The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 1

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THE 191

REVOLUTION AND THE NEW CULTURE 423

ualism as such seemed not to be entirely instrumental to socio-political

goals.

The translation of Ibsen's A

doll's house

in the Ibsen issue of New

Youth sponsored by Hu Shih is symbolic of this concern. Similarly the

rapt absorption of the romantic 'Creation Society' authors in their own

unfulfilled emotional yearnings was anything but a concern for 'art for

art's sake'. In the words of Leo Lee, 'Far from the French symbolist

notion that art not only restructures life but also constructs a new edifice

into which the artist can escape life, Ch'eng's (Fang-wu) arguments point

in the other direction','

towards an overriding concern with 'life' whether

this concern took the form of Yii Ta-fu's melancholy self-indulgence or

Kuo Mo-jo's soaring narcissism.

Another development clearly associated with the New Culture move-

ment is what might be called the 'higher criticism' of the traditional

heritage represented by figures such as Hu Shih, Ku Chieh-kang, Ch'ien

Hsuan-t'ung and others.

Conflicts regarding the validity and authenticity of various traditions

and scriptures had been a feature of Chinese thought for ages. The great

philological scholars of the empirical research

(k'ao-cheng)

school of the

Ch'ing dynasty had also fostered the critical treatment of the great texts,

although it is much to be doubted that their work had the sceptical-

iconoclastic connotations ascribed to it by their twentieth-century

admirers. K'ang Yu-wei - by no means a critical scholar - had attempted

at the beginning of the century to use a systematic attack on the orthodoxy

of certain Old Text scriptures to support his own New Text version of

Confucianism.

Like the scholarship of K'ang Yu-wei the movement to 'reorganize the

national heritage'

(cheng-li

ktto-ku),

as it was designated by Hu Shih, had

a deep ideological motive. The methods of 'science' could, in the words

of Laurence Schneider, be used 'to undermine the credibility of orthodox

histories and the historical foundations of scripture.'

One of the most

effective ways of removing the dead hand of tradition was to dissolve the

factual claims of the myths which supported that tradition. In the end

this critical liberation of historical studies from the burden of certain

fundamentalistic and conventional ways of viewing the past was to be

taken up by many other scholars of 'national studies' - even by 'neo-

traditionalist' scholars who did not necessarily share the iconoclastic

preoccupations of Hu Shih and Ku Chieh-kang.

Even in the case of the iconoclastic 'new cultural' scholars, their inten-

tions were not entirely destructive. Although Hu Shih, Ku Chieh-kang

17 Lee, The

romantic

generation,

22.

18 Laurence Schneider, Ku

Chieh-kang

and

China's new

history.

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424 MAY FOURTH AND AFTER

and Fu Ssu-nien committed themselves to a future whose model was to

be found in the contemporary West, as Chinese nationalists they were

by no means entirely free of the desire to find what Hu Shih called 'con-

genial stocks' in the Chinese past from which a modern culture might

grow. The view of science advocated by Hu Shih's teacher John Dewey,

with its notion of gradual, incremental evolution, encouraged the idea

that the present must somehow grow out of the past. Both Ku Chieh-

kang and Hu Shih were indeed able to find to their own satisfaction

strands of Chinese thought which pointed towards modernity. There

was the presumed 'scientific' method of Ch'ing scholarship, the begin-

nings of logic in China's ancient thought, and in the case of Hu Shih, the

vital vernacular literature of the past which was in such striking contrast

to the decadent, formalistic classical literature of the elite. This populist

theme which contrasted the discredited and oppressive 'high culture' of

the elite with the vital energy of the folk was eventually to lead Ku

Chieh-kang to his extensive studies of folklore (see below). Hu Shih,

who was equally concerned with both the new literature and the new

scholarship, was later able to combine both interests in his scholarly in-

vestigations of the vernacular fiction of the past. All of these endeavours,

whether literary, scholarly or simply publicistic, were thoroughly infused

with the common premises of the New Culture movement.

Despite the shared premises of the movement, when we juxtapose the

names of some of its major protagonists - Hu Shih, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, and

Lu Hsun - we become acutely conscious of the profound differences

among them. As a young student before 1911, Hu Shih had already been

profoundly influenced by the social Darwinist ideas of Yen Fu and Liang

Ch'i-ch'ao. His happy experiences as a student in the United States and

his contacts with the philosophy of the earlier John Dewey then seem to

have led him by a kind of smooth evolution to his own version of Ch'en

Tu-hsiu's famous formula 'Mr Science and Mr Democracy', a formula

which once it had been set forth was to remain essentially unchanged.

Yen Fu's Bacon-Mill conception of science as a kind of simple induction-

ism was to provide a bridge to Dewey's experimentalistic concept, and

Hu Shih's own life experience in early twentieth-century America was to

provide him with a happy image of democracy in operation even though

he also enthusiastically accepted Dewey's more advanced, critical view

of true democracy.

In John Dewey, science and democracy were inseparable values. The

experimental method of science in its reliance on tentative hypotheses

applied to the study of 'problematic situations' represented a rejection of

all spiritual authority and all pre-established dogma - whether religious,

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THE 191

REVOLUTION AND THE 'NEW CULTURE* 425

political or metaphysical. It thus was the very basis for the assertion of

freedom. If men would cooperate together to apply the methods of

science, which had been so successfully applied to nature, to the study

of human social and cultural problems - an area still subjugated to the

empire of dogma - the ends of true liberty and equality would be brought

close to realization. The spread of scientific intelligence, thus conceived,

through the whole society by education, would lead men to analyse and

deal effectively with their collective problems and even to reconcile their

clashing interests. In spite of Dewey's sharp criticism of mere formal

'political democracy' and constitutionalism, there seems little doubt

that his whole outlook presupposed a common acceptance of constitu-

tional democracy as 'the rules of the game'.

While Hu Shih seems to have accepted Dewey's view of science as

methodology, the subtle epistemological issues raised by Dewey as a

philosopher seem to have escaped him entirely, and he found it quite

possible to combine Dewey's pragmatism with a simple dogmatic mech-

anistic-naturalistic metaphysics.'

In this area he remained very much in

the tradition of Yen Fu and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, even though his naturalism

is unencumbered by Taoist-Buddhist overtones. Again, Dewey's emphasis

on 'scientific inquiry' and education in dealing with socio-political pro-

blems

;

his deprecation of 'mere politics' seems to have reinforced a pre-

existent tendency in Hu Shih to regard the disorderly and 'irrational'

political conflicts of China as irrelevant to China's true progress.

Dewey's emphasis on scientific intelligence and education was entirely

in keeping with the whole new cultural emphasis on the transformation

of conscious life. It was thus entirely appropriate that when Hu Shih

returned to China in 1917 he should have become closely associated with

the movement. His deep interest in language reform was entirely in keep-

ing with the broad educational goals of the movement. His interest in

the New Literature reflected both a deep personal fondness for literature

and a conviction that the affective power of literature provided a most

powerful vehicle for communicating new ideas. When one surveys his

life in retrospect, one cannot but feel that Hu's pronounced literary and

scholarly concerns reflected personal inclinations as well as the no doubt

sincere belief that 'reorganizing the national heritage' was a crucial cul-

tural task. This does not mean that he did not devote a good deal of

attention to social and political questions in his writings over the years,

but, unable as he was for the most part to affect the actual course of poli-

19 Hu Shih's staunch support of this kind of metaphysics seems to have shielded him from any

response to Dewey's later subtle discussions of religious and aesthetic experience.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

4*6 MAY FOURTH AND AFTER

tical affairs, he found that it was much more feasible to apply 'scientific

intelligence' to the critique of the cultural heritage.

When we turn to Ch'en Tu-hsiu we find that while he actually created

the formula 'Mr Science and Mr Democracy', his view of both these

categories was different in subtle ways from that of Hu Shih. His tempera-

ment, unlike that of Hu, was passionate and impatient. The fact that the

Western influence which had been predominant in his case had been

French rather than Anglo-American was not insignificant. His view of

science was basically that of a crude Darwinian metaphysic. Science was

a corrosive which could be used to undermine traditional values. The

fact that the forces of evolution seemed to have completely bogged down

in China led him to moments of deep depression, yet like Hu Shih, he was

basically able to combine his 'scientific' determinism with a strong faith

in the powers of an intellectual elite. Unlike Hu Shih, the positive doctrine

of science as a piece-meal experimental methodology did not penetrate

the centre of Ch'en's consciousness and he was later able to transfer the

use of the word science from Darwinism to Marxism without losing

any sense of its apodictic certainty.

Similarly, Hu Shih's conception of scientific method seems to have

rendered him impervious to the appeal of

the

notion of total revolutionary

transformation, while Ch'en Tu-hsiu, who greatly admired the French

Revolution as a fountainhead of modern democracy, was probably

inherently more vulnerable to the appeal of revolutionary transformation

in spite of his thoroughly anti-political 'cultural' approach during the

period before 1919. Yet during the period of close collaboration between

the two (1917-19) there was nevertheless a great resemblance in their

views on the individual and on the ingredients of democracy.

Lu Hsun (Chou Shu-jen), who was to become modern China's most

distinguished literary giant, was a man of quite different sensibilities.

Throughout his life in his more literary persona, he seems to have had a

peculiar sensitivity to the 'powers of darkness'. In his youth, he was

easily converted to the evolutionary creed and yet his dark doubts began

to emerge even before 1911. His own personal family experiences, his

deep sense of the corruption and 'slave mentality' of the Chinese people,

seem even before 1911 to have diminished his faith in the effectiveness

of the forces of evolution in China. His contacts with Nietzsche's writings

did not turn him into a true Nietzschean but provided him with the vivid

image of the free, heroic, defiant spirit who sets himself against the 'slave

mentality' of the mass of mankind. For a time, he indulged in the youthful

dream of the Nietzschean-Byronic poetic hero who would be able to rouse

mankind out of its spiritual slumbers. It may also have been Nietzsche

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MAY FOURTH AND'ITS CONSEQUENCES 427

and Byron who led him very early to a certain lack of sympathy for the

prosaic, 'bourgeois' culture of Western Europe and America. In spite

of Yen Fu's influence, Lu Hsun was to remain cool to the Western tech-

nocratic strain of thought as well as to the detached 'realism' of much

Western literature with its over-complicated view of man's moral life.

The post-1911 revolutionary situation was to lead Lu Hsun to a blank

wall of despair. His vision of the capacity of Nietzschean literary heroes

to mould society seems to have faded rapidly. His 'totalistic' image of

China's bad past and present was if anything more sombre than that of

his 'new cultural' colleagues. The cruelty, corruption, servility and hy-

pocrisy of contemporary China did not represent a decline of tradi-

tional values, but in some sense were actually a manifestation of those

destructive values. In his 'Diary of a madman', he makes it clear that it

is not only the actuality of Chinese society which makes it 'man-eating'.

Its ideals are also 'man-eating' ideals. Even the young revolutionaries of

the pre-1911 period had speedily succumbed to the poisonous influence

of this incubus. Lu Hsun's decision to take up writing once more was

a response to the 'educational' aims of the New Culture movement but

it seems to have been a highly sceptical response.

In spite of his 'totalistic iconodasm' it is nevertheless important to

point out that on the level of his literary imagination, Lu Hsun continued

to be fascinated by certain 'counter-traditional' aspects of the Chinese

past. The past to which he looked was, however, entirely different from

the past in which Hu Shih sought his 'congenial stocks'. It was the past

of 'neo-Taoist' bohemians of the southern dynasties, of popular fantasy

and fable and even the past of certain intimate personal values. Yet none

of these attractions seems to have wrenched Lu Hsun from his rejection

of the heritage as a whole.

MAY FOURTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

In dealing with the consequences of the events of May 1919, we shall

not here dwell on the multiplicity of doctrines which were to find ex-

pression in a myriad of new periodicals. May Fourth simply marked an

explosive stage in the expansion (already under way) of the audience for

the themes of the New Culture - particularly its 'totalistic' rejection of

the cultural heritage. It is now, however, quite clear that most of the

doctrines embraced were not new.

One of the main consequences of these events for our purposes here

is their implications for the purely cultural diagnosis of China's ills. May

Fourth was a political act, a seemingly effective act of political protest

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428 MAY FOURTH AND AFTER

against foreign imperialism. It even led for a time to a kind of mass move-

ment (albeit of students and urban strata only). The new cultural leaders

had in the past been mainly concerned with China's domestic ills. The

social Darwinist coloration of their thought had not on the whole led

them to moralistic judgments of the behaviour of the imperialist powers

or to attribute China's ills primarily to foreign causes. Yet the nation-

alistic impatience and sense of urgency of the students forced some of

their intellectual elders to turn their attention away for the moment from

their long-term cultural effort, to face the sad state of contemporary

politics in China.

Even the antipolitical Hu Shih was forced by the events of May Fourth

to reassess his posture. The immediate effect was to raise his hopes that

the cultural transformation which, to his delight, already seemed to have

taken place among young intellectuals, would flow not into politics but

into a 'social movement'. John Dewey, who was himself present in China

in 1919, encouraged this hope by his own observation that 'the students'

organizations have gone into popular education, social and philanthropic

service and vigorous intellectual discussion.'

Hu Shih spoke of 'masses

to educate, women to emancipate, schools to reform'.

The assumption

seems to have been at the outset that all these goals might be pursued

while by-passing the intractable facts of political-military power as they

existed in the China of 1919. Yet by the summer of 1922, Hu Shih, under

the proddings of his friend Ting Wen-chiang, was himself induced to

help found the journal Nu-li

chou-pao

(Endeavour), which was frankly

dedicated to political action.

Ting Wen-chiang, who, as an able geologist was one of the few actual

scientists among the new culture's 'scientific' intellectuals, had been

trained not in America but in Scotland.

There he had acquired a thor-

oughly British empiricist view of science (like Hu Shih he was an admirer

of the Ch'ing 'empiricists') but a type of empiricism not as implicated

with the gospel of democracy as was Dewey's version of experimentalism.

Accordingly, Ting was less inclined to indulge in the moralistic judgments

of militarists and politicians that figured so strongly in Hu Shih's outlook.

His attitude towards established power seemed to be - is it usable for our

purposes

Hu Shih had in the interim himself become painfully aware

of the power of political forces to interfere with the intellectuals' rights

of freedom of speech and action. He had also become aware of the rise

of new authoritarian '-isms' - prepared to pre-empt the arena of political

20 Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and

the Chinese

renaissance,

179.

Ibid.

177.

22 On Ting see Charlotte Furth's study Ting

Wen-chiang:

science

and China's

new

culture.

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MAY FOURTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 429

action. Hence one aspect of

his

political action was the liberal call for 'civil

rights'

as against the arbitrary acts of government. This was a cause to

which he remained faithful ever after.

The other side of Hu Shih's political proposals - his call for a govern-

ment of 'good men' and a 'government with a plan' - already pointed to

the grave problem of how to relate 'science' to 'democracy' in China.

Given his 'common-sensical' definition of

science,

Dewey allowed himself

to hope that the methods of scientific inquiry would rapidly be propagated

throughout American society, making science a weapon of an enlightened

people through the new education. Given China's situation, Hu Shih

could only hope that men of scientific enlightenment (who were 'good' by

definition but also few in number) might bring their influence to bear on

established centres of power. Hu Shih no less than the Communists and

Nationalists felt himself forced to believe in an enlightened elite. The

hope of being able to work with Wu P'ei-fu's government was of course

to be short-lived, and Hu Shih was soon to return to his cultural view of

China's problems.

One of the groups better able to take advantage of the nationalist poli-

tical fervour which pervaded the young during May Fourth (a fervour

which overrode all ideological differences) was Sun Yat-sen and his

entourage. Whatever one may think of Sun's merits as a thinker or states-

man, the fact is that during the whole bleak period from 1911 to I9i9he

had not been diverted from his political goal of establishing a strong

central government, however ineffective his methods. He did not succumb

to the 'new cultural' obsession with the sickness of China's culture.

On the contrary, even before 1911 his contacts with 'national essence'

thinking had convinced him that national pride in the achievements of

the past must be fostered and he had even developed definite ideas of what

was to be prized.

One of the traditional values to be prized was the old stress on 'people's

livelihood' which Sun had long since been able to link (like Liang Ch'i-

ch'ao) to the 'socialist' critique of the sharp class antagonism in Western

society. Like Liang he constantly stressed the relative lack of class anta-

gonism, as he defined it, in traditional Chinese society. Also during the

years of growing bitterness after 1911, he had devoted a good deal of

attention to the problem of how to create a disciplined, unified vanguard

party in China. In general his faith in constitutional democracy of the

Western type gradually declined. It is thus not surprising that Sun and

some of his closest disciples expressed an immediate and keen interest

after the October Revolution in Lenin's views on party organization as

well as in the Bolshevik formula for dealing with military power. Some

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43° MAY FOURTH AND AFTER

of the younger men

Sun's entourage

such

as Hu

Han-min, Tai Chi-

t'ao,

Chu Chih-hsin

were indeed

prove remarkably receptive

to the

Leninist theory

imperialism as an analysis

Western behaviour.

INTRODUCTION OF MARXISM-LENINISM

The doctrine

the Bolshevik revolution

was to be one of

the newer

additions

to the

doctrinal storehouse

the May Fourth period which

otherwise drew on older themes. The phraseology

the Leninist theory

of imperialism very quickly became popular among many circles after

the 'betrayal

Versailles',

but the

acceptance

Soviet communism

a total doctrine was

prove

much slower process

as is

amply proven

by the small number

immediate converts. Thus

dealing with the ap-

peals

Marxism-Leninism

must

by no

means confine ourselves

the early beginnings

the communist movement.

The first appeal

the October Revolution lay perhaps

in the

fact

revolution

itself.

The lively faith in a progressive evolutionary cosmology

which

had

been

the

central creed

of the

pre-revolutionary period

had

lost its vigour. The new cultural leaders who still thought

the present

West as China's future had felt obliged to fall back on their own resources

as educators. Even those prepared

call themselves socialists and anar-

chists

who had

accepted

the

anti-capitalist image

of the

West could

discern little sign

dramatic historic movement

what appeared

to be

an increasingly stable West.

The man who most vividly symbolized the response

to the

Bolshevik

Revolution

as a

sign that world history was again

on the

move was

Ta-chao.

One of the

more idiosyncratic members

of the new

culture

group,

had somehow managed

maintain a buoyant faith

his own

poetic version

historical progress even during

the

bleak years.

His

own conception differed from

the

prevailing social Darwinist creed.

Inspired by sources as diverse as Emerson, Bergson, Hegel, and a Taoist-

Buddhist strain,

he had

conceived

history

as a

kind

unified, ever

youthful World Spirit ever able

break through the static structures

which

gives rise. His readiness

for

a cosmic act

liberation thus made

him extraordinarily responsive

the apocalyptic message

the Bolshe-

vik Revolution as the harbinger of

new historic movement which would

sweep away 'all national boundaries, all differences of

classes,

all barriers.'

As Maurice Meisner points out, this more universal vision was combined

with

bone-deep Chinese nationalism which seemed

envisage

23 Their ideas found expression

the journal

Chlen she

(Construction), 1920.

24 For

study

Li see Maurice Meisner,

Ta-chao

and

the origins

Chinese

Marxism.

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INTRODUCTION OF MARXISM-LENINISM 43 I

the possibility that China would somehow be able to participate in this

world drama as a 'people-nation'. The Leninist doctrine of imperialism

with its positive attitude towards the provisional role of nationalism in

the 'backward' world during a bourgeois democratic stage, provided a

space for Li Ta-chao's vision although it is by no means clear that Li

truly accepted the provisional nature of the nationalist component. As

Joseph Levenson has, however, pointed out, this new vision of history -

even before it involved any deep knowledge of

the

dynamics of Marxism -

now would place China itself in the vanguard of an historic movement

which would lead beyond the corrupt contemporary West. The West

could be rejected from a higher yet iconoclastic point of view.

As has often been pointed out, the Marxist-Leninist revolution was

also responsive to a problem we have met before and already described

as the Leninist dilemma. The problem involved both a deep belief that

History is 'on our side' and deep doubts whether the movement from the

present into the future can be entrusted to impersonal forces. Lenin had

faced the problem of the conscious vanguard - a problem faced not only

by Yen Fu and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao in the past but by Sun Yat-sen and

even Hu Shih and Ting Wen-chiang in the May Fourth era. But he had

done so in a new way. The model of the communist party as the con-

centration of the general will of the industrial proletariat, the military

metaphor of the party as a general staff of highly disciplined, monolith-

ically united 'professional revolutionaries', who could analyse the tem-

poral terrain of emerging objective historical situations just as generals

can interpret the spatial terrain in which they operate - these notions

were to become indispensable components of the Marxist-Leninist

message.

In retrospect, however, it would appear that an even more important

aspect of Leninism as a political strategy was another side of the military

metaphor - its emphasis on mass mobilization as a source of political

power. The organizational philosophy of the party could be borrowed

by others (as the Kuomintang did after 1923). The essential, however,

was the combination of the concept of the vanguard party with a concern

for mass mobilization. Lenin no doubt sincerely believed that the Bol-

shevik party was the incarnation of the general will of the industrial

proletariat, and this belief led him to relate himself aggressively (but

not always successfully) to the organization of the party's 'class basis'.

But beyond that he had a deep appreciation of the power to be derived

from a linkage to immediately felt mass needs, as in his adoption of the

slogan 'peace and land' in 1917. None of this implies that individuals

who enter the movement are not directly moved in their organizational

MAY FOURTH

AND

AFTER

activities

immediate sentiments

compassion

and

indignation.

does mean that

the

leadership remains

'general

staff'

whose strategies

and perspectives

are not in

theory confused

by the

'limited', short-term

perspectives

of the

masses.

The

leadership

confident that

operates

from

long-term historical perspective. Again

the

military metaphor

also implies

determination

relate oneself

not

only

mass mobiliza-

tion

but to a

constant realistic

and

detached assessment

of the

strength

and disposition

political forces

in the

environment.

constantly

interpreting these political forces

reflections

'class relations'

in the

Marxist sense,

one

could maintain one's faith that

one was

relating prac-

tice

Marxist theory.

One should hasten

to add

that none

these abstract propositions

guaranteed

ultimate communist victory

China.

The

question

how

one was

acquire

mass base was

not

itself answered

the bare formula.

The question

whether

effective party could

created without great

leaders remained

to be

resolved.

The

emphasis

on a

'realistic' political

strategy provided

guarantees

of the

correctness

of the

strategies

pursued either

China

or in

Moscow,

nor

could

one

ever discount

the

crucial decisiveness

unforeseen contingencies such

as the

Japanese

intervention

later decades.

A word should

said

this point about

the

relative lack

attention

the

political potential

mobilized mass energy before

1919.

Certainly

China

had

known

the

power

mass mobilization

in the

rebellions

the

past.

Yet

despite

the

widespread older assumption that

'the

people'

would

be the

beneficiaries

progress, even

the

revolutionaries before

1911

did not, on the

whole, think

mass organization

as a

source

political power

' (with

the

somewhat questionable exception

their

cooperation with secret societies

One may

speculate that

some sense

the

new

Western ideas

of the

literati increased rather than diminished

their distance from

the

masses, intensifying their perception

the people

helpless entity sunk

ignorance

and

passivity.

Despite

the

fascination

of the

pre-1911 revolutionaries with Russian

'revolutionary heroism'

the

idea

'going

to the

people'

did not

truly

emerge until

the May

Fourth period

in the

'social movement'

of the

times.

The

notion

direct contact between intellectuals

and

masses

was

to have

considerable future

in the

work

Yen Yang-ch'u,

T'ao

Hsing-

chih, Liang Shu-ming

and

others,

but

again this

was not to

involve

the

25 Edward Friedman

in his

book Backward toward revolution:

the

Chinese Revolutionary Party

speaks of the 'mass' organizational activities of some of Sun's followers such as Chu Chih-

hsin after 1911.

26 For a discussion of this cooperation see Mary Backus Rankin, Early

Chinese

revolutionaries:

radical intellectuals

Shanghai

and

Chekiang,