Here we are, back in sleepy little Williamstown.  A stark contrast to big, brash Shanghai.  I will have more to say about the trip in the next few days, some reflections on the past and the present in contemporary China, but, for now, let me get back to commenting on stories in the press.

    Today, this piece in the People’s Daily jumped out at me: "China’s revitalization doesn’t mean a return to the past."  It discusses the implications of China’s emergence, or perhaps re-emergence, as a Great Power, warning the West against seeing the new China as a return to a regionally dominant empire, and warning Chinese people against "historical nationalism:"

China’s revitalization shouldn’t be understood as returning to the time
centuries back when China was the dominant power in East Asia. Chinese
people can be proud of their revitalization process, but shouldn’t have
sentiments of ‘historical nationalism’.

     To a significant degree, these warnings will have little effect: strategists in the West are certainly looking at China as the regionally dominant power that could potentially threaten their national interests; and "historical nationalism" is already strong and growing among Chinese generally.  But the author, Zhang Feng, is correct in one big way: the China of today is not at all like the China of the past.

    As I wandered from city to city in the past two weeks, I was constantly asking myself: how much of the past is in the present?  In the big cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Xian – I had to conclude "not much."  The physical infrastructure of these places has transformed fundamentally, from something vaguely Chinese to a modernist norm found in most global capitals.  Culturally, too, socialism is dead, dead, dead, and Confucianism seems impossible to revive in any meaningful sense (more thoughts on this later).  While the past will certainly be revised and reformatted to suit the present (doesn’t every nation search for a "usable past"?), we should not fall into the trap of believing that the past is somehow shaping the present.  The dynamic runs very much in the other direction, as it does everywhere: the past is filtered and shaped and understood in terms of the interests and needs of the present.

    And what are those present interests and needs?  Economic growth above all else, primarily for purposes of political legitimation of an authoritarian party-state, but also as the stage upon which countless of Chinese lives are transformed in the presence of intense modernization.  Most Chinese people, I am willing to bet, have no desire to return to the past.  Indeed, there is much in the past that they would just as soon forget.  It is much easier to seize the new opportunities for economic and social and cultural change in the present (the political is still blocked by the party-state) and remake the past in the image of what seems possible now.