Untimely reflections on modernization in Lau Kin Chi

For the Benefit of a Time to Come

Most, if not all, would agree that China’s future is inseparable from its projects of modernization. Not only that the trajectory of modernization has become inevitable and irreversible for China, it has also become essential to China’s securing a place in the increasingly globalized world. It is certainly true that China was forced to modernize itself in order to protect its pride and sovereignty from the plunder and exploitation, ruthless to both nature and people, of the expansion of capitalistic ventures. However, the emergency of modernization forced upon China also meant that the pride and sovereignty of China could only be maintained by becoming the Other in its “best”, that is, by adopting the criteria, norms and values of the developmentalism1 of the West that seemed to have made it so “successful”. The lessons from the defeats in the face of the superior warships of the Western powers and later of Japan2 were drawn in favour of building a modern nation state via developing science for the sake of industrialization and militarization. Despite the fall of the Qing dynasty and the formation of the Republic of China, the enterprise to build a strong modern state was interrupted by warlordism, Japanese invasion, and the civil war. The Communist Party came into power with the proclamation of the birth of a new Chinese state. Since then, China has committed itself to strategies of modernization to enable it to “progress” from a third world country to a world power. Now, half a century has passed, and China is congratulated for having moved into a right course of modernizing the state and society, and gaining recognition as one of the leading world powers decisive in the determination of the fate of all beings on earth. However, it is exactly at such a time when pride and sovereignty seem to be such a manifest reality for China that a certain rethinking of what most people regard as good and with reasons to be proud of is called for. Hence the borrowing of the term “untimely” from Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche writes in his essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” that the meditation is untimely for he is looking at something of which their time is “rightly proud… as being injurious to it, a defect and deficiency in it”. He further points out that being untimely is “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” (Nietzsche 1997: 60)

In a similar vein, Michel Foucault also says something exceeding the logic of binary oppositions: “My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous… If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do… I think that the ethico- political choice we have to make every day is to determine what is the main danger.” (Foucault 1994: 256)

The “forced” modernization of China is not simply a cure with extremely destructive side effects. It is destructive in such a way that people who are made to embrace it are also made oblivious to its force of destruction by being deprived of any other vantage points except those made proper by the dominant forces of modernization. Thus the untimely is the improper in the face of the authority of the proper. Yet, for Nietzsche, the untimely is not seen in opposition to the timely, it is itself the timely reflection on what seems necessary and inevitable so as to act on ourselves “for the benefit of a time to come”.

Indeed, the dangerous aspects of modernization in China today are quite obvious for anyone willing to confront them if they are not so identified with the criteria, norms and values of the discourse of developmentalism as to allow their capacity for experience and imagination to be greatly diminished by notions and images of linear progress and the benevolent power of science and technology. It is not my purpose to go into the dangerous aspects systematically; there are already works in this area.3 The aim of this paper is modest: it only takes some initial steps in dealing with the “main danger” of the everyday life with a view to a form of activism not exhausted by the political binaries of oppositional politics. Foucault’s genealogical practice4 belongs to such an effort. In his discussion of Immanuel Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?”, Foucault emphatically points out that a philosophical ethos emerged in the historical events of the Enlightenment, one “that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era”. It is a permanent critique for it is not predicated on any simple yes or no with relation to the “achievement” or “failure” of the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject in Enlightenment, that is, it implies, in Foucault’s words, “the refusal of… the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment”. (Foucault 1984: 42)

Similarly, what we must do with our untimely reflection is to refuse the “blackmail” of modernization, and direct the critical ethos of this critique “toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects” (Foucault 1984: 43) in the context of the historical specificities of China.

It is now taken for granted that the sovereignty of China and its people hinges upon the building of the state and society into modern entities, with the American military and economic power and the American way of life serving as model. The cast of such a schizophrenic pursuit is certainly heavy materially. In addition to the wider and wider gap between the powerful and the powerless in the face of the rampant corruption and abuse of power, fuelling the engine of modernization that produces effects representable in terms of high growth rate, Chinese society is also increasingly polarized between the rich and the poor as China is increasingly integrated into the global capitalist system.

However, notwithstanding the unchecked growth of unlawful practices, unconcerned for the well-being of others and indifference to their sufferings and even loss of life; notwithstanding the regular breakdown of everyday life as a consequence of the breakdown of power supply due to the structural deficiency in coal supply; notwithstanding the growing discontent among the population leading to diffused resistances and protests -- the upper and middle echelons of the society in China seem either oblivious to all these tensions and disruptions, or find it tolerable while offering condescendingly their sympathy to the “unlucky ones” which constitute the majority of the population, who suffer as a consequence of the processes of modernization taking place in China.

If these social strata are “blind” to the cost of becoming a modern and hence “civilized” sovereign subject (as a state or as an individual), it is because their eyes are “fixed” on somewhere else. That is, the shaping of their subjectivities has to be read in the context of the processes of globalization that involves China more and more intensely. For such a task, I propose to go by way of reading a film that helps throw some light on certain theoretical points serving as preliminary steps towards a conception of pragmatic interventions that escape the homogenizing, hegemonic forces of globalization rather than merely repeating the binary logic of the discursive practice of orientalism and colonialism characterizing such forces with sweeping negation or affirmation.

This paper is basically composed of two parts. The first part will look, through the film Not One Less（一個都不能少）, at representations of “obstacles” that modernization is supposed to surmount. The main “obstacle” represented in the film is “poverty” which is regarded as peculiarly a rural problem and is to be resolved by modern education. It is clear from the film that binary pairs such as urban/rural, modern/traditional, progressive/backward, resourceful/poor are the parameters of its organization. What the film evades is the structural relations between modernization and rural poverty in China. Instead, it seems to suggest that the remedy to poverty is to administer a higher dose of modernization.

As the film apparently explains poverty by its own empirical presence, what is made to disappear is how poverty, especially rural poverty, is historically constituted. Rather than conceiving poverty as something universally present in all societies at all times, if we trace the paths of China’s modernization, we can see that the rural has been necessarily sacrificed and marginalized in the project of the structural transformation of modernization/ globalization. Whether they be the bankruptcy of the rural in the 1920s and 1930s under the KMT regime, or the inexorable extraction of surplus value from the rural in the 1950s to late 1970s under the CCP regime,5 they are the consequences and effects of China’s relentless pursuit of industrialization and urbanization so as to become a “modern” economic, political and military power. The social mobility denied to the rural population in general cannot be dismissed by highlighting the exception made for a small minority via education to escape the fate of the peasants. Modern education, with its urban bias, has contributed to rather than ameliorate the decomposition and further marginalization of the rural.

Ironically, the film’s dehistoricization of rural poverty, that is, allowing the contextual specificities of poverty no occasion to stage themselves, is exactly the formula to win the heart and mind of the urban intellectuals and middle class. The effect of this is that the mobilization of sympathies for the underprivileged is at the same time the re-presentation of a modern self whose capacity for experience hinges more and more on media representations framed by binary pairs.6

Felix Guattari, in The Three Ecologies, argues that the intense use of modern science and technology in modern development not only ravages the Earth and upsets the ecological equilibrium that brings about increasingly intractable and unpredictable revenges from Nature, the modern self is also increasingly diminished: “Alongside these upheavals [the ecological disequilibrium], human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating. Kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum; domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass-media consumption; family and married life are frequently ‘ossified’ by a sort of standardization of behaviour; and neighbourhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression… It is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority – be it social, animal, vegetable or Cosmic – that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantalization.” (Guattari 2000: 27)

Walter Benjamin also says something similar with regard to the relation between the decay of experience and the processes of modernization. According to John McCole’s reading, the decay of experience refers to the imprisonment of the self in the sphere of the “immediate experience (Erlebnis)”, which is linked to “an underlying change in the structure of the labour process”. McCole explains that Benjamin’s understanding of the decay of experience in the form of the truncation of immediate experience is contrasted to the form of experience embodied in storytelling which is depicted as “a medium for exchanging and transmitting experiences”. Benjamin’s word for “experience” here is Erfahrung which McCole renders as “an accumulated stack of integrated, ‘lived’ experiences” (McCole 1993: 272). Thus the two forms of experience constitute a chain of actions on one another, accounting for the openness and richness of the intersubjectively constituting character of experience.

However, with the intens