Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Gl ...

be accomplished only by adopting Western attitudes. This is a dilemma that the reader will see emerging as a subtext in some of the chapters that follow; in order for China to be culturally strong enough to preserve its own culture, the country must become part of the globalising process that is eradicating its traditions.

On the one hand, first modernity can be characterised by the creation of a rudimentary internationalism in which the material experiences of life in an industrialised society (whether socialist or capitalist) were more important than traditional, preindustrial values. It could be argued that an industrial worker in Shanghai had as much in common with a factory worker in Manchester as each had in common with the preindustrial culture in which his grandparents lived. On the other hand, in an attempt to stem the erosion of distinct historical cultural identity and to regulate the social transformations caused by industrialisation as it homogenised life experiences globally, states endlessly debated the question of national culture. As industrialisation swept away identifiable cultural differences, there emerged an increasing concern about the cultural identity which the state would use to construct a narrative about itself that could act as the reference point against which individuals could measure themselves.

It is important to distinguish between national and traditional cultures in this international phenomenon. The two are often conflated in the chapters that follow. Traditional cultures are preindustrial and have an awkward relationship with the intellectual and physical construction of the modern industrial nation state. For example, the borders of most nations are evidence of the refusal of traditional cultures to recognise modern national boundaries. Even ancient nations, especially those that occupy different time zones and climatic conditions, have within their unified states a variety of traditional practices. Discussion of a Chinese national identity is as difficult as discussion of a British one. Both states have subsumed different national cultures under a unifying political and legal administrative system. Although this does not stop individuals from adopting a broad patriotic position, people also see themselves as having other cultural identities—for instance, Brits may also identify themselves as Welsh or Scottish, just as Chinese citizens might also be Hainanese or Miao.