THE West has long believed that there is only one modernity, and that is Western modernity. The origins of this belief lie in the fact that modernization began in the West with Britain's Industrial Revolution and then spread to Europe and the United States. As late as 1900, the West enjoyed a virtual monopoly of modernization, the exception being Japan, the only non-Western country to industrialize in the 19th century. Japanese modernity was very distinct from Western modernity, and still is. But this did not stop the West believing that modernity was singular. When the developing world began to modernize after 1945, the West saw their modernization as synonymous with Westernization. When China embarked on the reform period after 1978, the West regarded it as the beginning of a process of Westernization.