Article China Through the Lens of Modernity Barry Buzan † and George Lawson ‡ † Barry Buzan is a Fellow of the British Academy, Emeritus Professor in the LSE Department of International Relations and a Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS and ‡ George Lawson is professor of International Relations at the Australian National University. Abstract *Corresponding author. Email: george.lawson@anu.edu.au This article examines China’s encounter with modernity from the 19th century to the present day. It builds on the historical narrative of modernity developed by Buzan and Lawson (2015), and two theoretical perspectives: uneven and combined development, and differentiation theory. The article opens with a short history of modernity, establishing that it is not a static phenomenon, but a continuously unfolding process. It then explores five periods of China’s encounter with modern- ity: imperial decline and resistance to modernization; civil war and Japanese inva- sion; Mao’s radical communist project; Deng’s market socialism; and Xi’s attempt to synthesize Confucius, Mao, and Deng. It explores both how China fits into the gen- eral trajectory of modernity, and how it has evolved from rejection of it to construct- ing its own distinctive version of ‘modernity with Chinese characteristics’. The article ends by reflecting on what issues remain within China’s version of modernity, and how it fits, and doesn’t fit with other forms of modernity already established within global international society. Introduction In earlier work we set out the history of the last two centuries as a dual encounter of the non-Western world with both Western power, and the ideational chal- lenges of modernity. 1 Much has been made of China’s weakness in its encounter with Western and then Japanese power during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and of its regaining great power status since 1950, dramatically so during the 21st century. This article explores China’s other encounter, that with the multiple challenges presented by modernity. 2 Since modernity unleashes vast new 1 Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 2 We would like to thank Gordon Barrass, Wang Jiangli, Zhang Feng and Zhang Yongjin for comments on earlier drafts, though we alone are responsible for the argument made here. V C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Institute of International Relations, Tsinghua University. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2020, 1–31 doi: 10.1093/cjip/poaa005 Article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/cjip/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/cjip/poaa005/5838308 by London School of Economics user on 17 May 2020