Modern Weekly (周末画报)is a Chinese tabloid-sized magazine focused on news, lifestyle, finance, and urban fashion. The latest issue is its 2006 special anniversary. It’s 112 pages fat, and named ‘Post-Modern Modern’.
There are two highlights of the topic, one is a series of interviews with ‘post-modern intellectuals’; the other consists of article on “the city, its growth, its decay, and its future”.
The interview section includes explorer Zhang Yiwu (张颐武) from Beijing University, Hong Kong cultural critic Li Oufan (李欧梵), social scholar Gu Xiaoming (顾哓鸣), sexologist Li Yinhe (李银河) and other six intellectuals.
Below is a translated excerpt from sexologist Li Yinhe’s interview:
Q: What is your understanding of ‘tradition’, ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’?
A: Take the gender question for example, tradition is men first, women second (男尊女卑), modern is men and women are equal, post-modern means that the gender boundaries between men and women are ambiguous. (后现代是男女性别界限模糊化)
Q: Is China’s modernization actually post-modernization in essence?
A: I don’t think it is right to say China’s modernization is post-modernization in essence. We can only say China’s modernization has a factor of ‘post-modernity’. For instance, the information industry is not the product of industrial age and the general modernization of industry. Also, the concept of environment protection is post-modern, it is not modern. However, our country has put much emphasis on it. We cannot conclude that we are post-modern only judging by some post-modern factors during our modernization.
Q: If the judgment ‘post-modern modern’ is reasonable, what is your understanding?
A: I don’t think mixing two different concept up is a clear judgment.
Q: Is China the origin of post-modernism?
A: In my opinion, why some people think so is that Westerners think of the world in the way of dichotomy—-ration and emotion, material and spirit, mind and body and etc. But the Chinese think of the world in a wholly integrated way. A typical example is the difference between traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine in clinical treatment. The western medicine analyzes and treat the organ or disease as an isolated part: if one is suffering from headache, treat the head; if one is suffering from an ache in the foot, treat the foot. But traditional Chinese medicine treats the body as a whole. This kind of thinking matches the post-modernism thinking pattern spiritually. So if you regard China as the origin of post-modernism, this may be one of the reasons.