A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Nationalism, Modernization and Westernization

The briefest historical outline of the various complex thematic developments given above shows that it would be imprudent to understand “Westernization” to mean that China (if not India) would be happy to buy “off the peg” Western political, economic and cultural values without further scrutiny. The case of China parallels that of nineteenth-century Japan – the Meiji reforms were not about Western values per se, but about modernization, that is, the attempt to restructure the feudal/agrarian organization of society based on the warrior samurai class to one which emphasized economic growth, industrialism and military power, this time resting not on the traditional sword but high tech. In this limited sense only, “Westernization” may be said to equal “modernization,” how to bring one’s country up to the economic strength of the West, so that it may be able to compete with the West on more or less equal terms and, therefore, to be respected by Western powers. In other words, modernization goes hand in hand with nationalism – in this project, India is as nationalistic as China, although it remains true that their respective nationalisms assume different aspects given the differences in their histories.

The intellectual debate about modernization in the context of nationalism in China as well as attempts at modernization began in the nineteenth and continued into the twentieth century, although the project was much interrupted, first by ...