Abstract: Taking the recent heated debate on China’s particularities among Chinese scholars as its starting point, this paper endeavors to tackle the issues of the present and particularism at a philosophical level. It consists of four parts. Firstly, the paper addresses the question why the present matters significantly to sociopolitical deliberations. Then it moves on in discussing the inner ambiguities of Hegel’s historicism, and the problems of Leo Strauss’s anti-historicist thesis. The last section of the paper proposes a dialectics between the particular and the universal, and argues that once (re)viewing the “China model” topic from the perspective of the Foucauldian “ontology of the present” as critical ontology, participants of this current debate will be able to free themselves from the factionalist opposition between “Rightists” and “Leftists”, and turn the debate into a more productive one.