The Study Of National Identity In The Course Of Modernization

Modernization is a global social transition, and it poses great changes and shocks to society either from its width or depth. Since western countries have already become modernized, developing countries'modernization is kind of to overtake them and meantime will bring society greater changes, and at the same time it has changed, destroyed and rebuilt the concept of identity of the public. As a result there is modern identity crisis and consequently national identity crisis. Compared with western countries, many developing countries must take on political identity crisis, cultural identity crisis, and ethnic identity crisis which may weaken national identity during their modernization, meanwhile they are going to assume some unfair stresses from some developed countries, and finally the dual crisis of national identity will come into being. The appearance of national identity crisis may lead to the interruption of building process of the nation, causing some weaker substitutional identity which may be replaced by national identity. Knowing the importance of national identity and building highly unified national identity is the major subject developing countries now are facing.From the standpoint of political sociology, this dissertation discusses the connotation, nature and type of national identity through detailed description of the concept of identity. Furthermore it analyzes the inducing factors which may lead to national identity crisis in developing countries: the weakness of national identity caused by political identity crisis, cultural identity crisis, and ethnic identity crisis. China is a developing country and a typical multinational country as well. Faced with the diversity of different cultures and ethnic groups, whether China has a stable and unified base of social psychology directly relates to whether it may acquire the support from all nations, and whether it can form a steady league of all nations. With the background of modernization, guiding China's interaction among political identity, cultural identity, ethnic identity and national identity to be positive, constructing one-core political concept, maintaining unity of all nations, promoting inter-ethnic harmony and finally fulfilling the harmony of society are significant. Therefore, based on the reality of China as a multinational country to construct national identity, ways of achieving a rather good economic performance, strengthen the fair benefit distribution and culturing the identical political culture are practical.