Summary: Reappearance of Glories of Chinese Culture

Culture varies between nations and countries. Thinking from the perspective of International Law and humanism, each kind of culture is equal and enjoys equal rights to survival and development, as they’re all part of the human culture. Viewing from the perspective of development and modernization, different cultures have different cultural productivity and competitiveness; different nations and countries see different levels of development and qualities of cultural life; so different cultures are not equivalent. If we integrate the ideas of anthropology and modernization, every culture will face two challenges: rational protection of national cultural and cultural modernization. Cultural modernization is an important aspect of modernization, as well as a significant component of world and national modernizations. In the past 3 centuries, cultural modernization, together with modernization in economy, society and politics, changed the world pattern and the human life. This report discusses the facts and principles of world cultural modernization, as well as the rational choices for China’s cultural modernization in the 21st century.

If the earth is the physical home of the human beings, then culture must be their spiritual home. The cultural life is the spiritual life of the humans. If economic modernization is the modernization of human physical life, then cultural modernization must be the modernization of human spiritual life and the one of human spiritual home as well. With the enrichment of material life, people have greater and greater demands in their spiritual life, and the importance of culture and cultural modernization is increasingly prominent. However, so far there is no unified definition of culture and cultural modernization, nor is there standard paradigm of studies of culture and cultural modernization. This report mainly studies cultural modernization from the perspectives of science and modernization. Cultural modernization is so complicated that we have to carry out studies from different perspectives; and studies from different perspectives can grant us different and valuable understandings. Then different understandings can supplement each other and further wisdom can be drawn from all kinds of ideas for the profit of human beings.