Publisher's Synopsis
"This book looks at the overarching challenge of the "modernity" that continues to be the master discourse of Chinese society. The key to this book, as it is perhaps to all of modern Chinese intellectual history, is the instability and/or fluidity of the key concepts anchored in the basic notion of "modernity" and thus intended to describe, fix and thus lend ostensible certainty to an ongoing historical process that has been bewildering both in the comprehensiveness of its scope and in the rapidity of its onset. This critique is not meant to in any way minimize the enormous and at times insurmountable problems facing modern China or to gainsay the impressive achievements registered in overcoming many of them, it is merely to call attention to some of the inevitable costs associated with attempting to mandate fixed solutions, the cultural ones in particular, to these issues"--.
