Perspectives on Modernization: Nation-State, Engineering, and the Chinese Project

The term «modernization» carries two distinct meanings that are often conflated: an analytical concept in Western social sciences describing the historical emergence of modernity, and a political project of national development in non-Western countries. This paper connects these meanings through a single overarching theme: the role of engineering and engineers in modernization processes. The first section sketches a sociological debate on modernity, technology, and nationalism. It traces the evolution from the universalist theories of modernization and their critique to contemporary concepts of multiple and reflexive modernities. The second section examines historical studies of engineers as both subjects and objects of national modernization policies, with a focus on their role in sociomaterial transformations, underlying state-building and expansionism. Drawing on comparative historiography, it analyzes patterns across the first-wave to the «catching-up» modernization scenarios. The third section takes China as exemplifying a distinctive catching-up approach and postulates a philosophical interpretation of modernization as social engineering, arguing for the need to overcome a narrow, Eurocentric understanding of engineering itself. This framework synthesizes Western critical theory with Chinese philosophy of engineering to envision a hypothetical emancipatory path for twenty-first century modernization. This hypothetical imaginary constructs a perspective on modernization as a creative, reflexive, and participatory process of constructing the social world, where humans remain the subjects rather than objects of progress.