From the 1860s to 2019, China's modernization journey spanned approximately 160 years, starting from its inception to the initial stages of takeoff. During this period, coinciding with modernization’s concrete progress, modern and contemporary China experienced a tumultuous transformation rarely witnessed globally. In a certain sense, this extraordinary evolution presented a distinctive “V-shaped” pattern. From the 1860s to the first half of the twentieth century, aggression from imperialist forces and the backward forces of domestic feudalism and bureaucratic comprador bourgeoisie inflicted increasingly severe disasters on Chinese society, seriously impeding the normal progress of Chinese modernization. Driven by the escalating national liberation movement, China gradually achieved the goals of national independence, unity, and people's liberation. With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 as a milestone, China terminated the downward trend that had persisted for over a century since the Opium War in 1840.