A Postcolonial Reflection

The Indian Aboriginal did not flourish in pre-British India. …There is something Eurocentric about assuming that imperialism began with Europe. –Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Both mainland China and Taiwan have experienced “belated modernity” in their own respective ways. Unlike Greek culture, which is considered relatively peripheral to normative western European modernity despite its status as the cradle of Western civilization, these Chinese cultures are situated much further away from the West. However, as one of the four most ancient civilizations in the world, Chinese culture on the mainland and in Taiwan shares at least one aspect with Greek culture – an uneasy position between its own traditions and the processes of modernization. Since the May Fourth movement at the beginning of the century, Chinese “modernists” (a broadly defined expression, which includes a wide range of people of different ideological backgrounds, from radical intellectuals to humanists, from communists to individualists) have repeatedly used the term “modernization” interchangeably with “westernization” – the West is associated with the most important means of modernization: science and technology. In addition, the West also symbolizes revolution, democracy, or individual freedom, depending on the speaker's ideological beliefs. At the same time, these modernists have been ardent nationalists concerning their cultural identity. Although mainland China and Taiwan claim authenticity to Chinese cultural heritage in their own ways, both societies have changed considerably in the processes of modernization. Consequently, an “authentically” Chinese culture, which had never existed in a strict sense, has become more than ever a myth.