among the Chinese today. There are many signs which suggest that the Chinese deeply hanker for the kind of civilisation they once had, of which they were so proud. I think that old cultural identity is truly gone.
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But maybe some valuable parts of it could be recovered and given new life by incorporating new ideas that are coming from elsewhere. With new mixtures or compositions, China could build something that will be distinctively, if not uniquely, Chinese.