For well over a century, China's attitude toward its traditional culture has been highly unstable. Observing the contradictory waves of passionate enthusiasm and equally passionate rejection, sometimes picking up almost tidal force, at others undulating rapidly, or overlapping in confusing cross-currents, the impolite observer might be easily tempted to reach for descriptions from the field of psychiatry such as "schizophrenic", "manic-depressive" or "multiple personality disorder".

Is the country's traditional culture a precious asset or an obstacle to progress? Is it an instrument of social oppression or of national self-assertion? Has it induced decay and humiliation or does it on the contrary provide the resources for social renaissance and harmonious co-existence?

While these pages have often hosted Chinese voices lamenting the erosion of native traditions under the combined impact of Western influences and social modernization, a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences takes the opposite tack, denouncing the resilient "superstitions" - such as various types of fortune telling - which have impeded the popularization of scientific thinking within the country.

Indeed, after raging for perhaps 150 years, this heated controversy has itself become something of a Chinese tradition.

As with so many other aspects of today's China, while problems may seem acute, in broad historical perspective the trend is predominantly positive. If unbalanced, wildly oscillating attitudes to Chinese traditions resulted from the traumas of social stagnation, imperial encroachment, civil war and national humiliation, the reversal of the country's fortunes in the final decades of the 20th century has surely diluted the bitterness of these disputes. Even before Deng Xiaoping unleashed the mainland's economic miracle, the ethnic Chinese "Tiger" economies or "Little Dragons" had already demonstrated - against the conventional wisdom of 19th century European scholars - that "Confucian" societies can modernize dynamically without renouncing their cultural heritage or distinctive characters.

Perhaps the greatest irony haunting this entire noisy debate is the loss of balance it manifests, since the central importance of balance is the common thread running through China's three great currents of traditional culture. It is emphasized equally by Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism as the optimum of practical wisdom, the golden mean or middle way, the guiding principle of virtue and of fortune in all its respects. A balanced approach to the question of Chinese traditional culture, neither blindly devoted nor arrogantly dismissive, is surely the stance most in keeping with traditional Chinese teachings.

Science, technology and market economics are the universal keys to social development and prosperity, so that any culture which defines itself in contrast to them is aligning itself with ignorance and poverty. It is utterly mistaken, therefore, to identify modernization with "Westernization" - as if it were necessarily more corrosive of Chinese traditions than of those in the West. If anything, the opposite is the case. Each of China's three cultural wellsprings is remarkable for its flexibility, tolerance, practicality, lack of superstition and aversion to fanaticism. China has been blessed by an absence of terrible divinities, demanding irrational cruelties or unquestioning beliefs from their devotees.

All traditions require periodic renovation, but China has reason to be grateful for its cultural peculiarities, which are uniquely devoid of dogmatic features, being rooted instead in the pursuit of practical wisdom, the search for balance and the graceful acceptance of change. Modernization drives every culture a little crazy, but it's stagnation that really makes them mad.