Lesson Information

Title:
New Culture and May Fourth Movements
Period:
c. 1915–early 1920s
Previous:
The Warlord Era and the Fragmented Republic
Era:
1912 — Republic of China Era
Next:
Nationalists, Communists, and the Northern Expedition

Table of Contents

  1. Lesson Orientation
  2. Learning Objectives
  3. What Was the New Culture Movement?
  4. A Note on the Term “New Culture Movement”
  5. Post-1911 Political Disillusionment
  6. New Youth
  7. Chen Duxiu
  8. Peking University and Cai Yuanpei
  9. Hu Shi and Literary Reform
  10. Vernacular Chinese and the Literary Revolution
  11. Lu Xun and “Diary of a Madman”
  12. Science and Democracy
  13. Criticism of Confucian Social Institutions
  14. Family, Gender, and the “New Woman”
  15. Education, Youth, and the New Intellectual Class
  16. Print Culture and the New Public Sphere
  17. The Russian Revolution and New Political Ideas
  18. Li Dazhao and Marxist Interpretation
  19. World War I and Chinese Expectations
  20. The Shandong Question
  21. China at the Paris Peace Conference
  22. May 4, 1919
  23. Student Protest and Repression
  24. The Movement Spreads Beyond Beijing
  25. Merchants, Workers, and Urban Mobilization
  26. The Boycott of Japanese Goods
  27. China and the Treaty of Versailles
  28. Anti-Imperialism and Nationalism
  29. Anti-Warlord Politics
  30. How New Culture and May Fourth Overlapped
  31. Why This Was Not One Unified Movement
  32. New Political Ideologies
  33. The Road Toward Chinese Communism
  34. The Reorganization of Nationalism
  35. Limits and Contradictions
  36. How Do We Know?
  37. Think Like a Historian
  38. Historical Significance
  39. Key Takeaways
  40. Key Terms
  41. Check Your Understanding
  42. Continue the Story
  43. Further Study

Lesson Orientation

The political fragmentation of the Warlord Era did not stop intellectual, literary, educational, and social change.

During the mid-1910s, writers, teachers, students, editors, and professors increasingly questioned inherited cultural institutions and argued over what a modern Chinese society should become.

Journals such as New Youth, universities such as Peking University, and a rapidly expanding print culture created new spaces for debate about:

These intellectual developments are often grouped under the term New Culture Movement.

In 1919, anger over the disposition of German rights in Shandong at the Paris Peace Conference helped turn intellectual criticism and student activism into a wider political mobilization known as the May Fourth Movement.

The two histories overlap, but they should not be treated as identical.

Learning Objectives

After completing this lesson, the learner should be able to:

What Was the New Culture Movement?

The term New Culture Movement is commonly used to describe a broad intellectual and cultural transformation beginning in the mid-1910s and continuing into the early 1920s.

Participants challenged established literary forms, inherited moral hierarchies, classical education, patriarchal family structures, and older assumptions about authority.

Many promoted some combination of:

There was no single New Culture doctrine. Liberals, socialists, anarchists, nationalists, pragmatists, Marxists, and other intellectual currents competed within the same broad environment.

A Note on the Term “New Culture Movement”

Historians do not agree on a single precise beginning or ending date for the New Culture Movement.

The intellectual developments commonly associated with it were already underway before the phrase itself became widely used.

Recent scholarship has emphasized that the label New Culture Movement became especially popular only after the May Fourth protests and was used by different groups to describe a wide range of cultural, educational, religious, political, and social projects.

The label is therefore useful as an organizing category, but it should not imply that one centrally directed organization controlled the movement.

Scholarly reference: Modern Asian Studies — “The Buzzword ‘New Culture Movement’” .

Post-1911 Political Disillusionment

The 1911 Revolution ended Qing rule but did not quickly produce the stable constitutional republic many reformers had hoped to create.

Yuan Shikai's concentration of presidential power, his suppression of political opponents, and his attempted monarchy intensified disappointment with the idea that political institutions alone could transform China.

Some intellectuals increasingly concluded that political change required deeper cultural and social change.

The question became:

If a republic could be established without creating republican habits, citizens, education, or social institutions, what kind of cultural transformation was necessary?

This question became one of the intellectual foundations of the New Culture era.

New Youth

In 1915, Chen Duxiu founded a journal that became New Youth (Xin Qingnian).

The journal became one of the most influential forums for criticism of inherited social institutions and for discussion of new literary, philosophical, scientific, and political ideas.

Its contributors included figures who later followed very different political paths.

That diversity is important because New Youth was not originally the publication of one later political party. It became a platform in which different reform currents interacted and sometimes competed.

Chen Duxiu

Chen Duxiu was one of the most influential intellectuals of the New Culture era.

Through New Youth, he argued that Chinese society required a major reexamination of inherited institutions and ideas.

Chen became especially associated with the language of “Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science”, memorable personifications of two ideals he believed were central to intellectual reform.

His political thinking continued to change after 1919, and he later became one of the founders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Students should therefore avoid reading Chen's 1915 writings as though his later Communist commitments were already fully formed.

Scholarly reference: Modern Asian Studies — “Who was Mr Democracy?” .

Peking University and Cai Yuanpei

Peking University became one of the most important institutional centers of the New Culture and May Fourth era.

In 1917, Cai Yuanpei became president of the university.

Cai promoted a broad intellectual environment in which scholars with different philosophical and political positions could teach and debate.

Faculty and students associated with Peking University included major participants in literary reform, historical research, political debate, social criticism, and student activism.

The university therefore functioned not merely as a school but as a major node in the emerging modern intellectual public sphere.

Scholarly reference: Cambridge History of China — “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After” .

Hu Shi and Literary Reform

Hu Shi became one of the most important advocates of literary and linguistic reform.

In a 1917 essay published in New Youth, he argued for reforming literature so that writers would use a living language capable of expressing modern experience.

Hu's arguments drew upon comparisons with the development of vernacular literature in Europe and reflected his broader commitment to pragmatic, experimental approaches to intellectual problems.

His ideas helped turn language reform into a central issue of cultural modernization.

Vernacular Chinese and the Literary Revolution

For centuries, educated writing had relied heavily on forms of Classical Chinese that differed substantially from ordinary speech.

New Culture intellectuals increasingly promoted vernacular Chinese (baihua) as a written language better suited to modern education, literature, journalism, and wider literacy.

Advocates argued that a more accessible written language could connect intellectual life with a much broader population.

Historians have also warned against treating Classical Chinese and vernacular writing as two completely separate worlds. Vernacular and classical forms had coexisted for centuries, and May Fourth reformers sometimes exaggerated the sharpness of the divide in order to strengthen their reform program.

Scholarly reference: Journal of Asian Studies — “What Is Mandarin? The Social Project of Language Standardization in Early Republican China” .

Lu Xun and “Diary of a Madman”

Lu Xun became one of the most influential literary figures associated with the New Culture era.

His 1918 story Diary of a Madman, published in New Youth, used vernacular fiction and a psychologically unsettling narrator to attack what the story represented as oppressive features of inherited social morality.

The story became symbolically important because literary innovation and social criticism appeared together.

New literature was not simply a matter of changing vocabulary or grammar. Writers used new forms to ask what kinds of people, families, values, and social relationships a modern China should create.

Science and Democracy

Science and democracy became two of the most recognizable concepts of the New Culture era.

Their meanings were broad and contested.

Science could refer to:

Democracy could refer to:

Different intellectuals interpreted these terms differently. Their common importance lay in their use as symbols of a new intellectual and political vocabulary.

Criticism of Confucian Social Institutions

New Culture writers often criticized what they identified as Confucian social and moral institutions.

Their targets included:

These criticisms should not be interpreted as proof that every New Culture intellectual rejected every element of Confucian philosophy.

The movement included intense debate about which inherited traditions should be rejected, reinterpreted, or preserved.

Family, Gender, and the “New Woman”

Debates over cultural reform frequently centered on family structure and gender.

Reformers criticized arranged marriage, unequal educational opportunities, patriarchal family authority, and social customs that restricted women's autonomy.

New discussions emphasized:

The ideal of the “New Woman” became part of a wider debate about modern citizenship and social transformation.

These arguments expanded opportunities for some women, especially in urban educational and professional settings, but social change remained uneven and many reform discussions were still dominated by male intellectuals.

Education, Youth, and the New Intellectual Class

The abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905 and the expansion of modern schools and universities transformed the social foundations of intellectual life.

Students increasingly saw themselves as participants in national affairs.

Their education connected them to:

Universities thus helped create a new political constituency: educated young people who believed intellectual work and public activism could contribute directly to national transformation.

The Russian Revolution and New Political Ideas

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed political debate far beyond Russia.

Some Chinese intellectuals saw Bolshevik success as evidence that a radically different political and social order could be created outside the liberal constitutional model associated with Western powers.

Socialist, Marxist, anarchist, liberal, nationalist, and other political ideas increasingly competed within the same intellectual environment.

This competition became especially important after 1919, when disappointment with the postwar international settlement weakened confidence in Western liberal powers among some Chinese intellectuals.

Li Dazhao and Marxist Interpretation

Li Dazhao, a librarian and intellectual associated with Peking University, became one of the earliest important Chinese interpreters of Marxism and the Russian Revolution.

Li increasingly argued that China's national and social problems could be understood through wider patterns of class, imperialism, and global revolution.

He did not represent all May Fourth intellectuals.

His importance lies in showing how the May Fourth intellectual environment opened pathways toward political programs that would become far more organized in the 1920s.

World War I and Chinese Expectations

China declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1917.

Chinese leaders hoped participation on the Allied side would strengthen China's position in the postwar settlement and improve its ability to recover rights lost under earlier foreign agreements.

Chinese laborers also served in Europe through the Chinese Labour Corps, supporting Allied logistical operations.

When the war ended, Chinese diplomats went to the Paris Peace Conference expecting that wartime participation and the rhetoric of national self-determination might improve China's international position.

The Shandong Question

Before World War I, Germany possessed important treaty rights and privileges in Shandong, including its position at Qingdao.

Japan seized the German position during the war.

At the Paris Peace Conference, Chinese diplomats argued that the former German rights should be restored to China.

Japan argued that earlier agreements and wartime arrangements supported its claim.

The peace settlement ultimately transferred Germany's Shandong rights to Japan rather than immediately returning them to China.

Chinese critics regarded this decision as a major violation of national sovereignty.

Primary-source reference: U.S. Office of the Historian — Chinese proposals on the Shandong settlement, April 23, 1919 .

China at the Paris Peace Conference

The Chinese delegation at Paris sought revision of arrangements associated with foreign privileges and challenged the transfer of German rights in Shandong.

The final settlement disappointed Chinese expectations.

The Shandong decision became especially controversial because it appeared to demonstrate a contradiction between the language of postwar national self-determination and the continued operation of imperial power politics.

News of the decision reached students and political activists in China and helped trigger the protest of May 4, 1919.

May 4, 1919

On May 4, 1919, students from universities and schools in Beijing gathered to protest the Shandong settlement and officials they regarded as responsible for policies favorable to Japan.

The demonstrators marched from the area around Tiananmen and attempted to present political demands.

The protest developed into confrontations, including an attack on the residence of a government official associated by protesters with pro-Japanese policy.

Police arrested a number of students.

The arrests did not end the movement. They helped turn a major Beijing protest into a broader national political crisis.

Student Protest and Repression

Student organizations responded to arrests and government restrictions with further protest, petitions, class boycotts, public lectures, pamphlets, and organizing campaigns.

The movement linked three major themes:

Diplomatic reports from June 1919 described large student organizations, school strikes, arrests, and rapidly expanding public mobilization in multiple regions.

Primary-source reference: U.S. Office of the Historian — report on the anti-Japanese popular movement, June 7, 1919 .

The Movement Spreads Beyond Beijing

The May Fourth protest did not remain confined to Beijing.

News spread through newspapers, telegraphs, student networks, chambers of commerce, schools, and political organizations.

Demonstrations and solidarity actions occurred in other major cities and regions.

The diffusion of protest was uneven and locally specific.

Scholars have emphasized that the nationwide movement did not unfold according to one centralized plan. Protest, repression, communication, and local organization interacted differently from city to city.

Scholarly reference: The China Quarterly — “Single Sparks and Legacies: An Eventful Account of the May Fourth Movement” .

Merchants, Workers, and Urban Mobilization

Students were the most visible organizers at the beginning of the May Fourth crisis, but the movement expanded beyond student politics.

Merchants, chambers of commerce, workers, journalists, and other urban groups participated in boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, and public campaigns.

This expansion changed the political significance of the movement.

Student protest became part of a broader urban coalition capable of applying economic as well as political pressure.

The participation of different social groups also introduced competing interests. Merchants did not always support every student tactic, and workers had concerns that extended beyond the student agenda.

The Boycott of Japanese Goods

One of the most visible forms of political mobilization was the boycott of Japanese goods.

Student organizations promoted refusal to purchase Japanese products as a form of economic nationalism.

Chambers of commerce and merchants participated to varying degrees.

Diplomatic reports from 1919 described substantial reductions in Japanese trade in several sectors and cities, although the scale and enforcement of the boycott differed by region.

Some boycott campaigns also involved coercive inspection, seizure, or destruction of goods, demonstrating that mass nationalism could include conflict over the limits of lawful political action.

Primary-source references: U.S. Office of the Historian — report on the 1919 anti-Japanese boycott ; U.S. Office of the Historian — boycott statistics and student organization .

China and the Treaty of Versailles

The Chinese delegation ultimately did not sign the Treaty of Versailles.

The refusal was closely connected to the Shandong settlement.

Contemporary diplomatic reporting indicates that public opposition in China placed intense pressure on the delegation and government.

China's refusal to sign did not immediately settle the Shandong dispute.

The issue remained part of Chinese diplomacy until later negotiations in the early 1920s.

Primary-source references: U.S. Office of the Historian — report on China's refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles ; U.S. Office of the Historian — Treaty of Versailles and China's non-signature .

Anti-Imperialism and Nationalism

The May Fourth crisis intensified anti-imperialist nationalism.

Protesters criticized not only Japan but the wider international system that allowed foreign states to maintain treaty privileges, concessions, military positions, and special economic rights in China.

Many participants concluded that national survival required a stronger state, a mobilized citizenry, and a society capable of competing in a modern international order.

Nationalism during the period therefore connected foreign policy to domestic reform.

Weak education, divided politics, social hierarchy, economic dependency, and cultural institutions could all be interpreted as national problems.

Anti-Warlord Politics

May Fourth activism was also directed against Chinese political leaders associated with the fragmented Beijing political system.

Students and intellectuals criticized officials they believed had compromised national interests or subordinated constitutional government to military factions.

The movement therefore linked anti-imperialism with anti-warlord politics.

This connection helps explain why the May Fourth era later became important to several revolutionary political traditions.

Different groups could remember the same protests as evidence for different political conclusions:

How New Culture and May Fourth Overlapped

The New Culture Movement and May Fourth Movement are often discussed together because the participants, institutions, publications, and ideas overlapped.

New Culture supplied a language of intellectual criticism:

science + democracy + vernacular language + individual liberation + social reform

May Fourth supplied a moment of mass political mobilization:

student protest + nationalism + anti-imperialism + boycotts + labor and merchant action

After May 1919, cultural reform and political activism became more closely connected.

But one should not assume that everyone who supported vernacular literature supported the same political ideology, or that everyone who protested the Shandong settlement supported the entire New Culture intellectual program.

Why This Was Not One Unified Movement

The phrase May Fourth Movement can refer narrowly to the protests beginning on May 4, 1919 or broadly to a much larger intellectual and political era.

That broad usage can obscure major disagreements among participants.

Some intellectuals favored liberal constitutionalism.

Others moved toward socialism, anarchism, or Marxism.

Some emphasized cultural transformation more than political revolution.

Others believed national survival required disciplined political organization and mass mobilization.

Modern scholarship therefore treats May Fourth as a contested historical category rather than a single unified ideology.

Scholarly reference: Modern Asian Studies — “The May Fourth Movement Redefined” .

New Political Ideologies

The years around May Fourth produced an unusually wide range of political experimentation.

Intellectuals and activists debated:

These ideas did not develop in isolation.

They were responses to the same overlapping problems: political fragmentation, foreign pressure, social inequality, cultural change, industrialization, and uncertainty over the future of the republic.

The Road Toward Chinese Communism

The May Fourth intellectual environment helped create networks in which Marxism became increasingly influential.

Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, and younger activists studied the Russian Revolution, translated socialist writings, organized study groups, and discussed class, imperialism, and revolution.

In 1921, representatives from several Communist groups met at the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

The founding of the CCP was not an inevitable result of May Fourth.

It was one important political development that emerged from the wider intellectual radicalization and organizational experimentation of the period.

The Reorganization of Nationalism

May Fourth also influenced the development of Chinese nationalism outside the Communist movement.

Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist movement drew lessons from the failure of the early Republic, the weakness of parliamentary politics, regional militarism, and mass nationalism.

During the early 1920s, the Nationalist Party increasingly moved toward a more centralized, disciplined, party-led approach to revolutionary state-building.

The next lesson examines how Nationalists and Communists briefly entered a political and military alliance and how that alliance helped launch the Northern Expedition.

Limits and Contradictions

The New Culture and May Fourth era is often celebrated as a period of intellectual liberation, but historians also examine its limitations.

Reform intellectuals sometimes portrayed all inherited culture as a single obstacle rather than distinguishing among different traditions.

Calls for individual liberation could coexist with elite assumptions about who was qualified to lead national reform.

Advocacy of women's emancipation did not automatically create equal political or institutional power for women.

Student nationalism could encourage broad participation while some boycott campaigns also used coercive tactics against merchants.

Appeals to science could support open inquiry, but they could also be used rhetorically as though complex political disagreements had one scientifically correct answer.

These contradictions do not reduce the movement's importance. They make it historically more complex.

How Do We Know?

The New Culture and May Fourth era is documented through journals, newspapers, literary works, student publications, government records, diplomatic archives, memoirs, correspondence, photographs, police reports, commercial records, and later scholarship.

Journals and Essays

New Youth and other journals preserve debates over language, science, democracy, family reform, philosophy, and political ideology.

Literature

Fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism reveal how writers used new forms to challenge social and moral institutions.

Student Records and Newspapers

Student manifestos, protest notices, school records, and newspapers help reconstruct the May Fourth demonstrations and their spread.

Diplomatic Archives

Foreign diplomatic records contain detailed observations of the Shandong negotiations, boycotts, demonstrations, arrests, and China's refusal to sign the Treaty of Versailles.

These sources require caution. Diplomats often interpreted Chinese politics through the interests and assumptions of their own governments.

Historical Interpretation

Historians continue to debate where the New Culture Movement begins and ends, how widely its ideas reached beyond urban educated circles, and whether May Fourth is best understood as cultural renaissance, nationalist protest, social movement, revolutionary watershed, or some combination of these.

Think Like a Historian

Consider the following question:

Was May Fourth primarily a cultural movement or a political movement?

Evidence for a cultural interpretation is strong.

The period included:

Evidence for a political interpretation is equally important.

The May 1919 demonstrations centered on:

The strongest interpretation recognizes that the two histories became deeply interconnected without becoming identical.

Cultural criticism helped create the language and institutions of activism, while the political crisis of 1919 pushed cultural debate toward mass politics.

Historical Significance

The New Culture and May Fourth era became one of the most influential intellectual and political turning points of modern Chinese history.

Its historical significance includes:

Key Takeaways

  1. The New Culture Movement was a broad intellectual and cultural transformation rather than one centrally directed organization.
  2. New Youth, founded by Chen Duxiu, became one of the movement's most important publications.
  3. Peking University under Cai Yuanpei became a major institutional center of debate and intellectual experimentation.
  4. Hu Shi promoted vernacular literature and language reform as part of cultural modernization.
  5. Lu Xun used vernacular fiction to criticize inherited social institutions.
  6. Science and democracy became major symbols of New Culture thought, although intellectuals disagreed about their meanings.
  7. New Culture debates challenged family hierarchy, gender inequality, classical education, and some Confucian social institutions.
  8. The Russian Revolution increased interest in socialism and Marxism among some Chinese intellectuals.
  9. The Shandong settlement at the Paris Peace Conference triggered major nationalist anger in 1919.
  10. Students demonstrated in Beijing on May 4, 1919, and arrests helped expand the political crisis.
  11. The movement spread through student networks, newspapers, merchants, workers, and urban organizations.
  12. The boycott of Japanese goods became an important form of economic nationalism.
  13. China did not sign the Treaty of Versailles because of the Shandong settlement.
  14. The New Culture and May Fourth movements overlapped but were not identical.
  15. The period helped create the intellectual and political environment for the later rise of both Communist and reorganized Nationalist politics.

Key Terms

New Culture Movement
A broad intellectual and cultural transformation of the mid-1910s and early 1920s involving debates over language, literature, science, democracy, family, education, gender, and political thought.
May Fourth Movement
A term used narrowly for the political protest movement beginning on May 4, 1919 and more broadly for the overlapping intellectual and political era surrounding it.
New Youth
An influential journal founded by Chen Duxiu that became a major forum for New Culture intellectual debate.
Chen Duxiu
An editor, professor, intellectual, and political activist central to New Culture debates and later a founder of the Chinese Communist Party.
Cai Yuanpei
President of Peking University from 1917 and an important supporter of intellectual pluralism and university reform.
Hu Shi
A scholar associated with pragmatism and one of the leading advocates of vernacular literary reform.
Lu Xun
An influential writer whose fiction used new literary forms to criticize inherited social and moral institutions.
Li Dazhao
A Peking University intellectual and early Chinese interpreter of Marxism who later helped found the Chinese Communist Party.
Vernacular Chinese
Written Chinese based more closely on spoken language, promoted by reformers as more accessible than Classical Chinese.
Baihua
The Chinese term commonly used for vernacular written Chinese.
Mr. Democracy
Chen Duxiu's personification of democracy as a major principle of intellectual and political reform.
Mr. Science
Chen Duxiu's personification of science and critical inquiry as a major principle of cultural reform.
Shandong Question
The dispute over former German rights in Shandong and their transfer to Japan in the postwar settlement.
Paris Peace Conference
The 1919 international conference that negotiated the peace settlement after World War I.
Anti-Imperialism
Opposition to foreign political, military, economic, and treaty-based forms of domination or special privilege.
Boycott
Organized refusal to purchase goods, used during May Fourth as a form of economic and nationalist protest against Japanese products.
Chinese Communist Party
A political party founded in 1921 by activists influenced in part by the Marxist currents that expanded during the May Fourth era.

Check Your Understanding

Answer the following questions based on the concepts presented in the lesson. The questions emphasize historical understanding rather than simple memorization.

1. Which statement best describes the New Culture Movement?


2. Why was New Youth historically important?


3. What did Hu Shi strongly advocate?


4. Why were science and democracy important in New Culture discourse?


5. What issue directly helped trigger the May 4, 1919 demonstrations?


6. How did the May Fourth movement expand beyond student protest?


7. What was one major political effect of the boycott of Japanese goods?


8. What did China do regarding the Treaty of Versailles?


9. Why should historians distinguish the New Culture Movement from the May Fourth Movement?


10. Which interpretation best matches the lesson?


Continue the Story

The New Culture and May Fourth era transformed political possibilities in China.

Intellectual criticism had become mass activism.

Marxism, nationalism, liberalism, and other political currents now competed within a rapidly changing public sphere.

At the same time, neither the Beijing government nor the southern revolutionary movement had yet unified the country.

The next major development was organizational.

The Nationalist Party reorganized. The Chinese Communist Party was founded. Soviet advisers entered Chinese revolutionary politics. The two parties formed the First United Front, while a new military academy trained officers for a national revolutionary army.

Further Study

The following scholarly and documentary resources provide additional evidence and interpretation for the New Culture and May Fourth era.