New Culture Movement

The New Culture Movement before the May Fourth Movement in 1919 was the struggle between the new culture of bourgeois democracy and the old culture of feudalism. The movement began in September 1915 when Chen Duxiu founded the Youth Magazine in Shanghai (later renamed as the New Youth).

In January 1917, Cai Yuanpei became the president of Peking University; he hired Chen Duxiu as the liberal arts director of the university. In parallel, the editorial office of New Youth was moved to Beijing; Li Dazhao, Lu Xun and Hu Shi joined the editorial board and became major contributors. Thus, the New Youth magazine and Peking University became the main bastions of the New Culture Movement.

The advocates of the New Culture Movement regarded opposition to ethical codes of old feudal society and the promotion of new morality and opposition to old literature and the promotion of the new literature and the new way of writing as the two banners of the “Cultural Revolution”. Lu Xun’s short story the Diary of a Madman was a vigorous depiction and indictment of feudal rituals and ethics, making the opposition to “cannibalistic rituals” the common voice of many people. Chen Duxiu's call for literary revolution and Hu Shi's advocacy of using vernacular Chinese in the new literature also had a far-reaching impact.

The basic slogans put forward by the New Youth magazine were democracy and science, i.e., upholding the “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science”, in Chen Duxiu's view; democracy not only referred to the system of bourgeois democracy, but also to the thought of bourgeois democracy, and science had two meanings: in the narrow sense, it referred to natural science, and in the broad sense, it referred to social science. He stressed that we should use the same scientific spirit and scientific methods as natural science when studying the society. However, in those days he regarded William James' pragmatism, Henri Bergson's creative evolutionism and Bertrand Russell's new realism, which were decorated with some natural science achievements, as science. He advocated Democracy and Science in order to achieve the goal of "building China as a new Western-style nation ", that is, a Western-style bourgeois nation.

Confucianism was the orthodox thought of feudal society. In the period of the Republic of China, the Northern Warlords Government still regarded Confucianism as a religious doctrine and forced the people to believe in it. Therefore, the advocates of the New Culture Movement argued that Confucianism should be criticized in order to promote democracy and science and clear the ideological barriers to the development of capitalism.

The New Culture Movement before the May Fourth Movement has a great historical significance. The advocates of the New Culture Movement advocated democracy, opposed autocracy, advocated science and opposed superstition and blind obedience, which were all to the point and served the requirements of the times. While feudalism still occupied a dominant position in political and social life of that era, objectively the advocacy of bourgeois democracy still played an enlightening role. The advocates of the New Culture Movement did not deny all Chinese traditional culture just because they criticized Confucianism. They pointed out that all learning and study should not be reduced only to Confucianism. However, they also did not deny the historical role of Confucianism and did not argue that it has nothing worthy of praise and learn form. They criticized Confucianism in order to point out that it is not suitable for modern life at all, to oppose Confucianism's fetters on people's thinking, to make people dare to break through the fetters of feudal thought, to think independently in order to obtain "true and rational belief". They set off a trend of ideological emancipation in society, which was vivid, progressive and revolutionary.

There were also some weaknesses in the New Culture Movement before the May Fourth Movement had occurred. Because the program of the bourgeois republic did not suit the conditions of China and the promotion of bourgeois democracy did not provide an effective ideological weapon for people to grasp the realities of China and transform the Chinese society. Many of the leading figures of the movement at that time did not have the critical spirit of Marxism, and the views and methods they used were generally bourgeois ones.

Some of them discussed the questions one-sidedly, for them evil was absolutely evil, and good was absolutely good, such formalistic way of inquiry and study of questions had negatively affected the later development of this movement, as they make an absolute distinction between good and evil. Some of the advanced progressive figures at that time began to doubt Western bourgeois democracy although they were propagating it. Their doubts towards bourgeois democracy led them to explore new ways to overcome the crisis and prepared the adequate breeding soil for their acceptance of Marxism in the future. The New Culture Movement was later divided into two wings: one group of people (such as Li Dazhao, etc.) inherited its scientific and democratic spirit and reformed it on the basis of Marxism; and the other group (such as Hu Shi, etc.) continued along the bourgeois path.