ed or expanded into China by the neighbouring countries of Korea or Japan, by the period of British authority over some parts of China, and what ideas or practices really came from within the society itself. The Chinese experience has involved various things which would seem to match what happened in the West, as in governing a mass population, or industrialization, but the results have differed from what has been the experience of the West or for that matter, the experiences of other traditional societies that have also been exposed to Modernity by way of mainly outside forces.
             The social sciences make use of the terms, Traditional vs. Modern, in ways that are sometimes just as vague as those of ordinary conversation. As Eisenstadt asserted, ¡§the central preoccupation of modern social thought and sociology has been unraveling the nature of the modern social order¡. (1973, p. 4) It is argued that the changes brought by the forces of modernity, and which the social sciences have to take into account, have been the dichotomies of liberty versus Authority, of stability and continuity versus Change, and of what is called modern social rationality versus Cultural orientations. (Eisenstadt, 1973, pp. 4-5) The last concept, that of modern social rationality in contrast with usually much, much older cultural orientations, seems to be helpful in understanding what
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