Discourse Innovation and Significance of “Chinese Path to Modernization” under the Comparative Perspective of East and West

The long-standing discourse of “modernization” views tradition and modernity, East and West with binary thinking, and thus fails to see the real world history and the direction of human civilization. By reviewing the perspectives and dimensions of human beings’ understanding of world history and their own existence, we can historically define two types: the chaotic pattern of the classical period and the disintegrated pattern of the traditional period. Human civilization has been lost in the Western “modernization”, while the discourse “Chinese path to modernization” has created the “modern” period on the basis of reviving the chaotic pattern of the classical period and inherited the divisive pattern of the traditional period. The discourse of “Chinese path to modernization” has created the convergent pattern of the “modern” period. This new discourse gives human civilization at a critical moment a new future imagination, containing “community of human destiny”, “people’s democracy in the whole process”, “common wealth”, “high-quality development” and other new propositions, Additionally, “Chinese path to modernization” breaks free from narrow ethnocentrism bridges the gap between tradition and modernity, between East and West, and depicts the concrete shape of the direction of human evolution as indicated by the Marxist concept of material history.