Modernization and the Mainstream of Human Civilization

The magnificent and irrepressible intellectual wave of modernization thought in the 1980s was shaped by—and the consequence of—the confluence of the "waters" from three intellectual sources. The first of these was the intellectual tradition that had been formed by China's intelligentsia since the beginning of the twentieth century; the second was made up of the mainstream modernization theories that came out of the scholarship in the social sciences in other countries since the 1960s; the third was an ideology of modernization that had gradually taken shape since the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee [of the Chinese Communist Party in 1978] (this last is something that Wang Hui has described as a "Marxist ideology of modernization" that is to be distinguished from Mao Zedong's "antimodernist Marxist ideology of modernization").1