New Culture Movement - Evaluations and Changing Views

Evaluations and Changing Views

Orthodox historians viewed the New Culture Movement as a revolutionary break with feudal thought and social practice and as the seedbed of revolutionary leaders who created the Communist Party of China and who went on to found the People's Republic of China in 1949. Mao Zedong wrote that the May 4th Movement "marked a new stage in China's bourgeois-democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism," and argued that "a powerful camp made its appearance in the bourgeois-democratic revolution, a camp consisting of the working class, the student masses and the new national bourgeoisie."

Historians in the west also saw the movement as marking a break between tradition and modernity, but in recent decades Chinese and western historians now commonly argue that the changes promoted by New Culture leaders had roots going back several generations and thus were not a sharp break with tradition, which is in any case quite varied, so much as an acceleration of earlier trends. Research over the last fifty years also suggests that while radical Marxists were important in the New Culture Movement, there were many other influential leaders, including anarchists, conservatives, Christians, and liberals. This re-evaluation, while it does not challenge the high evaluation of the thinkers and writers of the period, does not accept their self-image as cultural revolutionaries.

Other historians further argue that Mao Zedong’s communist revolution did not, as it claimed, fulfill the promise of New Culture and enlightenment but rather betrayed its spirit of independent expression and cosmopolitanism. Yu Yingshi, a student of the New Confucian Qian Mu, recently defended Confucian thought against the New Culture condemnation. He reasoned that in fact late imperial China had not been stagnant, irrational and isolated, conditions which would justify radical revolution, but rather that late Qing thinkers were already taking advantage of the creative potential of Confucius.

Xu Jilin, a Shanghai intellectual who reflects present day liberal voices, agreed in effect with the orthodox view that the New Culture Movement was the root of the Chinese Revolution but valued the outcome differently. New Culture intellectuals, said Xu, saw a conflict between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in their struggle to find a “rational patriotism.” But the cosmopolitan movement of the 1920s was replaced by a “new age of nationalism.” Like a “wild horse,” Xu continued, “jingoism, once unbridled, could no longer be restrained, thus laying the foundations for the eventual outcomes of the history of China during the first half of the twentieth century.”