China Is a Calque of Modernity

It is almost taken for granted that China has “entered modernity,” given its advanced technology and industrialization. Yet if we define modernity not simply as a material condition, but as certain attitudes — Gestell, commodification, the subject-object ideal — arising from a particular Weltanschauung, then what China is in is not modernity in the Western sense.

China is a calque of modernity. The image plays in sync, but the audio track is from a different film. The grammar that received the borrowing is older, and it rewrites what it absorbs. What we have is a look-alike: highly advanced, yet with an underlying infrastructure — an OS, to borrow from the platform vernacular — that is not the same thing.

If we follow this trail of thought, “overcoming modernity” as a project becomes nonsensical — how could one overcome something one has never inhabited? Holding onto that view only produces vertigo and deracination. The prior question should be: What is the name of the condition in which China currently finds itself? The answer determines where the path leads.