Beyond Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science: What Else Should We Know About May Fourth?

Treating May Fourth only as a political movement, or only as a subject for intellectual history, isn't enough. We should place it within a long historical arc and show its different faces one by one.

On the evening of April 26, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, the publisher Shijie Wenjing and the independent bookstore One Way Space held an event in Beijing called "1919, A Century of Upheaval: Cross-Disciplinary Readings of Multiple Meanings."

The guests came from three of Beijing's most prominent universities and three different disciplines: Yang Nianqun, a professor of history at Renmin University of China; Li Meng, a professor of philosophy at Peking University; and Ying Xing, a professor of sociology at Tsinghua University. Their discussion centered on Yang's new book, The Other Side of May Fourth: The Formation of the Concept of "Society" and the Birth of New-Style Organizations.

Yang opened by summarizing The Other Side of May Fourth. He argued that people usually focus on May Fourth's "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science" but pay too little attention to a third figure, "Miss Mo," short for moral(ity) — and that Miss Mo is closely tied to the individualism that flourished around May Fourth. He also argued that understanding May Fourth means not confining it to a single day; it needs a long time frame, stretching back to the abolition of the imperial examination system and forward at least to the 1940s. He then traced the important role anarchism played between the end of the examination system and the rise of social reform movements, the rise and fall of individualism, and how socialism eventually displaced both anarchism and individualism.

After Yang's talk, Li Meng and Ying Xing each offered their own perspectives and discussed them with Yang.

Li Meng focused on the anarchism thread: "What decisive, pivotal role did anarchism play in China's next stage of development, from the republican period into the 1930s, especially after the Northern Expedition? I've always found Professor Yang's angle here very illuminating for understanding the long-term significance of May Fourth. Going forward, we may need to dig deeper into how the ethical revolution rebuilt social organization across modern China — and into a genuinely paradoxical phenomenon for a modern state: why did anti-statist anarchism play such an important role in paving the way for the building of a modern Chinese state?"

Ying Xing focused more on how radicalism rose in China: "If we fix our eyes only on May Fourth, we tend to see Beijing's major universities. What I care about is the rise of communism at the local level, where the main force was normal-school and high-school students. We can also see that these new-style organizations grew up alongside the schools. Outside of school life, these secondary-school and normal-school students built their own political societies and work-study schools, and that often became a crucial channel toward radical revolution."

"I'm especially glad to have Professors Li Meng and Ying Xing here for this conversation today. We wanted to try a kind of cross-disciplinary, even cross-border dialogue — to treat May Fourth as an open system, a three-dimensional, multifaceted, genuinely interesting system, and see whether these different facets can collide and talk to each other, deepening how we observe this piece of history," Yang said at the event.

Cross-disciplinary work is in fact Yang's trademark. He has long pursued new approaches to Chinese historical studies from across disciplines and fields. His books include Middle-Range Theory: Chinese Historical Studies at the Confluence of Eastern and Western Thought, Remaking "Patients": The Spatial Politics of the Conflict Between Chinese and Western Medicine, 1832–1985, and Where Is "Jiangnan"? The Establishment of Qing Orthodoxy and the Transformation of the Literati's Spiritual World. He also edits the New Historiography series (Zhonghua Book Company) and the "New Historiography & Pluralistic Dialogue" book series.

Born in Beijing in 1964, Yang comes from a family with more than a few notable names: his paternal great-grandfather was the late-Qing figure Yang Du, his maternal great-grandfather was the modern thinker Liang Qichao, and his maternal grandmother, Liang Sizhuang — Liang Qichao's second daughter — was a librarian and library scientist. Compared with his forebears, his own career has been fairly straightforward: he studied at Renmin University of China all the way through, earning his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in history, and then stayed on to teach. He now holds a Cheung Kong Scholar Distinguished Professorship from the Ministry of Education, a Distinguished Humanities Scholar professorship at Renmin University, and a professorship at the university's Institute of Qing History.

Toward the end of the event, an audience member, noting a resemblance between "sophisticated egoism" and individualism, asked how to distinguish individualism's strengths from its flaws. But the question itself misunderstands individualism — and in a sense, that very misunderstanding can be seen as one reason individualism declined in China.

"The sophisticated egoist is someone who sees himself as the boundless center of everything — a mistaken state of pure self-centeredness. Individualism isn't that. Its most important principle is that you abide by a basic contract; you have a spirit of contract. Without a spirit of contract, without basic respect for the public interest, without basic awareness of where public ends and private begins — that's what makes a sophisticated egoist. Individualism can't be reduced to simple selfishness, so don't equate the two. They're two different concepts, two entirely different states," Yang answered.

Finally, here is Yang Nianqun's talk as edited by QDaily. We hope you find something in it.

Besides "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," May Fourth Also Had a "Miss Mo"

This year marks the 100th anniversary of May Fourth. Chinese historians have a habit: whenever an event hits a hundred years — or even before it does, at some other milestone — it triggers large-scale commemoration and large-scale discussion. I call this "commemorative historiography." The topics it raises tend to be the ones everyone already knows by heart. Discuss May Fourth, and you'll inevitably discuss democracy and science: how those concepts took root in China, how they evolved, who promoted them, how they were received, what impact they had on the course of Chinese history, and so on. But May Fourth has now reached its hundredth year, and we shouldn't keep discussing the same old topics. We should discuss some new ones. This book tries to show, from a new angle and along a new path, some of the facets of May Fourth that may have been obscured or overlooked.

When it comes to May Fourth, there are really two threads, or two stories. Our middle school and university textbooks all treat May Fourth as a political movement: it arose because China was about to sign the Paris Peace Conference agreement, which triggered domestic outrage, and the movement erupted from there. It was a political movement — a movement of the public square — that provoked fierce reactions across social classes, including strikes and shop closures. That is how May Fourth gets defined in this sense. We also know that May Fourth trained a young generation of radical activists for the Chinese Communist Party, which is another part of its familiar significance. Reading May Fourth through a political lens: that's the story we all know by heart.

But that's the mainstream narrative. There's another narrative, another way of talking about May Fourth, and it's quite different. Starting in the 1980s, a "Hu Shi fever" swept through. Hu Shi and a number of intellectuals associated with the Nationalist Party at the time understood May Fourth as a liberal movement. Hu Shi framed it as a renaissance, a cultural movement. Seen this way, May Fourth becomes a different story, one that can be told from a cultural angle — completely unlike the political version. The two angles are, to some degree, opposed to each other, yet they also bleed into each other. Both stories have been told and retold. The story I want to tell is related to both, but isn't quite the same as either.

First, I found that besides "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," May Fourth also had a "Miss Mo" — from the English word "moral," standing for morality and ethics. People haven't paid enough attention to her; she has always been suppressed and overshadowed by the two dazzling concepts of democracy and science. This Miss Mo deserves to be rediscovered. From there, we can ask whether May Fourth has other facets worth excavating — which is the puzzle my book, The Other Side of May Fourth, tries to unlock.

Understanding May Fourth Means Not Confining It to a Single Day

My second idea is that understanding May Fourth shouldn't confine it to a single day. Everyone knows about the students marching and the political protests in Tiananmen Square, and we tend to treat that one day as if it captured the full picture of the movement. But I think May Fourth means far more than that. To understand it, we can't start only from that day — we can't even limit ourselves to the year or two around it as our interpretive window.

My basic idea is this: can we stretch May Fourth out, treat it as a longer, more complicated movement — one that reaches back to the late-Qing reforms, to the 1898 Reform and the New Policies, and to the 1911 Revolution, and forward into the 1930s and 40s, into the great political upheaval brought on by the Nationalist-Communist struggle? That's the reconsideration of what May Fourth is that I want to offer through The Other Side of May Fourth.

Once you understand May Fourth over a long time frame, a lot of new facets and ideas open up. The first question to ask is: how did the identity of the intellectuals centered on New Youth magazine and its associated circle actually take shape? What was the relationship between that identity and the historical conditions of the time? To use a fashionable phrase, what exactly was their "identity"? That identity shaped the direction May Fourth took and also reveals something distinctive about the movement itself.

To talk about May Fourth, or about the identity of that generation of intellectuals, we inevitably have to trace back to the years around the 1898 Reform. My view is that to see May Fourth, we first have to look at the late Qing, and to look at the late Qing, one historical turning point matters above all: the collapse of the imperial examination system.

To Understand the Deep, Broad Causes Behind May Fourth, Start With the Post-Examination Era

The imperial examination system was China's most important mechanism for selecting bureaucrats. What were the consequences once it collapsed? To understand the deep, broad causes behind the historical events of May Fourth itself, I think we need to look at what I'd call the post-examination era.

Why do I say that? For the past few years I've been writing essays defending the examination system. As a mechanism for selecting bureaucrats, I think it was an excellent system. Where was it excellent? First, it was a very good sorting mechanism. Pass the entry-level exam and become a licentiate (《秀才》), and you'd become part of the most educated stratum in the countryside — the gentry class — but you couldn't leave your home village. Pass the provincial exam and become a "juren" (《举人》), and you were roughly a mid-level official, eligible to serve as a county magistrate. Pass the metropolitan exam and become a "jinshi" (《进士》), and you could enter the Hanlin Academy, become a grand secretary, and so on. In effect, this sorted talent quite precisely into upper, middle, and lower tiers, giving official appointments a fairly high degree of rationality. At the same time, this selection system kept people flowing up and down. You could sit the licentiate exam until you were 60 and still pass the provincial exam and get a shot at office. But if you were a jinshi — a central-government official — when you retired, you'd go back to your home village, because your ancestral home, your family, your entire lineage was there. So retirement usually meant returning home. It was a genuinely healthy system, a mechanism of constant circulation, and that circulation gave official selection a certain built-in rationality.

Let's go further: what did the abolition of the examination system lead to? It led to the rise of the new school system. There were three sources of students for these schools. First, what we'd now call the science-and-engineering men — people who received a scientific education. Many became aides to local officials, supplying them with technical knowledge and support. Another group were the law-and-politics men, trained at normal schools, who did a year's study in Japan, picked up a crash course in law and politics, and came home to enter government service. But the quality of this group is highly questionable — once in Japan, they didn't even need to learn Japanese, since the Japanese provided interpreters for this crash-course legal and political training; after a year, they came home and could land senior positions. So this group's caliber is worrying. Third were students who came out of military academies; this group often went on to become the warlords who carved up the country. Fourth, returnees from abroad: many students who studied in Europe, America, or Japan came back to form the most important component of the intellectual elite. Those are roughly the four groups.

What were the strengths and weaknesses of these four groups? Their strength was systematic training in the social and natural sciences; they could go on to do a great deal in various specialized fields. But their basic grounding in the humanities gradually fell away, because once the examination system ended, the whole system for educating and selecting talent changed dramatically. When Zhang Zhidong reformed the examination system, he wasn't trying to abolish it — he inverted it instead, moving policy essays and knowledge of Chinese-Western relations to the first session. Originally the eight-legged essay came first; he pushed the eight-legged essay to the last session and put policy essays first, which in effect encouraged mastery of natural- and social-scientific knowledge — that became the primary channel for identifying capable candidates, and the exam was graded accordingly. Humanistic and traditional knowledge gradually receded to the third session. By the time the examination system was finally abolished, the humanities occupied an even smaller share. That was, broadly, the kind of training this generation received.

But that's not even the most important part. What matters most is that modern school education, and later university education, led not only to specialization but to the loss of the bureaucratic-selection function altogether. University and school education no longer existed to select suitable officials; through dispersed vocational training, they turned knowledge and scholarship into an educational system detached from politics.

This produced a major consequence — I think the most serious one was the disappearance of the rural gentry class. A licentiate could once stay in his locality long-term: running private schools and academies, doing charity work, building bridges and roads, all kinds of community service, while also serving as a cultural symbol. But once the examination system's cycle of circulation broke down, and its function of selecting officials was lost, students from the new schools no longer wanted to return to the countryside; they all flocked to the cities instead. The result was large-scale hollowing-out in the countryside — the loss of the figures who once carried cultural meaning there — which emptied out rural China. The growing distance between city and countryside, and the resulting imbalance and irrationality in the distribution of knowledge, trace back to this post-examination era.

That's the first consequence. Why go this far back? Because it directly shaped the identity of the intellectual class during the May Fourth period.

From the Post-Examination Era to the Rise of Social Reform, Anarchism Played a Key Role

The second consequence: May Fourth was also part of China's broader political transformation. From the 1898 Reform to the New Policies to the 1911 Revolution, this whole process was really a search for new political legitimacy and the building of a new, modern Chinese state. Along the way, there were many possible choices, and in choosing, China suffered plenty of setbacks, failures, and lessons.

One of the most important questions was this: once the emperor fell, once the Qing dynasty collapsed, what kind of modern state should China build? This question is crucial, and today we tend to take the answer for granted — we now have our own political system — but at the very moment the throne fell, we were genuinely at a loss. There were various options on the table. China could have adopted a federal system, or a system of national self-determination, in which each region became its own small independent state. There was also the possibility of returning to the Qing model of a unified, multi-ethnic community. All of these were tried, in one form or another, after the founding of the Republic.

But the obvious sense one gets is that these attempts failed. We know that the late Qing and early Republic saw a North-South conflict, the abdication of the Qing emperor, the struggle between Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai, and, most important, endless fighting among political factions. What was the biggest consequence of that factional fighting? It caused serious problems in all the institutional design we now call top-level design. We never managed to build a genuinely modern, democratic deliberative system. Within the first decade of the Republic — really within about seven years, up to 1919 — a great many people were already dissatisfied with the state of the Republic and with its politics. The biggest source of that dissatisfaction: what kind of reasonable modern state should we build? There was no answer, and the early Republic never gave a satisfying one. Under these conditions, a great deal of anti-Republic rhetoric emerged. We used to assume this anti-Republic talk all came from Qing loyalists — decrepit, reactionary holdouts who couldn't let go of the fallen dynasty.

But it turns out that's not necessarily true. In my book, I cite a well-known example: Liang Ji, the father of Liang Shuming. Liang Ji killed himself, and people said he must have been a Qing loyalist dying for the dynasty. But Liang Ji's suicide note says plainly: I am not dying for the Qing. If I were, I would have killed myself the moment the Qing fell. So why didn't I kill myself when the Qing fell? Why did I calmly observe the Republic for several years instead? He said his disappointment with the Republic came from its lack of what we'd traditionally call national character. This political system lacked a soul — not some superficial institution or surface trapping, but a genuine national spirit. Call it national soul or national character, he felt it was missing, and without it, the state simply couldn't be built. He believed that without national character, the chaos of early-Republic politics was actually worse than the Qing.

Liang Ji represented a whole cohort's view of the early Republic. A great many people were disillusioned with it, including Chen Duxiu. Chen, the most famous early representative of May Fourth, wrote an essay called "On Smashing Idols," arguing that top-level state design had failed, that the state itself was a rotten thing, and asking whether reform could start instead from society. Here I need to bring up the most important keyword in this book: the emergence of "society." The word appeared quite early — in the 1870s, the Japanese translated the English word "society" into the Chinese term 《社会》. Later, after the 1890s, Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and Yan Fu all introduced "society" into China, turning it into a highly prominent concept.

My book, of course, doesn't approach "society" from the angle of conceptual history. Instead, I treat society as a platform and an entity for reform at the time, a concept posed in opposition to "the state." That is the most important reason "society" became a keyword after May Fourth. After May Fourth, the social-reform movement became mainstream: China's fate and its reforms were no longer discussed through top-level politics, top-level design, or party politics, but through the reform of society at the grassroots — treating China itself as the object of a new kind of reform. That's the consensus that gradually formed after May Fourth.

My book argues that between the post-examination era, the 1911 Revolution, the failure — or disillusionment — with top-level party politics, and the emergence of social reform, there was an important school of thought in between: anarchism. Anarchism had already appeared by the early 20th century; Liu Shipei and others wrote extensively arguing for it. Liu's basic view was that whether it was the Qing dynasty or Western democratic politics, both were rotten, two of a kind — systems in which a clique of officials at the top pursued their own profit. So to truly make China better, we had to smash all of that and take a different approach, starting from the grassroots of society and beginning our reform there. That was Liu Shipei's view, and the view of early anarchism.

This anarchist outlook gradually grew into a major wave during the May Fourth period. It gave rise to the New Village movement and many other utopian designs — Mao Zedong, too, ran a commune experiment, gathering a group of people to eat, live, and work together, hoping to forge new values and a new path for reforming China out of social reform. These designs later came under growing doubt, precisely because they carried too much of the utopian in them, and because they drifted further and further from individualism and socialism, which I'll get to shortly. There was a wide gap between the design people imagined and how it actually worked in practice.

So socialism later displaced anarchism. At the same time, many early socialist figures had been anarchist believers — the two were, in fact, inseparable, even as they differed sharply. That's the thread I've tried to trace in this book.

The Rise and Fall of Individualism Around May Fourth, Dissolved at Last Into Tragedy

The second thread I want to draw out in particular is May Fourth individualism.

Individualism is closely tied to Miss Mo. What place should the individual occupy within the family, within the web of family ethics? Should we step outside the family and champion individual freedom, or should we throw ourselves into some new organization and re-identify with it? There was fierce debate over this at the time. But the debate's starting point was really this: can the individual truly exist as an individual, be recognized and understood as one? That was a hugely important question for May Fourth.

Look at the early works of Lu Xun and the early works of Hu Shi — both start from the individual. Their basic premise: if the individual isn't well, society can't be well; if society isn't well, the state can't be well. Without the individual, there is no society and no state, and China's modern state system can never be built. But this basic understanding later came under heavy challenge and, in the end, dissolved into tragedy.

In my view, there are roughly two reasons for this.

First, China never had a foundation for putting the individual first, or for treating the individual as an independent basis of value judgment. Only a handful of works — Zhuangzi's "Free and Easy Wandering," for instance — touch on individual freedom now and then, but in a social order built around Confucianism, the individual has no independent standing. He must submit to the whole network of family and lineage and to the larger social order. The basic logic of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism runs from the individual outward to family, state, and world — the individual is only a starting point, never something that can stand independent of the family-state system. To even talk about the individual was almost illegitimate, without any real basis.

Second, the line between public and private in China has never been clearly drawn. The Book of Rites gives us the idea that "the world belongs to all" — and that was also Sun Yat-sen's basic slogan. The legitimacy of "the public" is simply taken for granted; it's the premise behind any judgment. For the individual to insist on a legitimate opposition between himself and "the world" or "the public" was unthinkable, something neither tolerated nor accepted.

But in the earliest individualist arguments of May Fourth — Lu Xun's and Hu Shi's — they boldly proposed that the individual could stand in an opposing, parallel, even incompatible relationship with "the world" and "the public." Their attempt ultimately failed, and it failed because the line between public and private simply cannot be drawn within China's entire system of thought. "The public" may represent the private, but "the private" in turn becomes absorbed into "the public," folded into it as a way of expressing its own value.

This was the greatest attempt, since May Fourth, to break through the net — and it failed. One reason is that there was no traditional foundation to draw on, leaving it without roots. The second reason is that the place of the public, the private, or the individual has always been fixed through its interaction with family, state, and world. The biggest reason of all is that China was under constant Western invasion, incursion, interference, and forced transformation, and in facing all these outside forces, the individual had to hold a posture of continuous struggle. Some say that national salvation always had to come first — that anyone who placed the interests of the state, the interest of resisting foreign invasion, outside of or below their private interests had no legitimacy at all. In the end, "the private" turned into something dirty, selfish, an evaluation loaded with strongly negative connotations. And once Japan invaded China in the 1930s and 40s, this trend grew ever more pronounced. Individualism was squeezed into an increasingly narrow space, and eventually it faded away.

I think this may be the most regrettable part of May Fourth — and the factor most worth digging back up, mourning again, and paying tribute to. I devote a full chapter of the book to tracing this process in detail, and I make my basic stance on it quite clear — decisively so, I'd say.

How Did the New Intellectuals Led by Mao Zedong Inherit — and Remake — the Legacy of May Fourth?

The book's final chapter discusses how anarchism and individualism, over the course of May Fourth, went from emergence to development to eventual disappearance — and asks what replaced them. What replaced them was the socialist reform movement. We tend to understand that movement rigidly, as though it were simply inevitable — as though socialism naturally triumphed over all these other currents of thought and became a necessary historical trend. I think the reality is far more complicated.

The final chapter deals with how a new type of intellectual, led by Mao Zedong, inherited the legacy of May Fourth while also remaking it.

My basic framework treats May Fourth as an interaction and struggle between a center and a periphery. The center consisted of the Peking University elite led by Chen Duxiu and the group of returnees from abroad led by Hu Shi, who controlled the fullest share of the capital's cultural resources. This group could command the field; they held enormous discursive power over May Fourth individualism, liberalism, and the social-reform movement.

But there was also a peripheral group at May Fourth's margins, led by Mao Zedong, who could not enter its core. So they took a different approach: mobilizing local cultural resources to form their own distinct methods of social reform and social organization — a method entirely unlike the Beijing-centered core of May Fourth.

Some people say that Mao, then a library assistant at Peking University, resented on a personal level being marginalized by the university's professors. But I think that's all surface. What matters most, I think, is that Mao realized reform shouldn't be launched only from a core urban center like Beijing — it should also be centered on regions outside the capital. Society isn't isolated or abstract; it has to be grounded at a very specific local level, and that region was Hunan.

Social organization needs to be built by a group of people, and here that group coalesced around the First Normal School of Hunan as a shared point of identity. The New People's Study Society was founded, essentially, by people from that school, including Cai Hesen and others. Through their own mode of social organization and social reform, this group mounted a substantial challenge to the university-centered May Fourth discourse of the Beijing core — one very different from it.

That's the analysis my book's final chapter offers on this front. Another important part of Mao's intellectual legacy is how fully he drew on Hunan's own modern Xiang tradition. Hunan was a peculiar place: before the Xianfeng and Tongzhi reigns, it was an obscure province where almost no one passed the imperial exams. But after Zeng Guofan put down the Taiping Rebellion, there arose the saying that "half the provincial governors under heaven are Hunanese" — and many of these governors had risen from commoner backgrounds, holding high office despite modest examination credentials, a genuinely unusual historical phenomenon. There has been a good deal of research on this phenomenon; one important line of scholarship holds that these men carried forward a crucial Hunanese tradition — sharp judgment in military and political affairs, together with a tightly organized, distinctly local form of organization. This trait runs from Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang all the way through the many governors who followed.

So Mao, at this level, especially inherited the Xiang tradition's political sensitivity and its command of the basic resources for social reform. Given the limits of time and energy, I didn't develop this chapter fully — there's actually much more to be excavated here. But I've laid out the basic idea: did Hunan's local resources form a local tradition of transformation that made the social-reform movement more concrete, constituting a genuinely distinctive set of resources for social reform during the May Fourth period? That's the different facet this final chapter presents.

Finally, one very important feature of this book sets it apart from earlier May Fourth scholarship. Treating May Fourth only as a political movement, or only as a subject for intellectual history, isn't enough, I think. We should place it within a long historical arc and show its different faces one by one — connecting May Fourth to the post-examination era on one end and to the social-reform movement on the other, tying it to these different forces that had an enormous impact on Chinese history and politics. That complicates the whole reading of May Fourth and gives it a more three-dimensional shape.

Cover image: a still from the TV drama Young Schoolmates (《恰同学少年》). Credit: Douban.