Doing Western Studies in China: Its Nature and Methods

Abstract

If globalization is understood as Westernization or Americanization, then its opposite would be nationalization or localization. The sociologist Roland Robertson introduced the term “glocalization” to refer to the essence of globalization: “Its central dynamic involves the twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular.”1 Yet this “twofold process” has never been equally “twofold” and balanced for both sides. If, in its initial stages, “globalization” means that Western powers unilaterally push their economy, politics, and culture onto the entire world, then rather paradoxically it is this same process of Westernizing the “rest” of the world that awakens the national or local consciousness, and thus arouses resistance to it in numerous forms, which is manifested not only in the developing countries that have been subjected to globalization but also in the strong powers like the United States that impose globalization upon others. Globalization produces its opponents, and they are global opponents. For example, it is not that China does not want to continue (economic) globalization today but rather that former global powers are demanding to cut their ties with non-Western countries. It seems that we have ironically come to the opposite side of globalization and started a movement of “de-globalization.”