New Culture Movement

The New Culture Movement was an intellectual revolt in China in the 1910s and 1920s against Confucian tradition. Disappointed that the 1911 revolution had not rescued the country, writers and scholars such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun and Cai Yuanpei called for science, democracy, individual freedom, the emancipation of women and a literature written in everyday speech. The movement fed directly into the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and shaped both Chinese liberalism and Chinese communism.

The fall of the Qing in 1911 brought a republic, but not stability. After Yuan Shikai crushed a second revolution in 1913, many intellectuals fled to Tokyo or Shanghai, where Zhang Shizhao's journal The Tiger, published from 1914 to 1915, explored how culture shapes politics. In 1915 came the Twenty-One Demands, followed by Yuan's attempt to make himself emperor. That same year Chen Duxiu founded Youth Magazine, soon renamed New Youth, which is usually taken as the start of the movement. Yuan's death in June 1916 seemed to many to complete the collapse of the old order and opened the way for more radical thinking.

In 1917 Chen moved to Peking University, where the chancellor Cai Yuanpei gathered a remarkable faculty. Chen became dean of letters, Li Dazhao ran the library, and Hu Shih led a literary revolution. In January 1917 New Youth published Hu's essay on literary reform, setting out eight principles and urging writers to stop imitating the ancients. Chen blamed Confucian culture for China's weakness and called for "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy" to take the place of Confucius. Beijing, with its universities, and Shanghai, with its publishers, became the movement's two centres.

Vernacular writing quickly displaced the classical language. Chen Hengzhe's story One Day, published in 1917, is counted as the first modern vernacular fiction, and Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, published in April 1918, portrayed traditional morality as a kind of cannibalism; his The True Story of Ah Q followed in 1921. Writers including Mao Dun, Lao She and Bing Xin began their careers in these years. Foreign ideas, from social Darwinism and anarchism to John Dewey's pragmatism, were eagerly debated; Dewey lectured in China from 1919, and Bertrand Russell also toured.

On 4 May 1919 students in Beijing protested against the decision at the Paris Peace Conference to hand Germany's rights over Jiaozhou Bay to Japan rather than China, and so gave a cultural movement a political character. The protests then divided its leaders. Hu Shih and Cai Yuanpei urged students to return to their studies, and Hu called for "more study of questions, less study of isms". Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, impatient with cultural change alone, set up Marxist study groups and organised the Chinese Communist Party's first meeting; among their younger followers was Mao Zedong. Other participants, such as Liao Zhongkai and Hu Hanmin, helped reorganise the Kuomintang in 1922–1924.

The movement attacked arranged marriage and the Confucian family. The death in poverty in August 1919 of Li Chao, a Beijing student cut off by her family for refusing a forced marriage, made her a symbol; a memorial in November drew thousands. Hu Shih also translated Margaret Sanger's lecture on birth control during her 1922 visit.

By the mid-1920s nationalist and revolutionary violence had overtaken the movement's open debates. Communist historiography long treated it as the seedbed of the 1949 revolution. Later scholars stress that its ideas built on earlier reform currents, that liberals, anarchists, Christians and conservatives also shaped it, and some argue that Mao's regime betrayed its spirit of free inquiry.

Our 1914 and 1920 maps show the Republic of China in the years of the New Culture Movement. See also the history of Beijing.