The May Fourth New Culture Movement marks a new stage of China's modernization movement characterized by intellectual awakening. It was originally designed to promote a cultural transformation toward modernity in China. But the May Fourth New Culture Movement as the Chinese Enlightenment indeed was a relatively short event amid the fervor of political and social revolution.
As China's modernization from very beginning was crisis-related and its movement was often directed by a "challenge-response" approach, the issue of cultural transformation was long overlooked until the May Fourth period. Modernization in China was mainly initiated by external factors, especially the challenges of the modern West, which proposed a historical task for Chinese intellectuals--undertaking a process of cultural adaptation which involved criticism of Chinese culture and reconstruction of its value system. This process for Chinese intellectuals was a painful experience because they had to reluctantly accept the fact that Chinese cultural superiority was giving way to Western cultural hegemony.
Since the Opium War when China's door was opened by Western warships to Western trade, investment, and administration, the country was forced into the changing world dominated by the modern West. To the challenge of the modern West, China's response was quite conservative.
The Self-Strengthening movement (1861-1896) can be viewed as the first modernization campaign but its modernist discourse can be characterized by Zhang Zhidong's catchword, "Chinese learning for essence (ti); Western learning for utility (yong)."
The modernization campaign was mainly for strengthening the military establishment aiming at a restoration and re-invigoration of the social and political ethics of Confucianism. Since traditional administrative practices and personal ethics undermined the way of modernization, even those modernization efforts, such as running steel and iron works, coal mines, shipyards, steamship companies, modern arsenals, interpreter schools and telegraph stations, were often left to the initiatives of single regional governors. They thus lacked the particular degree of dynamism, unity and central guidance that was one of the reasons behind Japanese modernization success.
Defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 broke the Self-Strengthening program into pieces and convinced Chinese intellectuals that the roots of Western strength went deeper than science and technology the Self-Strengtheners wanted to borrow; China (like Japan) would not only have to learn Western technology, but also adapt its basic social and political institutions along Western lines. Therefore, reform-minded intellectual elites, such as Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, along with others, began calling for more radical reforms of social and political institutions patterned on Japan's Meiji Reform, which enabled Japan to succeed in catching up with the Western powers.
The failure of reform movement in 1898 stimulated the rise of revolutionary movement. Given that the sense of crisis was so strong that political reform became less convincing, Sun Yat-sen and other intellectuals took the lead in resorting to radical approaches by launching political revolution aiming at destroying the old framework of imperial system.
The 1911 Revolution finally overthrew China's two-thousand-year old monarchical system and established a republican government patterned on the West. The collapse of the monarchy increased the process of disintegration of traditional Chinese society and the state ideology. After the 1911 Revolution, however, the newly established Chinese Republic did not live up to the expectation of the intellectuals who set their hope on modern nation-state and democracy, but paved the way for political chaos.
袁世凯登基
The undesirable result of copying Western political system in China, however, did not shake the intellectuals' confidence in changing the society through westernization. Unlike a rise of cultural nationalism among Indian intellectuals at the same time, Chinese intellectuals set more hopes of saving the nation on westernization. This phenomenon was largely due to the fact that India passed under British control while China reminded under indigenous governments.
It was a paradox that the less westernization China had, the more expectations Chinese intellectuals set on it.
After the 1911 Revolution, many Western cultural and social ideas such as liberalism, individualism, socialism, Darwinism, pragmatism, utilitarianism, anarchism, Marxism, democracy and science flowed rapidly into China, which provided May Fourth intellectuals with a great mount of weaponry for preparing a cultural revolution when they found indigenous political structure and economic system still remained as the major obstacle to China's modernization.
Like their predecessors of the 1911 Revolution, who were obsessed with the change of political center in a radical way, May Fourth intellectuals chose a more radical approach in debunking traditional Chinese culture and society.
In contrast to Gandhi's opposition to westernization and revitalization of tradition, radical May Fourth intellectuals expressed a belief that if China could not rid herself of traditional culture and modernize herself through westernization, it could not survive as a nation. They intended to destroy the totalitarian social and political order through undermining its cultural and ideological bases.
This intention contributed to the formation of a radical intellectual current of totalistic cultural iconoclasm and complete westernization. The worse the political situation became, the more relentless rejections may be projected onto traditional culture.
Seeing China's crises, Chen Duxiu took the lead in launching a whole-scale attack on traditional Chinese culture and society. He believed that Chinese way of life--economic, social, political and cultural systems--were incompatible with modernity, the Chinese had no choice but to abandon their traditional culture for accepting Western culture. The fundamental change to Chen was westernization, i.e. to accept science and democracy as a weapon against the empty formalism of Chinese tradition, instill aggressive and energetic spirit into the Chinese people, and follow suit of Western nations in every aspect to make China fit for living in the modern world.
It is obvious that both the external and internal crises China faced caused the intellectual elites' serious concern with the question of cultural transformation. Believing that underlying Chinese attitude remained unchanged despite all modernization efforts had made, the intellectuals felt it necessary to reshape the national character by launching an enlightenment, criticize Chinese traditional culture in light of science and democracy, and reintegrate Chinese society on rational and humanistic ground.
The New Culture Movement, however, did not last long, leaving the historical task of the Enlightenment unfinished. Because of the close combination of traditional Chinese culture and polity and the strong influence of the "Shi" (Confucian scholar) tradition, it is hard to imagine that all of the intellectuals driven by national crises could have patience to engage in the long-term work of cultural transformation and kept themselves from direct participation of political and social activities as they intended. Even Hu Shi himself, who once claimed that he had “determined not to discuss or participate in politics for twenty years and instead, to lay down a foundation for the reform of China's political structure in terms of ideas and culture,” later turned to politics, let alone Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao and other May Fourth leaders who felt political change more decisive for China's modernization movement.
It should be noticed that the intellectuals who turned to initiating the Chinese Enlightenment was mainly because they could not carry out their modernization plan through political channel. They wanted to change it through a cultural revolution rather than give up their efforts in the political realm. As soon as political and social revolution gained momentum and political channel was available to them, they would switch their attention to that area. This is one of the factors that contributed to the short-lived fate of the Chinese Enlightenment, leaving a rich legacy of radical approach to modernization in later years.
