30 People, 13 Books, 5 Big Questions: What You Should Know About May Fourth

What kind of movement was May Fourth, really? How should we judge it? What made it unique, and how did it shape twentieth-century Chinese history? And from where we stand today, how should we look back on it and mark its anniversary?

Lu Xun, a leading figure of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, once wrote in the preface to Call to Arms: "Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But they will die in their sleep, and won't feel the sorrow of death. Now you shout loudly, waking a few of the lighter sleepers, causing these unfortunate few to suffer the pain of a dying agony they cannot escape. Do you really think you're doing them a favor?"

This exchange, deeply metaphorical, took place between a gloomy and despairing Lu Xun in the early Republican years and his friend Qian Xuantong, who was trying to persuade him to write for the new-culture journal New Youth. It's only natural that this "iron house" calls to mind Plato's famous allegory of the cave, from ancient Greece: "A group of people are chained inside a cave, facing a stone wall, with the source of light behind them, unseen. All they care about are the shadows the light casts on the wall, and they strain to work out the relationships among those shadows. Finally, one of them manages to break free of his chains, turns around, and sees the sun. Dazzled and disoriented, he gropes his way forward and stammers out what he has seen. The others say he has gone mad. Gradually, he grows accustomed to gazing directly at the light, and then his mission becomes to return to the prisoners in the cave and lead them toward the light. This man is the philosopher, and the sun represents the truth of learning. Only within that truth can we stop settling for illusions and shadows, and instead pursue true existence." [1]

Both the iron house and the cave assume that human life and intellect are shrouded in ignorance and darkness, and that some light is needed to dispel it. For Europe's Enlightenment, that light came from ancient Greece and Rome — an "inner light" already present in Western history and culture. For modern Chinese intellectuals, by contrast, that light came from a distant and unfamiliar West (sometimes relayed through Japan as an intermediary) — a "borrowed," even "stolen," external light (a metaphor that comes from Yu Ying-shih). The rise of the trend toward studying abroad signaled that Chinese readers and thinkers, confronting a crisis in the political, social, and spiritual order, could no longer look back to the rule of the Three Dynasties or Confucian and Mencian teaching for the intellectual, cultural, and political wisdom to resolve that crisis, and instead had to "seek truth from the West." In that sense, China's May Fourth Enlightenment inherently faced the problem of fusing heterogeneous elements, even entire systems, from Chinese and Western civilization — a historical process of grafting that remains unfinished to this day. That is precisely why the Enlightenment, too, remains unfinished.

Without question, May Fourth was never simply a patriotic or nationalist movement. [2] It was, more fundamentally, a movement to awaken and rouse the individual — an Enlightenment movement calling for the formation of human subjectivity, meaning liberation and freedom, carrying forward what Tan Sitong called "smashing through the net." What makes the May Fourth New Culture Movement unique is that it was not only, as a historical episode, a model instance of Enlightenment; the continual act of looking back on it and carrying it forward has also served as the most genuine Enlightenment-style driving force in Chinese history ever since. In other words, May Fourth as a historical event and the historical interpretation of May Fourth form a recurring chain of Enlightenment, together propelling the Chinese people's historical pursuit of freedom and democracy. And within that latter process, historical writing shaped by the interplay of scholarship and ideas has naturally played an important role.

The most classic interpretations of the May Fourth New Culture Movement come from three eminent Chinese-American intellectual historians: Hao Chang, Lin Yü-sheng, and Yu Ying-shih. In his selected essays, Chang devotes an entire section, "Revisiting May Fourth," to his classic writings on the subject: "The Critique and Affirmation of the May Fourth Movement," "Revisiting May Fourth: On the Ambivalence of May Fourth Thought," "Concepts of Democracy in China's Modern Transition," and "A Century of Chinese Revolutionary Thought," along with a later lecture, "May Fourth and the Chinese Communist Revolution: Radicalization in Modern Chinese Intellectual History." These writings offer extraordinarily deep and insightful discussions of core May Fourth themes — especially the relationship between enlightenment and revolution, "high-key" versus "low-key" democracy, and the "dark consciousness" that underpins democratic culture. Chang's concept of May Fourth's ambivalence, in particular, drives home just how plural and complicated the intellectual currents within May Fourth New Culture really were — nothing an external label could ever settle once and for all. Set against the reflections, and outright rejections, that different schools of thought have directed at the century-old New Culture Movement in recent years, the importance of Chang's argument becomes even clearer: the May Fourth New Culture Movement itself already contained the intellectual resources needed to overcome the pathologies of Enlightenment. Reflecting on the movement a century later, then, doesn't require moving past May Fourth back to tradition, still less turning around to embrace the West — it requires concentrating on digging deep into the sources of May Fourth New Culture itself, to draw out the wisdom and light of history.

As Chang put it: "Intellectually, May Fourth was truly an age of contradiction. On the surface, it was an age that emphasized science and championed reason; in reality, it was an age of boiling blood and roiling emotion. On the surface, May Fourth took the intellectualism of the Western Enlightenment as its model; underneath, it carried a strong current of romanticism. On the one hand, May Fourth intellectuals cursed religion and opposed idols; on the other, they desperately needed idols and beliefs to satisfy their inner hunger. On the one hand, they advocated confronting reality and 'studying problems'; at the same time, they were desperate to find an '-ism' that could hand them a simple, all-encompassing answer and let them escape the complexity of their era's problems." [3]

At a 2009 conference marking the 90th anniversary of May Fourth, Chang went further, spelling out the historical relationship between May Fourth Enlightenment and revolution: "After 1895, the core values and cosmology of Chinese tradition began to disintegrate in modern Chinese thought, producing a widespread sense of spiritual loss and intellectual confusion among intellectuals. In the midst of this anxious cultural disintegration, they urgently needed a new sense of direction, cultural identity, and spiritual belonging, both as individuals and as a group. By the May Fourth era, this sense of spiritual loss had become widespread, forming a crisis in the basic cultural orientation. Luo Jialun, one of the May Fourth vanguard, called it a 'spinning age' to describe the dizzying, upside-down spiritual world they faced — a phrase that best captures the shock of this crisis in cultural orientation. This also explains why leading May Fourth intellectuals like Hu Shih, Chen Duxiu, and Zhou Zuoren spoke loudly of rationalism, skepticism, and a critical spirit on one hand, while betraying, time and again, their need for a new 'religion' on the other. Like Guo Moruo at the time, they wanted both to smash idols and to chase after them. Confronting this paradoxical state of mind, I believe that, under the radicalizing trend of the times, many intellectuals from the 1920s through the 1940s found a new religion in Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong's revolutionary thought — one that let them hold onto a sense of direction, identity, and belonging, spiritually, in a spinning age." [4]

Extending this line of scholarly argument, Wang Fan-sen has proposed that 1920s China was an "age of -isms." He points out that while May Fourth brought individual liberation and a great deal of freedom, the liberated individual found life to be even more "vexed" and "troubled" — the old house had been torn down, but the new one wasn't yet built. As a result, a good number of progress-minded young people in the post-May Fourth era grew drawn to accepting and spreading radical currents of thought like Marxism and socialism, a body of values and social theory that fused tightly with the highly politicized, organized parties built around such "-isms," offering confused, adrift, struggling young people a comprehensive institutional and spiritual anchor.

As Wang put it: "In modern China, the appeal of an '-ism' lay in the way it formed a blueprint, a network of channels, that gathered every scattered force and directed it toward a single outlet, uniting them into common action. Its scope reached beyond politics — even where its ultimate goal was political, it also took in one's outlook on life, one's worldview, and the frustrations and setbacks of daily existence. It offered a new cognitive framework for making sense of that frustration and setback, letting every drifting resource find a new place and order within the framework the '-ism' provided. It set problems inside a new structure, so that issues once unnamed and unexplained shed their old vagueness, drift, and fragmentation and turned into a new way of understanding both the problem and its meaning. Answers followed, arriving in a chain, converging like scattered little channels that finally merge into one or two great rivers, forming a common direction and finally flowing out to a shared 'outlet.' So Marxism-Leninism didn't descend on China only after 1949 — from the very start, it was treasured, drawing in every kind of person." [5]

The reason this kind of grand doctrine could sweep up one's outlook on life, worldview, and values all at once has much to do with the particular kind of individual that the May Fourth era sought to establish. Hu Shih called for an Ibsen-style, well-formed individualism; Lu Xun advocated a Nietzschean "self that stands on its own and helps others stand," rejecting mediocre politics; and Chen Duxiu went so far as to sketch out a whole set of basic personality traits for the new youth. And yet it must be admitted that the May Fourth era never actually established a genuinely well-formed individualism — an individual grounded in empiricism and liberalism. [6] As Lin Yü-sheng points out, in his classic work on the May Fourth New Culture Movement, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, in his discussion of Lu Xun's character Ah Q and others: what was missing was an inner self. Perhaps precisely because this inner, well-formed self was missing, the individualism that China's Enlightenment called for and longed after lacked a stable social and intellectual foundation. In the age of "-isms" that followed, and especially under revolutionary politics, individualism — petit-bourgeois individualism above all — became a kind of mortal sin.

Lin Yü-sheng writes: "Ah Q's lack of an inner self stood in the way of this, because without self-awareness, he could not consciously cultivate and develop such positive qualities. Since he lived almost entirely by instinct, even outside stimulus could not truly inspire him. His naivety was, in fact, a particular symptom of a missing inner self, not a moral strength within his character. … The story of Ah Q is precisely an observation of the dark side of the Chinese people. In the countryside — China in miniature — there was nothing that could be seen as a source of positive hope. The 1911 Revolution brought no real change; on the contrary, it exposed the uglier nature of the Chinese people. Apart from a formal change of official titles and the destruction of some symbols of the old society, the old culture and social institutions — superstition, custom, the rigid hierarchy of Chinese society — remained essentially untouched." [7]

Ah Q became a small, concrete symbol of the Chinese people — a fictional character who also embodies the paradox at the heart of May Fourth New Culture's Enlightenment project. The masses at the bottom of society, waiting to be awakened or refusing to be, could hardly be expected to understand the mind and reason of the enlighteners, still less to follow them into every intellectual, cultural, or political movement. That's exactly why, for enlightened intellectuals in the post-May Fourth era, the whole question of intellectual enlightenment got replaced by the question of "revolutionary mobilization," and propaganda and organization took on outsized importance. Coming back to Lu Xun's version of the enlightenment problem: he had to confront an eternal dilemma. How should the enlightener face the one being enlightened? How does the enlightener overcome the "dark genes" buried deep in his own soul? How does an enlightener who is himself a petit-bourgeois intellectual face the rise of mass politics, proletarian politics above all? In the revolutionary years after May Fourth, one's class and social background became a kind of original sin — which is why Qu Qiubai called himself a "vagrant of the educated class," even "worthless." On this point, Lu Xun stayed comparatively clear-eyed, describing himself as "one of the masses — neither their teacher nor their servant." That was a rare stance to take in a May Fourth era that sanctified labor and the lower classes even as it stigmatized and caricatured them. In other words, Lu Xun tried to understand the daily life and inner world of the masses, but that understanding didn't amount to identifying with them.

In correspondence with a young Lin Yü-sheng, Yin Haiguang put his finger precisely on this dilemma facing May Fourth intellectuals: "Deep in the consciousness of May Fourth people, it wasn't the modern Western sense of 'to be free' — it was 'to be liberated.' The two are related, but they are not, in the end, the same thing. What they were in a hurry for was liberation — from tradition, from the old institutions, from old thought, from old customs, from old literature. So everyone threw themselves, full force, into opposing authority, tradition, idols, old morality. In that kind of atmosphere, how many people could actually do careful, rigorous scholarly and intellectual work? The new opposed the old, and the old opposed the new. They stirred each other up, tempers flaring. Everyone stood on the defensive, and the result was polarization — rational exchange grew harder and harder on both sides. After 1911, China had nothing like Japan's stable social center or its deep reserve of moderate forces. Add to that the splintering and clashing of left and right politics, and things spun completely out of control — and it was precisely at this moment that Japan swept in from outside, bringing the whole structure crashing down." [8] Liberation is centered on "breaking"; freedom is centered on "building." Breaking is not the same as building, and perhaps it's precisely for this reason that the May Fourth era never managed to form an intellectual's "inner self." That, too, is the inner root of why a good number of intellectuals later turned to revolution (the outer cause being nationalism, the call to save the nation from ruin, and so on).

Discussing Chen Duxiu, Lin Yü-sheng writes: "Chen Duxiu's critique of Chinese tradition was, in part, the product of an interplay between his individualism and his nationalism. Although he never saw the state as flawless or as an end in itself, he cared deeply about the survival of the Chinese nation. His individualism, since it was primarily concerned with the individual's need to break free from the shackles of traditional Chinese culture and society, was functionally linked to his nationalism. He believed a liberated individual served not only personal happiness but also the interests of the nation-state.

Chen Duxiu wrote: 'A nation is made of individuals gathered together; if the character of the individual is elevated, the character of the nation is elevated too; if the individual's rights are secure, the nation's power is secure too.' The liberation of the individual, then, carries a double justification: it is necessary both for the perfection of individual morality and for the survival of the nation-state." [9] This echoes what Benjamin Schwartz described, starting with Yan Fu's search for wealth and power: the liberalism and individualism Chinese intellectuals pursued also served the goal of national wealth and strength, without the same confrontation and tension that marked the European Enlightenment. And yet, even amid the storm of nationalism that broke out over China's loss of national interest at the Paris Peace Conference during the May Fourth period, Chen Duxiu insisted on the individual's dignity and integrity in the face of national interest — perhaps the root of why, late in life, Chen was able to reflect so deeply on the revolutionary culture that followed.

Lin Yü-sheng writes: "In this essay [referring to Chen Duxiu's 'Patriotism and Self-Awareness,' published in New Youth], Chen Duxiu argued that two different forces — emotion and reason — compete for control over people's thinking. Patriotism arises from an individual's emotional devotion to the state. Patriotism matters, but we shouldn't praise it blindly, because however important it is, it can only guide people toward loving their country once they become aware of the country's purpose — and that awareness can only come through the workings of reason. What is the purpose of the state? It is 'to guarantee rights and pursue the happiness of all.' The state exists for the individual, not the individual for the state. If the state cannot guarantee rights and pursue collective happiness, then the individual has no obligation to love it. If people love their own country without understanding its purpose, opportunists and usurpers can easily abuse power and deceive the people." [10] Unlike the tendency in the late Qing and early Republic to sanctify the "state," Chen Duxiu reduced the state to a tool for advancing the welfare and freedom of the people. If the state violated this basic principle, then patriotism and nationalism would become tools that political parties could use to oppress ordinary people.

Yu Ying-shih has written repeatedly to commemorate May Fourth, and his assessment of the New Culture Movement is not as negative as Lin Yü-sheng's. In a recent interview with this author, Yu laid out, in broad strokes, three basic views he holds on the centenary of May Fourth. One of them: "I believe 'May Fourth' has multiple, complicated dimensions, and cannot simply be treated as one radical intellectual movement, or revolution. Most people understand 'May Fourth' as defined by its overturning of China's Confucian ritual tradition and its embrace of modern Western cultural achievements — 'democracy' ('Mr. Democracy') and 'science' ('Mr. Science') above all — to transform an ancient China into a modernized nation and society. So 'May Fourth,' as a 'new culture' or 'new thought,' tends to get treated as inseparable from 'antitraditionalism' and 'Westernization.' This understanding is, broadly speaking, reasonable and well-founded. But we absolutely cannot go further and infer that every intellectual who accepted or identified with 'May Fourth' New Culture necessarily walked the road of antitraditionalism and radicalization. In fact, even a cursory look shows that many scholars who took part in the 'May Fourth' movement and accepted 'democracy' and 'science' did not dismiss Chinese tradition wholesale — some even pointed out that traditional family and kinship ties had a mutually supportive side. They advocated constitutional government, respected freedom of thought and scholarship, but opposed the radical stance of changing the status quo through violence. I have pointed out before that Hsiao Kung-chuan is a typical figure in this regard, since scholars who took similar positions to his can be found everywhere. Even Hu Shih himself is typical in this way — his late-life (1960) lecture 'The Chinese Tradition and the Future' is clear proof of it." [11] It's clear, then, that whether May Fourth amounted to wholesale antitraditionalism for that generation of intellectuals remains an unresolved historical question. And judging from the historical facts, tradition need not have stood in the way of Chinese intellectuals' pursuit of modern values and constitutional government — some relatively positive strands of traditional thought and culture may even have supplied spiritual momentum for China's entry into the modern era. In an essay of family memoir and research by the late US-based scholar Lin Tongqi, "The Lin Family Ethos: A Glimpse into the Life of the Scholar-Official Class," we can see even more clearly that traditional education and ideals didn't obstruct family members from pursuing specialized, professional careers — they instead offered a kind of spiritual support. As Lin Tongqi put it: "The Lin family tradition never had any interest in accumulating wealth, and so it didn't encourage its descendants to go into business; and a distaste for factional politics likewise discouraged any interest in becoming a politician. That left only one choice of career: becoming a professional in the modern sense. The transformation from traditional scholar-official to modern specialist of every kind had become unavoidable." [12]

Compared with the historical reflections of the three scholars above — who approach May Fourth through the broad lenses of tradition versus modernity, enlightenment versus revolution, individualism versus statism — the American scholar Vera Schwarcz, in her classic work on the movement, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement, pays closer attention to the generational dynamics among May Fourth intellectuals, and to how an enlightenment movement rooted in modern rational awakening was transformed, within the Chinese historical context, into a revolution that glorified violence. Schwarcz writes: "The teachers' generation who paved the way for the 'May Fourth' Enlightenment movement were themselves deeply steeped in Confucian learning. Although most of that generation refused to take part in the imperial examination system, which the Qing government kept running until 1905, they all had a solid grounding in Chinese classical learning. What's more, their understanding of the worldview they were determined to overthrow went far beyond book knowledge. In daily life, these antitraditional intellectuals were compelled to marry, raise children, honor their parents, and defer to their teachers — staying in line with China's own ethical traditions. Even those who had studied abroad before 1919, and had tasted certain freedoms of thought and action still forbidden to scholars at home, returned to China carrying only a thin hope of personal liberation. Once back, they first threw themselves into political revolution against the Qing rulers. Only after that effort was frustrated did they turn to the work of cultural awakening among a pure, unspoiled younger generation. These professional educators felt keenly the predicament of being a transitional generation caught between old culture and new. Through what they had seen and experienced traveling in Japan and the West, modern science, technology, and Enlightenment thought stayed fresh in their memory, so they could not simply look away from China's backwardness. They saw the inertia clinging to the old banner more clearly than anyone, and so they raised a new one." [13]

In other words, for the generation of May Fourth New Culture leaders — Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and others — their rebellion against tradition carried the weight of genuinely painful, everyday experience: the burden of a traditional marriage, or the agony of breaking free of one (Hu Shih's line about being "willing to give up freedom, and so becoming free" in one sense; the "gift" Lu Xun said his mother gave him). These were ties bound into the marrow of daily life and spirit, hard to cut away — and perhaps precisely because of that, they took on such a fierce, all-encompassing antitraditionalist posture. At the same time, as Schwarcz observes, this generation had also grown up out of China's own history and culture; the culture, life, and tastes of traditional China left their mark on them, deeply or lightly. Traditional China became, for them, what the American sinologist Joseph Levenson described in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: something rejected, even negated, on the level of reason, yet still an object of emotional and spiritual attachment. As for the generation of students who rose up during the May Fourth movement itself, Schwarcz captures with real precision the generational gap between them and their teachers: "In an instant, the younger generation seemed to have transformed the older one. In fact, both generations shared the most basic Enlightenment conviction — that a scientific worldview carries within it an inherent freedom and progressiveness. The students placed even more emphasis than their teachers on scientific methodology and epistemology, but they also demanded, above all else, freedom of thought. … The more deeply these students pursued scientific methodology, the more they opposed the confinement of individual self-expression that pervaded Chinese society. In the end, they came to see that the obstacle blocking the free expression of thought was less a matter of their countrymen lacking scientific knowledge than of their countrymen's own long-standing, internalized self-repression. It was this — what they called an 'undemocratic self-repression' — that undermined their efforts to build an alternative epistemology. In this way, the pursuit of a scientific worldview put the students in direct opposition to the habit of self-doubt, and to the passivity embedded in Chinese culture through the family system." [14]

Beyond the works and essays mentioned above, another important study of May Fourth is Chinese-American historian Chow Tse-tsung's The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, which is more systematic and examines May Fourth's causes and consequences chiefly through the lens of social, cultural, and political history. One notable feature is that it traces how different countries viewed this Chinese political and cultural movement afterward, and it also carefully maps how the New Culture Movement spread into different localities in the years after May Fourth. In other words, May Fourth as a political event helped extend and deepen the enlightenment project as a cultural event. Chow also offers some in-depth analysis of the intellectual and political splits that emerged within China's intellectual world after May Fourth, and of the competing historical interpretations and memories of May Fourth constructed by later generations. On the splintering of New Youth, Chow writes: "The left wing within the New Youth camp — Chen Duxiu above all, along with his assistants in Shanghai — complained that the liberals in the camp, people like Hu Shih and Tao Menghe, had grown too conservative, too close to the Research Clique. As Li Dazhao put it: 'These days, our whole crowd at the university is like a virgin — the Communications Clique, the Research Clique, and the Political Study Clique all want to seduce us, and when they can't, they spread rumors about us instead; and then the Kuomintang faction, seeing all these cliques drooling over us, gets a bit jealous too. It's really quite tiresome!' Liberals, meanwhile, felt New Youth had become too politically charged, saying it had 'nearly become a Chinese translation of Soviet Russia' (a weekly pictorial published by the Communist Party in New York, from which New Youth often reprinted articles)." [15]

There's also Chen Pingyuan's Touching History and Entering May Fourth, which emphasizes close textual reading and on-the-ground detail to reconstruct the intellectual and historical context of the May Fourth generation, carrying a distinctive sensibility and approach drawn from modern literary studies. Chen, too, holds a positive view of May Fourth's legacy: "Beyond its significance as a historical event in its own right, 'May Fourth' has, to a great extent, become a symbol of how twentieth-century Chinese people renewed their tradition and responded to the challenge of Western culture. Every generation that commemorates and interprets 'May Fourth' inevitably folds in the questions and answers of its own era. But on the other hand, the New Culture Movement that bears the name 'May Fourth' also has a relatively fixed historical content — its cultural slogans and scholarly approach took root in the late Qing and continue into the present. In the realm of thought and culture, it's fair to say, we are still living today in the shadow that 'May Fourth' cast." [16]

Gao Like's The Intellectual World of May Fourth offers a very detailed analysis of the various intellectual currents of the May Fourth era — individualism, liberalism, socialism, scientism, Marxism, and more — their basic content, and how they argued with and related to one another. Gao writes with a strong sense of contemporary concern, hoping to carry forward May Fourth's Enlightenment ideals, and he shows deep insight into the tension May Fourth intellectuals felt between their Enlightenment orientation and their nationalism: "China's Enlightenment sprang from the nationalist goal of seeking national wealth and power, and so Enlightenment and nationalism traveled hand in hand from the start. This is where China's Enlightenment differs from Europe's: the individualist spirit of the European Enlightenment leaned, if anything, toward cosmopolitanism. The claim that 'national salvation overwhelmed enlightenment' clearly overlooks the historical differences between Chinese and Western Enlightenment, and the nationalist concerns baked into the Chinese version from the start. In fact, the deep driving force of China's Enlightenment was precisely 'national salvation.' Compared with Europe's humanist-style Enlightenment, China's Enlightenment is better described as a 'salvation-type Enlightenment' — a backward nation's search for a path to wealth and strength. Throughout China's modernization movement, the West has always appeared in the contradictory guise of both bandit and teacher: on one hand representing free, democratic modern civilization, on the other an imperialist power bullying and plundering Eastern nations. Mirroring this two-faced image of Western civilization — liberal on one side, imperialist on the other — China's modernization movement and Enlightenment thought have likewise shown two tendencies: a pro-Western liberalism and an anti-Western nationalism. This is the root of the contradictory orientations in modern Chinese thought — an 'anti-Western Westernization' and an 'anti-modern modernization.' Nationalism, for China's Enlightenment, has therefore always been a double-edged sword: it can serve as the spiritual force driving Enlightenment forward, and just as easily become a conservative factor resisting Enlightenment and modernity." [17]

In 1969, on the 50th anniversary of May Fourth, Yin Haiguang — the spiritual heir to May Fourth, and Taiwan's leading liberal intellectual — was besieged by both political persecution and illness. The last commemorative essay he completed before his death still reads today as thought-provoking and undated: "Fanaticism, fantasy, radical upheaval, myth, and dogmatism are never signs of clear thinking. We cannot say these things truly help bring about an ideal world. Democracy is a product of 'social health'; 'social health,' in turn, can strengthen democracy. The cycle between the two is the 'virtuous circle,' the opposite of a vicious one. Only in circumstances like these can human independence, dignity, and the value of existence come into view. What science embodies is objectivity and universality. Only when objectivity and universality hold firm can we speak of 'reason' at all. If we must use a word like 'reason,' then we might as well say science is the crystallization of human reason. Without reason as its skeleton, we cannot imagine how modern human life could go on. Now, fifty years after the May Fourth Movement championed 'democracy' and 'science,' democracy has come to nothing at all, and even science's basic attitude has won little acceptance. But if the two remain indispensable elements of human life, then many people will keep pursuing them. And if many people keep pursuing them, that alone proves they remain a force for social change. And if they remain a force for social and cultural change, then sooner or later, the day may come when they resurface." [18]

(Originally titled "Let Historical Writing Illuminate China's Enlightenment Movement: Historical Reflections on the Centenary of May Fourth")

Notes

[1] Quoted from Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," trans. Qian Yongxiang et al., in Max Weber: Scholarship and Politics (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2004), p. 170.

[2] Xu Jilin, "The Historical Memory of May Fourth: What Kind of Patriotism?," Dushu, no. 5 (2009).

[3] Hao Chang, "Revisiting May Fourth: On the Ambivalence of May Fourth Thought," in Selected Essays of Hao Chang (Shanghai Educational Publishing House, 2002), p. 252.

[4] Hao Chang, "May Fourth and the Chinese Communist Revolution: Radicalization in Modern Chinese Intellectual History," Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, no. 77 (September 2012).

[5] Wang Fan-sen, "What Is the Essence of 'Vexation'? The Private Sphere and the Rise of '-Isms' in Modern China," in Thought Is a Way of Life (Taipei: Linking Publishing, 2017), p. 160.

[6] See Yang Chen-te, Turning Toward the Self: The Individual in Modern Chinese Political Thought (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing, 2012).

[7] Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, Chinese ed. (Guizhou People's Publishing House, 1986), pp. 208-209.

[8] Yin Haiguang and Lin Yü-sheng, Correspondence Between Yin Haiguang and Lin Yü-sheng (revised and expanded ed.) (Central Compilation & Translation Press, 2016), p. 211.

[9] Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, Chinese ed. (Guizhou People's Publishing House, 1986), p. 107.

[10] Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, Chinese ed. (Guizhou People's Publishing House, 1986), p. 97.

[11] Yu Ying-shih and Tang Xiaobing, "'The Spirit of May Fourth Is a Real Historical Force': An Interview with Yu Ying-shih on the Centenary of 'May Fourth,'" Reflexion [Sixiang], no. 37 (Taipei).

[12] Lin Tongqi, "The Lin Family Ethos: A Glimpse of the Modern Transformation of the Chinese Scholar-Official Tradition," in In Search of the Humanities: An Analysis of the Thought of Prominent Contemporary Chinese and American Scholars (New Star Press, 2006), p. 452.

[13] Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement, Chinese ed., trans. Liu Jingjian, ed. Qiu Weijun (New Star Press, 2007), p. 69.

[14] Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement, Chinese ed., trans. Liu Jingjian, ed. Qiu Weijun (New Star Press, 2007), p. 126.

[15] Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, Chinese ed. (Yuelu Press, 1999), p. 359.

[16] Chen Pingyuan, Touching History and Entering May Fourth (Peking University Press, 2010), pp. 2-3.

[17] Gao Like, The Intellectual World of May Fourth (Xuelin Press, 2003), p. 279.

[18] Yin Haiguang, "The Eclipse and Reemergence of May Fourth: Written for the 50th Anniversary of the May Fourth Movement," in Selected Materials on Modern Chinese Liberalism: May Fourth and the Student Movement, ed. Zhang Zhongdong et al. (Taipei: Tangshan Press, 1999), pp. 166-167.

About the Author

Tang Xiaobing holds a PhD in history and is an associate professor in the History Department at East China Normal University. His research focuses on the history of modern Chinese intellectuals and the press, left-wing culture and the Chinese revolution, memoir and oral history, and twentieth-century China. His books include Public Opinion in Modern China: The Case of Ta Kung Pao's "Sunday Essays" and Shun Pao's "Free Talk" (Social Sciences Academic Press, 2012), Intellectuals at the Crossroads (China Renmin University Press, 2013), and Encountering the Republic (SDX Joint Publishing, 2017), among others.

Cover image: patriotic students from Beijing Higher Normal School, detained during the student march on May 4, 1919, photographed on their return to school seven days later. Source: Wikipedia. Banner image: the magazine New Youth.