Abstract

The rhetoric material vs spiritual; West vs East in our historical present is more than ever a false problem, in a way that in a post-modern era where technology offers new definition of time and space, forcing human being to reconsider the role played in society, culture is a definition that shapes itself every day. As to say that the contraposition between civilization was a useful tool to describe a society until the past century, defining an identity by juxtaposition to the other, but today because of the process of homologation that reduces us all to an anonymous mass of consumer, defining the other is a quite more complex attempt and therefore the definition of self becomes a game to lose. The transition from Socialist China to Post-Socialist China is also the transition from the stability guaranteed by Chinese philosophy to the individualism offered by the logic of marketization. Over the sociological attempt to define the never resolved dynamic modernization-westernization, China places her quest for a new identity.

Key words: Confucianism, taoism, modernism, westernization, modernization, scar literature.