Rising China and Its Postmodern Fate

"Deng Xiaoping’s (1904-1997) program has now lasted longer than Mao’s, and it continues to move forward. Indeed, in almost all of the manifestations of the Modern, the pace of China’s grand project has accelerated. Mao had hoped that the Countryside and all that it represented would surround and finally destroy everything that the City was and what it represented — and not only in China, but throughout the world. But the City has more than fought the Countryside to a draw; it is now counterattacking and it will win. China will soon leave behind its past as a predominately peasant society, and most of its people will live in urban settlements. Soon, there will be no countryside at all. Of course, the countryside will be more than just a memory for a long time; Postmodern China will have within it hundreds of millions of new urbanites who carry the Countryside’s habits of mind with them. The world as a whole may not yet be configured in the way late Qing-era writers of science fiction imagined it, but China’s newest cities — indeed, all the newest cities around the world — resemble the projections of prescient fantasists and pioneering filmmakers. The World City is now more [than] mere metaphor. It is a thing called Megalopolis, and it does not acknowledge national boundaries in its unstoppable sprawl."

-Charles Horner

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