Asian Literature

The May Fourth Movement was a movement for a new culture, and hence it is also known as the New Culture Movement the term is generally applied to the social and cultural changes that took place in China from 1915 to 1921. It is compared with European Renaissance as well as with the Age of Enlightenment or is sometimes seen as the Chinese equivalent of the October Revolution of Russia, though being more broad-based.

For millennia China was ruled by monarchic dynasties. The tradition of autocratic rule of kings came to an end during the Chinese revolution of 1911-1912. The emperor of the Qing dynasty was deposed, and China entered into the modern ages  or rather took the first crucial step toward being part of the modern times. The government that took over the control after 1911 was unstable and disorganized. The new President, Yuan Shikai, showed totalitarian tendencies, while people were expecting a fair and democratic form of government. When the president died in 1916, many of the regional warlords of China tried to seize the opportunity and rise to power by taking control of the government. China now had a weak and unstable government, torn by internal dissent. There was much chaos and uncertainty about the countrys future. Chinas reputation was declining on the international scene. These were times of crisis, but the Chinese intellectuals of the period realized that the way out of the crisis was not a quick and easy one. They saw that the causes of the turmoil of the present had very deep roots in the past. The problem was with the entire traditional Chinese culture and outlook toward life. Modernity could not spread and bring about progress just by a change of the political system, because the political system could not be changed effectively in the first place without getting rid of many of the burdens of the past. A great amount of groundwork had to be done first for the successful change of the polity, and much of this change had to take place at the grassroots level. The national character and the essential mold of the Chinese mind had to be transformed. The enlightened intellectuals of China banded together into an avant-garde force in order to lead the nation in new directions. The May Fourth Movement was an intellectual revolution, it was a call for a thoroughgoing social, political and cultural reform involving multifarious aspects of the Chinese society. A cohesive and capable national administration could be established, and China could move steadily toward modernization only if some fundamental social and cultural changes took place first.

The old was gone, but the new had not arrived yet. The May Fourth Movement is the name given to a transitional stage of great importance in the national history of China. It was a movement to achieve national independence and establish national sovereignty on the one hand, and at the same time rebuild the entire society and culture of China on the other. At the nexus of the outward political changes and the more inward social and cultural changes was the cause of the emancipation of the individual.

In 1915, an intellectual revolutionary by the name of Chen Duxiu started a monthly magazine called The Youth Magazine which was later renamed to New Youth. This magazine propagated iconoclastic ideals to do away with the past and its oppressing feudal traditions. Duxius writings inspired many young intellectuals to realize the nature of the situation and strive to change it.

Several years previously Chen Duxiu had founded a patriotic association, and thereafter actively participated in the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 which led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. But when Yuan Shikai took the reins of power, Duxiu decided to flee to Japan for a few years. During his stay in Japan, Duxiu began to write articles that conveyed a strong sense of patriotism and instigated people to fight for their freedom. Freedom was most needed China at that time was not under the direct rule of an imperial force, like, for example, its neighbor India was, but it was a weak nation very much vulnerable to imperialist influences and invasions. The defeats China had suffered in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and during the Boxer Rebellion between 1898 and 1901 left it very much weakened politically and economically. The Boxer uprising was a response to imperialist expansion and missionary evangelism. When the uprising was crushed, China was made to pay tens of millions of pounds to Britain. Reeling as it was from the fines of the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing government was further weakened by the widespread corruption within its own bureaucracy. The revolutionary movement that toppled the Qing Dynasty was also a fight against the oppression of foreign imperialism. The emperor was gone now, but the powerful hands of imperialism  Britain on the one side and Japan on the other   continued their stranglehold on China. Duxiu was determined to arouse the nation and bring China back to standing on its feet. He became an influential activist over the years and by the time of the New Youth magazine, he had the attention of forward-thinking youngsters of the country. His writings urged people to think and discuss and come together with a cause. Young intellectuals of the nation began to burn with a revolutionary zeal to reform the Chinese society and strengthen its government and economy. These would-be leaders of the New Culture Movement intended to change China in all respects, to transform it into a prosperous and strong, democratic and liberal, state. Herein lay the origins of the May Fourth Movement.

The young revolutionaries desired to bring about a total new beginning for China. They exalted Western ideas and ideals and disparaged the traditional Chinese mores based on Confucianism. Science (scientific thinking) and democracy (a rational form of government) became the new gods on whose altar an increasing number of thinking people in China were willing to lay their lives. Science and democracy were becoming the watchwords for a whole new generation of people. In fact, the May Fourth Movement is sometimes known as the May Fourth Movement for Science and Democracy. Also of great interest were Western ideas of political philosophy such as liberalism, pragmatism, socialism, anarchism. In fact the kind of nationalism that was seething among many educated Chinese at that time can itself be considered as a Western concept.  

Many Chinese students returning from abroad brought back with them a wealth of knowledge regarding the Western political, economic and cultural ways of thinking. All kinds of writers and thinkers of China began to take a broad look at the world, trying to find Chinas place and role in the world of the twentieth century. They were predominantly preoccupied with the question of how to the transform the entire culture of the nation.
Nowhere was the struggle between traditional and modern more visible than in the field of culture. Beginning with the New Culture era, radical reformists criticized traditional culture as the symbol and instrument of feudal oppression that must be entirely eradicated before a new China could stand with dignity in the modern world.

While a number of Chinese thinkers were thus engaged in thinking and discussing about cultural aspects, the major powers of the Western world were engaged in the First World War. China too contributed to the War by supporting the Allied forces. In return for their help, China was hoping to reclaim the German-occupied territories in the Shandong peninsula.

When it was known, however, that the Shandong Province would go to Japan, this became a blow to the self-respect of the Chinese people. By 1919, the New Culture Movement had been in existence for a couple of years, but in a rather diffuse form. Some crucial events after the World War would gave a shape and focus to this movement. The weak dissent-torn Chinese government at that time was virtually in the hands of warlords it made a pact with Japan to yield the Shandong Province expecting financial support in return. The Allies too supported Japanese claims on Chinese territories. By April of 1919, it became clear to many Chinese people that the Treaty of Versailles would not heed the point of view of the Chinese people.

On May 4, 1919, 3,000 to 5,000 students of Peking University and other educational institutions in Beijing held a demonstration in Tiananmen square, protesting the Treaty of Versailles. They felt that the warlord-controlled Beiyang government of China was an effete and ineffective government and expressed their anguish at being betrayed both by the Allied forces and their own government. This relatively small student demonstration soon triggered student agitations nationwide. Within a short time thereafter the student rallies garnered support from various groups representing different sections of the society. Merchants, the lower classes, the people from the press  all joined the movement bringing to it their own social and economic grievances. Although the agitations of the May Fourth Movement began on the issue of ceding Chinese territories to Japan, over the span of the next few months the scope of this movement expanded dramatically and incorporated into itself the goals and ideals of the New Culture Movement that had been going on since the mid 1910s. The terms May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement are often used synonymously, and hence the May Fourth Movement is itself associated with the years before 1919. This movement went much beyond its original political agenda and sought for a cultural awakening of the nation, a modernization of the Chinese society in every possible way.

It was widely realized and acknowledged that China lagged greatly behind the West. The major reasons for the weakness and the lack of progress in the Chinese society were also clearly identified the traditional ways of thinking and lifestyle underpinned by a Confucian code of ethics. In effect, China was sick from age-old illnesses that had penetrated deep into its marrow  yet this disease was curable. The focus was not on any person or persons though, but on ideals the doctors who could heal China were going to be Doctor Science and Doctor Democracy. The Shandong Province would only be secured in 1922, but in the meantime a great many changes that were underway were orienting China to modern ways of thinking and living.

The most fundamental problem was perceived to be one of education of the masses. At that time, reading and thinking was mostly limited to the elite circles, and this state of affairs had to be changed first. A major hurdle to achieve this was the then existing traditional, unwieldy system of written language called wenyan. The leaders of the New Culture Movement sought to replace it with baihua, a more easily accessible vernacular form of the Chinese language. This was perceived as a good starting point to initiate the changes. In fact, going beyond just the system of writing, a whole new literature was needed to generate the interest of masses in books and ideas.

Along with Chen Duxiu, who was now a professor of Chinese literature at the Peking University, the philosopher Hu Shi, the historian Gu Jiegang, the Buddhist scholar Liang Shuming, and many more thinkers and scholars were at the forefront of the New Culture Movement. They mainly operated from the Peking University, under the aegis of its chancellor Cai Yuanpei. All of them realized the importance of the literary dimension of the new movement. Hu Shi declared wenyan to be a dead language however, what was needed was a living literature. Fortunately many new writers who would later become famous, such as Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Lao She, rose up to the occasion and contributed to the enormous literary output of the period. These authors propagated the ideals of the new movement in their stories, novels and other writings. Hu Shi, for example, championed the philosophical outlook of pragmatism that had just taken birth in America in the writings of William James and was being developed and advocated by John Dewey. Lu Xun, and Mao Dun, on the other hand, were heavily influenced by Nietzsche and sought to reflect his iconoclastic spirit in their writings. Furthermore, the original works of these Western philosophers, thinkers and novelists were copiously translated into Chinese and gained considerable popularity with the Chinese audiences.

Like Chen Duxius writings of years ago, though usually not as apparently, the new literature was marked by characteristics such as an intense criticism of the inefficiencies and corruption associated with the prevailing political structure and an antagonistic stance to the conservative traditional culture, which included the clan systems, the patriarchic family, arranged marriages, a stultified system of education and so on. Literary societies were started. Periodicals were published in the vernacular baihua discussing and debating issues related to the ideology of the New Culture Movement. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao started the magazine called The Weekly Review in order to propagate the ideals of democracy, science and new literature. Like the great thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment in Europe in the eighteenth century, these twentieth century Chinese philosophers advocated reason above all. Of course, it is very difficult or impossible for common people to follow the path of reason in their lives but a significant percentage of the Chinese population began to develop a new awareness, becoming increasingly exposed as they were to books, magazines and newspapers. 

In thousands of years of long history of China, women had been vehemently suppressed. This was one of the particularly dark aspects of the Chinese culture. Therefore, understandably, a primary focus of the New Culture Movement was the emancipation of women. This liberation of women had to be brought on the economic front as well as on the social front in regard to such issues as education and marriage. An idea of the New Woman was promulgated Hu Shis translation of Henrik Ibsens A Dolls House was instrumental in this.

The silly and abominable practice of foot-binding women had been a Chinese custom for nearly a thousand years although it was officially banned in 1912, the new official policy did not have much effect. As part of the womens emancipation movement, efforts were undertaken to bring this custom to an end. Like their feet, womens minds had also suffered from stunted growth owing to systematic cultural suppression. It would be next to impossible to change this sad state of affairs in a span of a few years, still efforts were made in this direction. An increasing number of independent-minded women joined the New Culture Movement and did their bit to help liberate other suffering women.

Aspirations for womens liberation were only a part, albeit a very important part, of the fight to achieve individual freedom, equality, and a fair social structure. The democracy that needed to be achieved was not just a political one, but a social and economic one. Economic democracy of course means economic equality. This issue, however, began to create major problems. People doubted if it was ever possible to achieve economic equality in a free market democratic system. Till then the Chinese thinkers paid scant attention to the revolutionary changes happening in Russia. But when the New Culture Movement gathered definite momentum in 1919, in the months after the May fourth episode, people increasingly began to be attracted to Soviet-style socialism and communism. At some point in 1919, the New Youth magazine which was still a major voice in the New Culture Movement, began to shift its loyalty from American-style democracy to Soviet-style communism. The perception that America was not doing enough in supporting the Chinese anti-imperialist stance may also have played a role in effecting the shift from democracy to communism.

In the subsequent decades of the twentieth century Chinese history when the country became a bastion of communism, the May Fourth Movement was hailed for a being a catalyst in spreading about Marxist thought into China, and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  Many of the writers and thinkers who were part of the New Culture Movement were zealous advocates of freedom of the mind (science) and freedom of the individual (democracy), they would have loathed the notion of communism. But ironically, the May Fourth Movement is perhaps even today most noted for paving the path to communism. And it is difficult to say whether Mao Zedongs communist revolution fulfilled the promise of the May Fourth Movement or betrayed it, since the turning from democracy to communism happened very much at the height of the movement itself.