Contemporary Chinese Society In Transition National Character Transformation Problem

"The development of history appears tending to deceive people of the country at first, and then it may result in arousing them from numbness." The above sentence from Revolution in China and Europe (written by Marx) is helpful for us to understand the complexity of history and we are surprised to find the fact that the problem of people's modernization in China hasn't been solved better during its more than 100 year's modernizing process. In some sense, social modernization is naturally people's modernization. Moreover, one of the important contents of people's modernization is people's modernization in character, in other words, according to the requirement of people's modernization, from the point of view of developing what's useful and discarding what's useless, to realize people's transformation from tradition to modernization, to form peculiar temperament of its nation in accordance with the requirement of time, to shape national character which is ideal and healthy in order to achieve the renascence of traditional national characters in the contemporary era.In the late of 1970's, history has entered a new chapter. With the process of reform and opening and the development of socialistic modernization, China has met the accelerating period of social transformation, which is also called the period of contemporary social transformation. During this period, great changes have taken place in the systems of politics, economy and culture as well as people's life style. However, national character is still the problem which hinders the smoothing transformation of Chinese society and the realization of the strategic aim of modernization. After 100 years' straying, whooping, frustrating and suffering, China has ultimately gone back to its historic starting point of modernization, of transformation of its national character which was initiated by Chinese people 100 years ago. On the background of world-wide modernization, from the fact of China's transformation from traditional society to modern society, in Marx' and sociological ways in researching and analyzing , by centering the problem of transformation of national character in current China, the article tries to research and analyze the characteristics of traditional character in China and its original reasons, to find out the peculiarity of contemporary society in the period of transformation and its impacts on national character. Furthermore, the article, in the light of the requirement for people's modernization, also tries to put forward some general standards, value and approaches in transformation of national character in modernization, in order to realize the transformation of national character and make it become a rational light which will lead to China's modernization.