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

circumstances (Inglehart & Baker, 2000), and the cultural questions that are raised by debates about nationalism, internationalism, and their relationship to a globalising world economy are increasingly important in attempting to understand ‘who we are’ at an individual level as well as an institutional one. Although the debates in this book are on China, they can also contribute to a global discussion about what it is to be creative in the new conditions of the twenty-first century.

It is important to understand the contemporary context of international cultural exchange in order to be able to reinterpret the value of traditional practices (Hier, 2008). Ulrich Beck (1992) referred to the contemporary condition of globalisation as a ‘second modernity’, but how does this differ from ‘first modernity’? And how does it relate to the aesthetic, policy, and educational debates about tradition, art, and design in China?

First modernity sprung from the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century. In mechanising the economy and in harnessing scientific knowledge for material production, the industrial process swept away the traditions and values of a rural economy. Fuelled by coal, a new way of thinking about nature and humankind was forged that framed tradition negatively in terms of the progress of knowledge (Crouch, 1999). Knowledge was conceived as a programme of chronological development in which the past was flawed and the future perfect. Scientific knowledge was valued as a marker of the development of information about the material workings of the world and as an indicator of ethical or moral worth. From a Western perspective, the technology of enlightenment that was used as a means of colonial subjugation was simultaneously seen as a marker of the right to subjugate. Indigenous cultures, colonised cultures, and cultures lacking the mechanical hardware of more technologically advanced nations found their traditional ways of life swept away, just as the traditional cultures of industrialised countries had been transformed previously. The echo of this process in China at the start of the twentieth century is easy to identify. Given this, it is easy to understand the dilemma of an intellectual like Lu Xun. On the one hand, he wanted to revolutionise China and eliminate foreign intervention in its affairs, but on the other hand, he believed this could