New Culture Movement
신문화운동
The intellectual and cultural movement in China that began when Chen Duxiu founded Youth Magazine (later New Youth) in 1915 and lasted into the early 1920s. It attacked Confucian ethics as the root of autocracy and championed “democracy and science”, individual emancipation and literature in the vernacular. Led from Peking University by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun and others, it split into liberal and Marxist currents after the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
In depth
Background: the republic left by the 1911 Revolution collapsed under Yuan Shikai’s dictatorship and monarchy and the warlords. Journals such as Zhang Shizhao’s The Tiger, published in Tokyo in 1914–15, began to ask about the culture and values beneath politics, and the Twenty-One Demands and Yuan’s plan to become emperor convinced intellectuals that changing institutions was not enough. Chen Duxiu’s founding of Youth Magazine in September 1915 was the starting point.
Ideas and activity: the movement put “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science” in place of “Mr. Confucius”. Hu Shih’s “Preliminary Discussion of Literature Reform” (1917), Chen Duxiu’s call for a literary revolution and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918) opened a new literature written in the vernacular instead of classical Chinese. At Peking University under Cai Yuanpei, Chen, Li Dazhao and Hu Shih were joined by scholars such as Liang Shuming and Gu Jiegang, and almost every “ism” in the world was introduced, from anarchism and Dewey’s pragmatism to Marxism. Women’s emancipation, free marriage and the critique of patriarchy were major themes.
Division and assessment: the May Fourth Movement of 1919 turned it towards political action, and in that year’s “problems and isms” debate Hu Shih’s gradual reform parted from Li Dazhao’s “fundamental solution”. Mao Zedong treated it as the cultural reform movement that grew out of May Fourth and part of the new-democratic revolution. The orthodox view saw a revolutionary break with feudal thought, but many historians now stress roots going back generations to the late Qing reforms. The anti-imperialist nationalism and party politics of the mid-1920s overwhelmed the movement’s plural inquiry.