Integrated Development: A Structural Interpretation of Chinese Modernization

Western modernization theories have long taken the linear development view of disciplining developing countries through their own demonstration effects, which is seriously divorced from their own modernization process in practice, and is essentially a West-centered ideology. However, from a structural perspective, the contemporary “chaos in the West” is not a temporary disorder caused by the developed industrial society entering the post-modernity, but a pre-modern countertide brought about by the failure of the integration of the national and social development systems. Chinese modernization, on the other hand, adheres to the path of independent development, promotes the structural integration of political, economic and cultural systems and elements in the development, and realizes the internal connection and heterogeneous isomorphism of the Party to the political system, the structural coordination and functional connection between productive forces and production relations, the government and the market, and economic base and superstructure, and the full cohesion of traditional culture, the system of core socialist values and social consensus. Integrated development breaks the linear cognition of pre-modernity-modernity-post-modernity, emphasizes the multi-dimensional and multi-level correlation and optimization of national and social development factors, and provides a new model of “compound integration” that combines vitality with order, freedom with consensus, and development with integration.