Editors' Introduction
Editors' Introduction

Summary/Abstract: China in Betweenness: Harmonizing New Order in the Times of Transition. Why China? The year 2008 was in public discourse called the “Year of China.” One could think that China attracted attention due to the Olympic Games that took place in August, the tremendous catastrophe—the May earthquake in Sichuan claiming more than 90,000 lives, or demonstrations in Tibet in March last year. However, China becoming the focus of international attention had no connection either with the spectacular sports event or with the Sichuan tragedy, but with social transition, which after nearly a century of searching for a formula of efficient modernisation has been the way of leaving behind the crises caused by the Great Leap Forward and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. This formula was initiated by the reforms of the Chinese statehood, agriculture, industry and economic exchange with foreign states in the late 1970s. China’s accelerating modernisation at the end of the 20th century, together with the open door policy, generated more and more deeper changes in social life, in culture and the economy and, to some extent, in politics. Many Western countries required more than a hundred years to complete the changes, but China did it in an incomparably shorter time. The results and manifestation of the modernisation are studied today by both Chinese and non-Chinese social scientists.

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