The Price of Progress: Modernisation and Traditional Crafts and Cities in China
Yangwen Zheng
What the paper says
Abstract More than a century of modernisation—163 years if we count from 1862 when the Tongzhi Restoration was launched—has injected new blood into the old Chinese civilisation and brought China into the orbit of a modern world. But at what cost? Scholars of China have researched and debated about modernisation from various perspectives. But few have asked: what has China lost in its quest for and in achieving modernity? This article takes a concrete look at the damage done by industrialisation and urbanisation, offering a glimpse into what has been lost. It argues that these processes have devastated traditional crafts and household/village industries, ruined traditional cities, and wrecked the urban landscape/environment. They have led to overconsumption that has and will continue to devastate the country. Conceptualising the cost of modernisation opens a unique window to interrogate the transformation of the Middle Kingdom. It exposes the problem with modernisation in China.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.