Modern Research. Issue 3

Author: Research Center for the World Modernization Process, Peking University
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: The article "Capitalist World-System and the Production of Space" by Li Jiaqiao in the "Academic Forum" section of this issue provides a framework for reflecting on modernization theory from the perspective of spatial analysis and "postmodernism." The author emphasizes that modernization merely reflects the process of capitalist spatial production and encounters resistance from "regions," "places," and "bodies" in this process. Yang Chenqi's "An Overview of Twentieth-Century American Techno-Governance Thought" delves into the impact of technology on politics in developed industrial societies. From the angle of the direct and profound influence of economic and technological progress on the structure and decision-making of social politics, it examines the trends of development in developed industrial societies. The author argues that techno-governance thought is a reflection of industrialization and economic and technological progress in people's ideas and concepts. A society without scientific rationality is empty, and a society without social rationality is blind. People critically and reflectively engage with techno-governance politics from theory to practice because attempts in reality to solve social and political problems with science and technology have failed. Wang Shuguang's "The 'Washington Consensus' and the 'Post-Washington Consensus' in the Economics of Transition" reveals the inherent theoretical dilemmas of the "Washington Consensus" from the perspective of the practice of economic transition. The article points out that the "Washington Consensus" is a significant achievement of transition economics in the 1980s, but this consensus on rapid privatization, marketization, and liberalization, based on neoclassical economic dogma, is increasingly facing severe challenges from the reality of economic transition, thus forming the "Post-Washington Consensus" in the field of transition economics. The article also analyzes the profound significance of the "Post-Washington Consensus" for the theoretical "transformation" of transition economics itself.