Facing the modernization challenge

Outside the Western world, with a few notable exceptions, Modernity has failed to deliver its promise. Many long suffering peoples of the world have subjugated their cultures to adopt Western values that were sold as universal values. They hold their elections and build their parliaments and write their laws, and yet, are still mired in poverty and civil strife. The Arab Spring? Don't hold your breath.

In the Western world itself, the ideologized version of the Enlightenment is proving to be the undoing of the success the West has achieved based on these very ideas. The US armed forces are trying to transform thousand-year-old societies from half ways around the world into its own image, while the state of California, the world's sixth largest economy, is mired in complete political dysfunction and bankrupt. Its middle classes are languishing. Here in Europe, 20-year-olds (and 19 and 18) are rioting on the streets to protect their retirement pensions.

Two hundred years ago, in an inward looking China, Emperor Qianlong's hubris was only harmful to China itself. Today, we have an inherently expansionist and self righteous West, with universal moral claims and in a headlong pursuit of an inextricably linear future for all of humanity, its hubris has entirely different consequences.

Two hundred years ago, we had a rising West bravely putting forth to the world what it stood for. Today, we have a rising China, in the face of an incumbent that still claims universality, fearful and insecure. It is so successful by most if not all objective measures, yet it is so afraid to tell its own story. Our task today is to say something about China's story:

Today we live in a globalized world in which threats to human existence on this planet are of global proportions. There is no need to list them because we know them too well. Yet, the underlining threat of them all is the nature of the structure of ideas prevailing in our world. An incumbent ideology that insists on universality with a singular vision for the future of mankind and an ascendant alternative that is too timid to be heard is a combination that is incommensurate to the problems at hand. For the first time since the Enlightenment, peoples around the world are in the market for new ideas. Are they forthcoming?

There are two paths before us, and two outcomes. A still powerful West finds in itself the wisdom that eluded Qianlong and shifts from a worldview of universality to one of plurality. It recognizes the fact that no truth is forever, that Modernity is indeed a product of cultural developments unique to the West and are not universal; and perhaps the Enlightenment is no longer enlightening, and perhaps Modernity is not so modern any more. A China that marshals enough courage from its ancient heritage and recent accomplishments articulates not just what it is not but what it stands for. The narrative is there and it is credible. Will China tell it? Will China debate it?

Or, an incumbent West insists that its ownership of the truth is perpetual and indefinite. The individual is indeed God himself; liberal democracy is an end in itself not a political system that works for some peoples some of the times and not all peoples all of the times. A rising China that is defensive in the face of such overwhelming intolerance that is religious in nature finds itself unable to justify its development to its own people or to the world. It is intellectually frustrated, it protests, it reacts. This is indeed the likely path on the current trajectory.

We ask today at the birthplace of Modernity, what's it going to be?

The author is founder of Chengwei Capital; and Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. These are excerpts of a speech delivered as part of the panel discussion "The European Union and China in the 21st Century" at the 9th Euro-China Forum held at UNESCO, Paris.

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