Class 11 History Chapter 7 Paths to Modernisation MCQ / Objective Questions with Answers in English

“An influential symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in 1943 debated the dilemma facing Japan – of how to combat the West while being modern. A musician, Moroi Saburo, posed the question of how to rescue music from the art of sensory stimulation and restore it to an art of the spirit. He was not rejecting Western music but trying to find a way that went beyond merely rewriting or playing Japanese music on Western instruments. The philosopher Nishitani Keiji defined ‘modern’ as the unity of three streams of Western thought: the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of natural sciences. He argued that Japan’s ‘moral energy’ (a term taken from the German philosopher Ranke) had helped it to escape colonisation and it was its duty to establish a new world order, a Greater East Asia. For this a new vision that would integrate science and religion was necessary.”
(NCERT, Themes in World History, on the 1943 ‘Overcoming Modernity’ symposium)

“In a survey in 1930 in Xunwu, Mao Zedong looked at everyday commodities such as salt and soya beans, at the relative strengths of local organisations, at petty traders and craftsmen, ironsmiths and prostitutes, and the strength of religious organisations to examine the different levels of exploitation. He gathered statistics of the number of peasants who had sold their children and found out what price they received: boys were sold for 100-200 yuan but there were no instances of the sale of girls because the need was for hard labour not sexual exploitation. It was on the basis of these studies that he advocated ways of solving social problems.”
(NCERT, Themes in World History, on Mao Zedong’s 1930 Xunwu survey)