It is noteworthy when one sees the two opposite directions one term assumes in the same period. At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s “modernity” and “modernization” seemed to be terms to be relegated to the semantics of the times past – with the declaration of the “postmodern condition”, with the announcement of the end of the “grand narratives” of freedom, development or equality in Europe and North America; add to this the critique of ecological consequences of the modernization processes developed around the same time and the overall picture will defi nitely be a negative one; but exactly in the same years the ambitious modernization project was announced in China; forty years later the world has signifi cantly changed because of it – in the period which was supposed to have left the modernity behind.