Uneven Development Quotes

“Seen in this way, it represents a challenge of the grassroots to the elite, of popular to the official, of the weak to the strong...

...More than twenty years have passed since Tiananmen protests of 1989, and from today's perspective their greatest impact has been the lack of progress in reforming the political system. It's fair to say political reform was taking place in the 1980s, even if its pace was slower than that of economic reform. After Tiananmen, however, political reform ground to a halt, while economy began breakneck development. Because of this pradox we find ourselves in a reality full of contradictions: conservative here, radical there; the concentration of political power on this side, the unfettering of economic interests on that; dogmatism on the one hand, anarchism on hte other; toeing the line here, tossing away the rule book there. Over the past twenty years our development has been uneven rather than comprehensive, and this lopsided development is compromising the health of our society.

It seems to me that the emergence - and unstoppable momentum - of the copycat phenomenon is an inevitable consequence of this lopsided development. The ubiquity and sharpness of social contradictions have provoked confusion in people's value systems and worldview, thus giving birth to the copycat effect, when all kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.”
― Yu Hua

“How may we describe the general outlines of nationalist development, seen as 'general historical process'? Here, by far the most important point is that nationalism is as a whole quite incomprehensible outside the context of that process's uneven development. The subjective point of nationalist ideology is, of course, always the suggestion that one nationality is as good as another. But the real point has always lain in the objective fact that, manifestly, one nationality has never been even remotely as good as as, or equal to, the others which figure in its world view. Indeed, the purpose of the subjecivity (nationalist myths) can never be anything but protest against the brutal fact: it is mobilisation against the unpalatable, humanly unacceptable, truth of grossly uneven development.”
― Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism

“By 1938, Scotland had for nearly 200 years lived within a classic peripheral identity assigned to it by the artists and ideologues of the great European core cultures through the mode of Romanticism and their control of the means of (ideological) production. However, the brute fact of subsequent uneven economic development compelled the Scots to bring into collision with that historically assigned identity a new-fashioned identity more appropriate to a dynamic modern nation. Great national moments of self-presentation, such as the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938, were the occasions when the ongoing dialectic of modern/urban against rural/ancient emerged in its most public and delirious form. Such occasions therefore hold a political lesson. The process of speaking with two voices - the fissures; the uncertainties; the grating shifts of gear from one discourse to another - assert once more, the fluid, unstable character of national identity. Such occasions proclaim that national identity is not a set of inborn, natural characteristic in a people, but the product of that people's history. With the realisation of instability comes the realisation of the possibility of change.”
― Colin McArthur, Popular Culture and Social Relations