Listen to the audio narration above.
I mentioned when launching this Substack that one ongoing project of mine is a translation of my paternal grandfather Kuo Ting-yee’s work Outline History of Modern China《近代中国史纲》. It’s slow going, but I thought that in light of the anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, I would offer some sections from Chapter 14, much of which deals with the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement.
My grandfather was only 15 when students from Peking University marched to Tiananmen in protest of the grotesquely unfair treatment given to the Chinese delegation at Versailles, and the warlord government’s impotence after secret treaties between the Entente powers and Japan came to light. But even as a high school student in Kaifeng, he was very much caught up in the spirit of the times and was a creature of the New Culture Movement of which May 4th was an expression. Writing about it decades later, his ardor for its spirit is very much in evidence.
Since I first read about the May Fourth Movement as an undergraduate, I’ve also resonated with its core ideas and found them irresistibly romantic, bringing together as they do the idealism of my liberal convictions and love for the ideas of the Enlightenment with my strong feelings of Chinese patriotism. I still admire the great thinkers of that time, even while recognizing that the cultural iconoclasm they unleashed would return in the form of the Cultural Revolution a half-century later, in much the same way as the ideas of the philosophes — Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach, Grotius — would be perverted in the excesses of the Terror. The boldness with which they met the challenges of their time stirs me, as it clearly stirred my grandfather.
That the May Fourth/New Culture Movement impelled a search for alternatives to liberal democracy as an appropriate form of government for China — and that, more to the point, Chinese communism was an outgrowth of the movement —is something Kuo Ting-yee clearly believed.
Five years ago, on the centenary of May Fourth, a senior national security official in the Trump administration delivered a talk “to the Chinese people” that, with galling hubris, challenged this idea and made the case that Chinese historians have understood May Fourth all wrong: That it was all about intellectual independence, freedom, and of course, democracy. Chinese communism, in this telling, was an aberration — a wrong turn taken by people who didn’t understand the “real” meaning of this pivotal moment in history.
Indeed, May Fourth was about individual freedom, intellectual emancipation, and yes, even democracy: but it was also about the profound disillusionment with the abortive republican experiment in China, and about the betrayal of China by the loudest proponents of those principles, the Allied powers who had emerged "victorious” from the ruins of the Great War.
This first part, which covers Section 1 and Section 2 of Chapter 14, looks at the background of the New Culture Movement and the revolution in literature led by figures like Hu Shi. As Section 3 is mostly about the industrial and commercial advances of the time, I’ll likely skip that and move directly to Section 4, about the expansion and spread of the May Fourth Movement, in the next installment.
Footnotes are from the original. I’ll add some commentary after the second section, which deals more directly with the May Fourth Incident itself.
(Part One) (1915-1924)
Section One: The New Culture Movement
During the Qing dynasty, intellectuals who took inspiration from the West and aspired to democratic politics can be considered the primary driving force of the revolution, with students — whether those who studied in Japan or domestically — occupying a pivotal role. After the establishment of the Republic of China, the confluence of a wide range of factors left them disillusioned. In their quest for a path to national salvation, eventually they gained new awareness. They came to feel that in laboring in the direction they had been, they’d emphasized the imitation of Western forms without having grasped the fundamental spirit on which Western nations were founded. To reform politics, they must first reform society. And to reform society, they must first reform the people’s minds. From a negative perspective, it was necessary to cleanse the outdated, conservative old ideas, beliefs, and worldviews that comprised the old culture. From a positive perspective, it was essential to establish new ideas, beliefs, and worldviews that suited the times and were progressive — to create a new culture. In short, it was necessary to abandon tradition and thoroughly westernize, starting with embracing new trends — a New Culture Movement. And thus the revolutionary movement began.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Sinica to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.