New Culture Movement

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New Culture Movement
Background
Aftermath of 1911 Revolution

Eastward spread of Western learning

Ideologies
Practice
Schools of thought
Major publications
Notable people
New Culture Movement
Hanyu Pinyin
Xīn Wénhuà Yùndòng
Bopomofoㄒㄧㄣ ㄨㄣˊㄏㄨㄚˋ ㄩㄣˋㄉㄨㄙˋ
Gwoyeu RomatzyhShin Wenhuah Yunndonq
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The New Culture Movement was a

He Dong, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, Bing Xin, and Hu Shih, many classically educated, who led a revolt against Confucianism. The movement was launched by the writers of New Youth magazine, where these intellectuals promoted a new society based on unconstrained individuals rather than the traditional Confucian system.[5] In 1917, Mr. Hu Shih put forward the famous “Eight Principle”, that is, abandon the ancient traditional writing method and use vernacular.[6]

The New Culture Movement was the progenitor of the

Paris Peace Conference (the meeting setting the terms of peace at the conclusion of World War I), transforming what had been a cultural movement into a political one.[8]

Major positions

The movement promoted:

  1. Vernacular literature (Hu Shih's saying "Speak in the language of the time in which you live")[9][10]
  2. An end to the
    women's liberation
  3. The view that China is a nation among nations, not a uniquely Confucian culture
  4. The re-examination of Confucian texts and ancient classics using modern textual and critical methods, known as the Doubting Antiquity School
  5. Democratic and egalitarian values
  6. An orientation to the future rather than the past

In the view of the New Culture Movement, Confucian morality repressed the universal and natural experience of sexuality.[11]: 21  They believed that sexuality was best considered in scientific terms.[11]: 21 

History

Background

Following the failure of the 1911 revolution, Yuan Shikai’s ending of the second revolution of the summer of 1913 forced many intellectuals into exile, some fleeing to Tokyo, while others sought refuge in Shanghai.[12] In Tokyo in May of 1914, Zhang Shizhao founded the political magazine The Tiger that, while being short-lived, running only between May of 1914 - October of 1915, was one of the most influential political journals in China of the time.[13] Chen Duxiu, as well as other intellectuals who would later become a part of the New Culture Movement in China such as Li Dazhao contributed articles, poetry, letters, and more to The Tiger.[14] The Tiger was known for “probing the fundamental spirit of politics”, and the writers of this magazine grappled with the question of how underlying cultural values and beliefs shape politics, which would become important during the New Culture Movement.[15]

In 1915,

Beijing University where they became acquainted with the other individuals who made up the community of the New Culture Movement.[20]

New Youth
Magazine Cover

Rise

Two major centres of literature and intellectual activity were Beijing, home to Peking University and Tsinghua University, and Shanghai, with its flourishing publishing sector.[21] The founders of the New Culture Movement clustered in Peking University, where they joined Cai Yuanpei, who served as chancellor. These founders include Chen Duxiu who served as the Dean of the School of Arts and Letters in addition to being founder of the New Youth,[22] Li Dazhao as librarian, Hu Shih who was a leading figure in the literary revolution,[23] the philosopher Liang Shuming, and the historian Gu Jiegang, among others.

Hu Shih had argued for the use of the modern written vernacular Chinese (白话文 baihuawen) in literature before[9] and especially in his essay published by New Youth in January 1917 titled Preliminary Discussion on Literary Reform (文學改良芻議 wenxue gailiang chuyi) with the guideline: "Do not imitate the ancients." On April 18, 1918, he published the followed landmark article Constructive Literary Revolution – A Literature of National Speech (建设的文学革命论 jianshe de wenxue geming lun).[10]

The first vernacular Chinese fiction was the female author Chen Hengzhe's short story One Day (一日 yi ri), published 1917 in an overseas student quarterly (《留美学生季报》 liumei xuesheng jibao). This was a year before the publication of Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman on April 2, 1918, and The True Story of Ah Q (second was not published until 1921), which has often been incorrectly credited as the first vernacular Chinese fiction.[24]

Death of Yuan Shikai

Yuan Shikai, who inherited part of the Qing dynasty military after it collapsed in 1911, attempted to establish order and unity, but he failed to protect China against Japan, and also failed in an attempt to have himself declared emperor.[25] When he died in 1916, the collapse of the traditional order seemed complete, and there was an intensified search for a replacement to go deeper than the changes of the previous generations, which brought new institutions and new political forms. Daring leaders called for a new culture,[26] as the death of Yuan Shikai in June 1916 had opened the possibility of fundamental reform in the Chinese political sphere anew.[27]

Literature

The literary output of this time was substantial, with many writers who later became famous (such as Mao Dun, Lao She, Lu Xun and Bing Xin) publishing their first works. For example, Lu Xun's essays and short fiction created a sensation with their condemnation of Confucian culture. "Diary of a Madman" directly implied that China's traditional culture was mentally cannibalistic,[24] and The True Story of Ah Q showed typical Chinese people as weak and self-deceiving.[28] Along with this musicians such as Yin Zizhong joined the movement through music.

Major figures

Chen Duxiu

Chen Duxiu founded the

New Youth journal, which was a leading forum for debating the causes of China's weakness, as it laid the blame on Confucian culture. Chen Duxiu called for "Mr. Confucius" to be replaced by "Mr. Science" (賽先生; 赛先生; sài xiānsheng) and "Mr. Democracy" (德先生; dé xiānsheng). These two were regarded as the two symbols of the New Culture Movement and also its legacy.[7]

Hu Shih

Another outcome was the promotion of

Zhao Yuanren), began the study of the various Varieties of Chinese using tools of foreign linguistics. Hu Shih was among the scholars who used the textual study of Dream of the Red Chamber and other vernacular fiction as the basis for the national language. Literary societies such as the Crescent Moon Society flourished. Hu Shih was not only one of the founders of the movement but also considered the leader of the vernacular faction with his promotion of scientific methods.[9][7] The "national language" has another social and political function: it facilitates intellectuals to enlighten, spread new ideas, and create new cultures. In Hu Shi's view, this is also the premise for the formation of modern state order.[31]

Hu was among the influential New Culture Movement reformers who welcomed Margaret Sanger's 1922 visit to China.[11]: 24  He personally translated her speech delivered at Beijing National University which stressed the importance of birth control.[11]: 24  Periodicals The Ladies' Journal and The Women's Review published Hu's translation, which contributed to the public debate regarding birth control.[11]: 24 

Li Dazhao

While serving as an editor for various newspapers and journals, Li Dazhao campaigned for a new culture and opposed the enshrinement of Confucianism in China's constitution, and implored Chinese people to defend the nascent republicanism. He wrote articles promoting Western civilization, constitutional rule, and endorsing democracy.[32]

Cai Yuanpei

Beijing University, and he was also a friend of Chen Duxiu.[23] Cai Yuanpei was involved in the New Culture Movement, as well as other similar movements such as the May Fourth Movement
.

Foreign influence

New Culture leaders and their followers now saw China as a nation among nations, not as culturally unique.

Nietzsche, which were also propagated by Li Shicen
, Mao Dun, and many other intellectuals of the time.

Development and aftermath

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    When Cai Yuanpei, the principal of Beijing university, resigned on May 9, 1919, it had caused a huge uproar in the media across the country. This connected the academic discourse within the university with the political activism of the May Fourth demonstrations.[36] The May Fourth Demonstrations of 1919 initially united the leaders but soon, there was a debate and falling out over the role of politics. Hu Shih, Cai Yuanpei, and other liberals urged the demonstrating students to return to the classroom, but Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, frustrated with the inadequacy of cultural change, urged more radical political action.[37] They used their roles as Peking University faculty to organize Marxist study groups and the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party.

    Li called for "fundamental solutions", but Hu criticized it as abstract, calling for "more study of questions, less study of isms."[38] The younger followers who followed Li and Chen into organized politics included Mao Zedong.

    Other students heeded Hu Shih's call to return to their studies. The new approaches shaped scholarship for the next generation. The historian

    James Yen and Tao Xingzhi
    which promoted literacy as a foundation for wider political participation.

    Many of the leaders of the Kuomintang, such as Liao Zhongkai, Hu Hanmin and Dai Jitao as well as Communist members of the Kuomintang such as Li Dazhao, participated in the New Culture Movement. These figures played a major role in the restructuring of the Kuomintang along Soviet lines in 1922–1924.[41]

    Journalism and public opinion

    Chinese newspaper journalism was modernized in the 1920s according to international standards, thanks to the influence of the New Culture Movement. The roles of journalist and editor were professionalized and became prestigious careers. The business side gained importance and with a greater emphasis on advertising and commercial news, the main papers in Shanghai such as Shenbao, moved away from the advocacy journalism that characterized the 1911 revolutionary period.[42] Much of what they reported shaped narratives and realities amongst those who were interested in what was becoming the New Culture Movement.[36] Outside the main centers the nationalism promoted in metropolitan dailies was not as distinctive as localism and culturalism.[43]

    In 1924, Indian

    Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore held numerous lectures in China. He argued that China could encounter trouble by integrating too much progressive and foreign thoughts into Chinese society. Liberal ideals were a major component of the New Culture Movement. Democracy became a vital tool for those frustrated with the unstable condition of China whereas science became a crucial instrument to discard the "darkness of ignorance and superstition".[44]

    New Culture intellectuals advocated and debated a wide range of cosmopolitan solutions that included science, technology, individualism, music and democracy, leaving to the future the question of what organization or political power could carry them out. The anti-imperialist and populist violence of the mid-1920s soon overwhelmed New Culture intellectual inquiry and culture.[45]

    Evaluations and changing views

    Orthodox historians viewed the New Culture Movement as a revolutionary break with feudal thought and social practice and the seedbed of revolutionary leaders who created the

    People's Republic of China in 1949. Mao Zedong wrote that the May 4th Movement "marked a new stage in China's bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism" and argued that "a powerful camp made its appearance in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, a camp consisting of the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie."[46]

    Historians in the west also saw the movement as marking a break between tradition and modernity, but in recent decades, Chinese and foreign historians now commonly argue that the changes promoted by New Culture leaders had roots going back several generations and thus were not a sharp break with tradition, which, in any case, was quite varied, as much as an acceleration of earlier trends.[47] Research over the last fifty years also suggests that while radical Marxists were important in the New Culture Movement, there were many other influential leaders, including anarchists, conservatives, Christians, and liberals.

    The re-evaluation, while it does not challenge the high evaluation of the thinkers and writers of the period, does not accept their self-image as cultural revolutionaries.[48]

    Other historians further argue that Mao's communist revolution did not, as it claimed, fulfill the promise of New Culture and enlightenment but rather betrayed its spirit of independent expression and cosmopolitanism.

    Qian Mu, recently defended Confucian thought against the New Culture condemnation. He reasoned that late imperial China had not been stagnant, irrational and isolated, conditions that would justify radical revolution, but that late Qing thinkers were already taking advantage of the creative potential of Confucius.[50]

    Xu Jilin, a Shanghai intellectual who reflects liberal voices, agreed in effect with the orthodox view that the New Culture Movement was the root of the Chinese Revolution but valued the outcome differently. New Culture intellectuals, said Xu, saw a conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism in their struggle to find a "rational patriotism", but the cosmopolitan movement of the 1920s was replaced by a "new age of nationalism". Like a "wild horse", Xu continued, "jingoism, once unbridled, could no longer be restrained, thus laying the foundations for the eventual outcomes of the history of China during the first half of the twentieth century."[51]

    See also

    References

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    2. ^ a b Weiping 2017, pp. 175–187.
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    26. ^ Schwartz, Benjamin I (1983). "Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After". In John K. Fairbank (ed.). Republican China 1912–1949, Part 1. The Cambridge History of China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 406–451.
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    29. ^ Bary & Lufrano 2000, p. 362.
    30. ^ Chow, May Fourth Movement, pp. 46, 59, 277
    31. ^ [1]Yao Zhongqiu." The Turn of the New Culture Movement and the Process of founding the Nation: With Hu Shi at the center." Journal of China University of Political Science and Law [姚中秋."新文化运动与立国进程之转向——以胡适中心." 中国政法大学学报 .03(2009)]:97-120+160. doi:CNKI:SUN:PZGZ.0.2009-03-014.
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    33. ^ Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), Ch 5 "China's Place Among Nations"
    34. ^ James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1983).
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    37. ^ Patrick Fuliang Shan, “Assessing Li Dazhao’s Role in the New Cultural Movement,” in A Century of Student Movements in China: The Mountain Movers, 1919–2019, Rowman Littlefield and Lexington Books, 2020, pp. 3–22
    38. ^ Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 254.
    39. ^ Laurence A. Schneider, Ku Chieh-Kang and China's New History; Nationalism and the Quest for Alternative Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
    40. ^ Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 1985).
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    42. ^ Timothy B. Weston, "Minding the Newspaper Business: The Theory and Practice of Journalism in 1920s China," Twentieth-Century China (2006) 31#2 pp 4–31.
    43. ^ Henrietta Harrison, "Newspapers and Nationalism in Rural China 1890–1929," Past & Present (2000) 166#1 pp 181–205
    44. ^ Schoppa, R.Keith. Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 170.
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    46. ^ "The May Fourth Movement" (1939), Selected Works of Mao Zedong
    47. ^ Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 85–86.
    48. ^ Introduction, Kai-wing Chow, Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm : In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefied, 2008) and Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution : China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
    49. ^ Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
    50. ^ "Neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment: a historian's reflections on the May Fourth movement," Ying-shi Yü, in Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, Oldřich Král, Graham Martin Sanders, eds., The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China's May Fourth Project (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001).
    51. ^ “Historical Memories of May Fourth: Patriotism, but of what kind?”, Xu Jilin (translated by Duncan M. Campbell), China Heritage Quarterly, 17 (March 2009).

    Bibliography

    External links
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