Eric Li: How China Broke the West's Monopoly on Modernization

Eric Li is founder and managing director of a leading venture capital firm in Shanghai and a doctoral candidate at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs. The following was adapted from his opening remarks at the Tsinghua Centennial China Model Forum and translated from Chinese by the author.

This week, Tsinghua University, China’s foremost institution of higher education, celebrates its centennial. Founded in 1911 in deep national humiliation, Tsinghua University was initially funded by the infamous Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship, which was essentially war reparations China paid to the United States.

Since then, Tsinghua has epitomized the Chinese experience of modernization for an entire century. Its destiny has been inextricably linked to that of the Chinese nation. It occupies a central place in the collective Chinese consciousness. Many Chinese leaders, intellectuals, and even revolutionaries began their quest for national redemption from these tree-lined grounds near the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, burned to the ground by the Anglo-French forces led by Lord Elgin. Chinese President Hu Jintao, himself a graduate, opened the festivities last week for this event loaded with political and historic significance.

Of course, the days when China was a helpless prey of great Western powers are long gone. Today, it is viewed as a contender for global leadership in the future. As China’s emergence shakes the core of the international system as we know it, Tsinghua’s centennial offers an opportunity for reflection.

Many see China’s rise in political, economic, and military terms. But the Chinese renaissance is in its essence a moral and intellectual challenge to the modern world. For nearly 300 years, the European Enlightenment was the intellectual and moral source of change, if not legitimacy, for mankind. Yet, the tidal wave of Westernization also brought about, along with the glory of economic and technological transformation, confusion, defeatism, and even catastrophe to non-Western civilizations. The product of the Enlightenment, modernism – centered as it is on individualism, rights, and science – was a unique Western cultural experience....