Modern Chinese Thought: A Retrospective View and a Look into the Future

Abstract

At one time, modern historians had come to be accustomed to using the paradigm of "Western challenge-Chinese response" to describe the development of modern China since the Opium War. However, in the past few decades, some scholars have begun to offer a very different opinion and argument. This is not only because Arnold J. Toynbee's "challenge and response" theory has continued to be repeatedly criticized and examined in a more unfavorable light, but also because people have come to believe that the lessons of Chinese history over the past century and a half cannot simply be summarized as an outward response to the modern civilization, or the civilization of modernity, represented by the West, and that the conflict between the two—[i.e., between China and the West] must be resolved only through China's own modernization. Nonetheless, from a macrocultural perspective, the question of how a premodernistic Chinese culture may produce a creative response to the modernized culture of the West has remained and...