Invoking Habermas's distinction between cultural and societal modernity, this article-a response to Wang Hui's justly celebrated discourse on Chinese modernity-separates modernity from modernization by emphasizing self-reflection and self-legitimation as the defining characteristics of cultural modernity. It is argued that herein lies the critical potentials of the modern consciousness. The unbalanced state of Chinese modernity is then explained in terms of its ties to nationalism. It is further argued that in this aged of late modern exhaustion the critical thrust of modernity is best represented by liberalism, which serves as a bulwark of post-metaphysical sobriety against all sorts of conservative/romantic regressions.