Les cycles de la modernisation en Chine (1842-1949)

Abstract

Modernization cycles in China (1842-1949), Marie-Claire Bergère. Since 1842, China has been going through a series of modernization drives repetitive enough to be called cycles. The first one, ending with the First World War, was marked by the predominant role of the State. It was a modernization from the top, characterized by belated reforms, insufficient to save the Empire. In the second one, during the 1920s, there was a spontaneous modernization which corresponds to the golden age of Chinese capitalism. But the failures at the end of this period were evidence of the inability of Chinese society alone to perform the tasks of modernization. That explains, despite its distrust of the State, why the bourgeoisie did not renounce the advantages of a centralizing order. Since even liberalism needs the State, the third cycle, that of the Kuomintang, could thus be understood as an attempt to set up a non-bureaucratic capitalism under which the integration of the bourgeois elites to the bureaucracy was to be the expression of a national political culture.