Chinese Modernization, the Global South and Strategic Pragmatism

Chinese modernization is unfolding at a historical moment when Western modernization, the universal narrative that shaped development thought and global governance for over seven decades, is confronting its own structural exhaustion. The global order produced by that narrative no longer commands coherence, legitimacy, or uncontested authority. What is at stake is not simply a shift in economic power, but the decay of a monopoly over modernity itself.

Modernization theory abstracted a particular historical experience and presented Western modernization, especially in the post-World War II (WWII) period, as universal progress. Yet this abstraction systematically erased the material foundations of Western modernity: colonial extraction, unequal exchange, cheap energy and asymmetries of political and military power.

For much of the post-WWII period, development in the Global South was organized around a promise that was never fully honored. Growth was encouraged without sovereignty, openness without strategy and reform without productive transformation. Structural adjustment, trade liberalization and financial deregulation were prescribed as universal remedies, while the deeper question of capability formation was marginalized.

Chinese modernization emerges within this historical breach. It does not seek to universalize its experience, nor does it claim moral or ideological supremacy. Instead, it exposes the contingency of Western modernity and reveals that modernization itself is neither singular nor preordained. In doing so, it reopens history for the Global South.

Amid the emergence of a new geo-economic age of using trade rules, industrial policies, technology regimes and financial systems as instruments of strategic influence, U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) marks a historic turning point in how the United States conceptualizes modernization. Unlike earlier strategies that cloaked economic globalization in universalist rhetoric, the current NSS explicitly subordinates global engagement to core national interest, industrial revival and civilizational renewal.

This shift is historically significant. It represents an explicit abandonment of the universalist claims that underpinned the liberal international order. Globalization is no longer presented as a shared pathway to prosperity, but as a strategic arena shaped by rivalry. Technology, climate policy, supply chains and finance are increasingly securitized. The NSS does not conceal this transformation; it announces it.

Within this framework, China is not primarily criticized for violating liberal norms, but for succeeding too effectively on its own terms. The strategy implicitly acknowledges that China’s rise was enabled by state-led industrial policy, disciplined sequencing of liberalization, control over finance and land, and long-term planning—precisely the instruments that Western development doctrine long discouraged in the Global South. China is thus framed not merely as a competitor, but as a systemic challenger capable of reorganizing global economic geography.

This framing is also an admission of Western retreat. For decades, development policy prioritized fiscal discipline, policy conditionality and market access, while infrastructure, industrial ecosystems and productive capacity were systematically neglected. The great-power competition now articulated in the NSS is, therefore, not only military or technological. It is a struggle over whose modernization logic will organize the world economy in the 21st century.

Western modernization and civilizational exhaustion

The Western model of modernization achieved unprecedented material expansion during the post-WWII decades. Between 1950 and 1973, often described as the “golden age of capitalism,” advanced economies grew at nearly 4 percent annually. Industrial expansion, welfare states and regulated finance underpinned rising living standards and social mobility. This experience was subsequently universalized through development theory and policy advice.

Yet this promise rested on historically specific conditions that could not be replicated globally. Colonial extraction, cheap fossil energy and asymmetric power relations underwrote Western prosperity. By 1980, countries representing less than one fifth of the world’s population controlled over 70 percent of global income. The neoliberal turn from the late 1970s onward intensified financialization and inequality while eroding productive capacity. Manufacturing employment declined sharply, while speculative finance became increasingly detached from the real economy.

The 2008 global financial crisis marked a decisive rupture. It exposed the fragility of an economic order driven by leverage and speculation rather than productive investment. Since then, growth in advanced economies has remained structurally weak, inequality has widened within them, and political fragmentation has deepened.

In 1980, the top 1 percent in the United States captured around 10 percent of national income. By 2022, this share had risen to over 20 percent. Such concentrations of wealth undermine the social foundations of modernity itself.

Civilizations do not decline when power disappears overnight; they decline when coherence erodes. Western modernization today suffers from precisely such erosion, socially, economically and politically.

Chinese modernization as a civilizational project

Chinese modernization emerges from a radically different historical condition. China’s encounter with modernity was mediated through humiliation, fragmentation and external domination. Its modernization drive, therefore, is not animated by a desire to universalize its experience, but by a determination to avoid subordination.

Unlike Western modernization, which privileged markets over states and individuals over collectives, Chinese modernization places state capacity, long-term planning and social stability at its core. Markets function as instruments rather than sovereign forces; growth is sequenced rather than abrupt; political authority is justified through performance rather than electoral competition.

Crucially, Chinese modernization does not frame tradition as an obstacle to be eliminated. Civilizational continuity—ethical, cultural and institutional—is treated as a resource to be reworked rather than erased. This challenges the Western assumption that modernity requires cultural rupture. In this sense, Chinese modernization represents not a rejection of modernity itself, but a rejection of Western civilizational monopoly over it.

This distinction matters. Modernity here is not a destination already reached by some and denied to others.

Chinese modernization began from a fundamentally different historical baseline. In 1978, when its economic reforms were initiated, China’s annual per-capita GDP was approximately $156, and over 80 percent of its population lived in rural areas. By 2023, per-capita GDP had exceeded $12,000 in current prices, and the urbanization rate had risen to more than 65 percent. China has accounted for nearly three quarters of global poverty reduction since the early 1980s, lifting over 800 million people above the international extreme poverty line, according to 2022 World Bank data.

This transformation was not driven by unfettered markets. The state retained control over land, finance and strategic industries while gradually introducing market mechanisms.

Unlike the “shock therapy” adopted in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia during the 1990s—where GDP contractions of 20 to 40 percent were common—China’s growth averaged close to 9 percent annually between 1980 and 2010.

What distinguishes Chinese modernization is not simply speed, but sequencing. Growth preceded financial liberalization, infrastructure preceded consumption, and industrial capacity preceded services. This reflects a civilizational logic that prioritizes long-term stability over short-term efficiency.

Chinese modernization exemplifies what I describe as strategic pragmatism—a development approach that resists ideological absolutism and adapts institutions to historical context. Markets are neither rejected nor deified; they are subordinated to national objectives.

This pragmatism is visible in China’s contemporary global engagement. By 2022, China had become the world’s largest trading partner for over 120 countries and regions. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), (a China-proposed initiative to boost connectivity along and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes—Ed.), Chinese firms have financed and constructed infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In a geo-economic environment increasingly shaped by supply chain reconfiguration and technological rivalry—particularly since the escalation of U.S.-China trade tensions in 2018—strategic pragmatism has become a defensive necessity rather than a theoretical preference.

The Global South and the reclaiming of agency

The deeper implication of Chinese modernization is epistemic. It inspires the Global South to abandon the illusion that history moves along a single track policed by a single civilization. In an era of ecological limits, geopolitical rivalry and systemic uncertainty, the central question is no longer who leads the world, but how societies negotiate modernity on their own terms.

For countries like Bangladesh and others in the developing world, the task is neither to romanticize China nor to cling to a Western script. It is to practice strategic pragmatism—learning without imitating, engaging without subordinating, and modernizing without erasing history. This is about learning selectively, preserving policy space and aligning development with social and ecological objectives.

Bangladesh’s aspiration to become a trillion-dollar economy by 2034, following its graduation from Least Developed Country (LDC) status in 2026, marks a decisive moment. This transition is unfolding not within the liberal international order that supported its first phase of development, but amid its fragmentation.

For decades, Bangladesh’s growth was anchored in preferential market access, low-cost labor and export concentration, particularly in ready-made garments. This model delivered poverty reduction, employment generation and macroeconomic stability. Yet it remained structurally narrow. LDC graduation represents both success and exposure. The erosion of trade preferences and tightening of global standards reveal the limits of a price-competitive, labor-intensive trajectory.

Bangladesh does not face a binary choice between Western and Chinese models. That framing obscures agency. Chinese modernization demonstrates that sequencing matters. Infrastructure, energy security, logistics and industrial ecosystems are not outcomes of growth; they are its preconditions. Bangladesh’s trillion-dollar ambition similarly requires the deliberate construction of productive capacity before financial deepening, industrial upgrading before premature liberalization, and social stability before speculative expansion.

Green strategic pragmatism reframes sustainability as a productive agenda. Renewable energy, climate-resilient infrastructure, adaptive agriculture and green manufacturing are not costs to be absorbed, but capabilities to be built. Bangladesh must ensure that the green transition strengthens domestic industry rather than reproducing dependency through technology monopolies and conditional finance.

Moving toward a trillion-dollar economy demands qualitative transformation. It requires a shift from preference-led growth to capability-based development, from export dependence to productive diversification, and from scale without depth to resilience with complexity. Bangladesh cannot afford to inherit development scripts designed for a global order that no longer exists.

Geography intensifies these challenges. The Bay of Bengal is rapidly emerging as a central arena of 21st-century geopolitics, where maritime trade routes, energy corridors, digital infrastructure and naval power intersect. The BRI, India’s connectivity strategies, Japan’s Bay of Bengal Industrial Growth Belt and U.S.-led Indo-Pacific frameworks all converge in this maritime space.

Bangladesh’s location at the heart of this convergence transforms geography into either vulnerability or strategic capital. Strategic pragmatism treats ports, logistics, energy corridors and digital connectivity not merely as transit facilities, but as anchors of domestic industrialization. Engagement with competing powers must be evaluated through a single criterion: whether it deepens national capability and preserves policy space in the post-LDC era.

The Bay of Bengal should not become a militarized frontier. It should be constructed as a developmental common structured around economic sovereignty, regional production networks and shared ecological security.

Sovereign modernization in an age of transition

Strategic pragmatism emerges not as tactical balancing, but as a doctrine of ascent. Sovereignty in the contemporary world does not lie in isolation, but in the capacity to manage interdependence on national terms. Every trade agreement, infrastructure project, climate commitment and technological partnership must be assessed by its contribution to autonomous decision-making capacity.

The Global South’s horizon cannot be reached through continuity alone. It demands a new political economy that fuses modernization with sovereignty, growth with ecology, and global engagement with national purpose.

Strategic pragmatism provides the compass for Global South countries in their pursuit of modernization. Green destiny defines both constraint and opportunity. The future lies in mastering the art of sovereign modernization in an age of transition.

The author is a professor of economics at and former chairman of the Department of Development Studies at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as a director of the Central Bank of Bangladesh.