Introduction
The New Culture Movement is famous as a turning point in Chinese history, associated with the popularization of Marxism in China, a variety of social reforms, and the introduction of ‘plain language’ (baihua), a precursor of modern Chinese. But what is unclear is when it began and ended, and a lot of scholarly ink has been spilled over the question. It has been dated variously as starting in 1914 or 1915,Footnote 1 and it has been said to have ended at varying dates in the 1920s or the 1930s.Footnote 2
The different dates depend, unsurprisingly, on what scholars believe the New Culture Movement to be—its central atmosphere, its most important ideas, its key figures. And there are many ways to answer these questions. This article takes a different approach to the New Culture Movement. It does not treat it as a ‘movement’ that began when its ideas were introduced. Instead, it looks at the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ (xin wenhua yundong) itself and at the way discourses were created around it. This approach shows, this article argues, that the New Culture Movement was a buzzword, used by little-known intellectuals to market a variety of agendas that they had been endorsing for a number of years. Surprisingly, they had for a long time done so without talking about a ‘New Culture Movement’. The expression ‘New Culture Movement’ was only invented in the late summer of 1919, a few months after the May Fourth demonstrations. Immediately, a cluster of rhetoric was constructed around it, much of which sounds familiar today: it was claimed that the New Culture Movement had, as its ‘centre’Footnote 3 and inspiration, the famous academics Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Hu Shi (1891–1962) at Beijing University; and that it was a ‘movement’. But this rhetoric notwithstanding, the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ was coined by the little-known intellectuals, who did not appear in the myth that they filled into the phrase. These intellectuals at the periphery of the myth then used the New Culture Movement as a buzzword to sell their long-standing agendas. The New Culture Movement was thus not a movement, but a moment.Footnote 4 Some of the minor intellectuals were so successful with this strategy that they helped shape ideas associated with the New Culture Movement that have persisted until the present day. One of them is the notion that plain language is the language of the common people, not an elitist language of present times, as the avowed ‘centre’ around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu had argued. Only later did the circle around Hu and Chen try to reclaim the New Culture Movement by inscribing their own definitions. But their feeling of being unable to control a phenomenon that was said to have been inspired by them left them frustrated and defensive.
This usage of the New Culture Movement as a buzzword explains why it is difficult to determine the Movement's beginning and end point: its individual ideas started and ended at different points. It also makes sense of the multitude of ideas associated with the New Culture Movement: these ideas came from different quarters and were retrospectively subsumed under the buzzword ‘New Culture Movement’.
The New Culture Movement has been studied, defined, and redefined continuously since it was invented in the summer of 1919. For a long time, as David Der-wei Wang and Milena Doleželová-Velingerová have pointed out, academic narratives about the New Culture Movement drew upon a discourse that had been shaped by the protagonists of the movement.Footnote 5 This discourse identified the New Culture Movement as a watershed moment in Chinese history, dividing the ‘old’ and ‘new’, ‘premodern’ and ‘modern China’—with ‘modern’ being defined as either Western-style, Marxist, or multi-centred.Footnote 6 It also emphasized the important role the New Culture stars at Beijing University played in the movement.Footnote 7
The last one or two decades have dramatically challenged this narrative. This was down to the flourishing of new theoretical frameworks in Chinese studies in the 1990s, a broadening of the sources base, and very likely the fact that the New Culture Movement ceased to be part of contemporary history: the last people who had lived through its invention had passed away. Scholars now questioned the importance of the New Culture Movement as a watershed momentFootnote 8 —but the movement still appears on standard undergraduate curricula on ‘Modern Chinese History’. Historians have started exploring the importance of lesser-known intellectuals,Footnote 9 but excellent works on the movement's glamorous ‘centre’ are still being produced.Footnote 10 Above all, the complexity and variety of the New Culture Movement have been ever more strongly emphasizedFootnote 11 ; however, with few exceptions, the phenomenon is still referred to as the ‘New Culture Movement’.Footnote 12 This article regards these tensions within scholarship as productive. If we see the New Culture Movement as a buzzword used by many people to sell many programmes, these tensions make sense. The New Culture Movement meant, or was made to mean, different things for different people. The intellectuals who were hardly visible in the New Culture rhetoric were as important, if not more important, in shaping ideas associated with the New Culture Movement. Most importantly, all the varying agendas were thought of as the ‘New Culture Movement’ because they were marketed as the ‘New Culture Movement’.
The discussions in this article are shaped by my intuitions about what ‘New Culture’ is and what it is not. These preconceptions are, of course, built on almost 100 years of discussions about the New Culture Movement. They are not only unavoidable; they are also useful in that they provide a contrast foil that permits us to see differences in the way contemporaries treated the New Culture Movement, and the way it arrived through constant reinterpretation in the present day. The picture here is fractured. On the one hand, much of what was said about the New Culture Movement in 1919 remained there, contested to varying degrees, until today: the aforementioned ideas that Beijing University's academics were its ‘centre’, that it was a ‘movement’, and that it promoted plain language, which was the language of the common people. On the other hand, some features soon disappeared from the New Culture rhetoric, and therefore they seem odd today; some Chinese intellectuals, for example, claimed that Christianity was the true New Culture Movement. It is these latter, now seemingly strange, claims about the New Culture Movement that challenge our view of it. They open up a new interpretation of what the New Culture Movement was at the hour of its birth in 1919 and the early 1920s. This article presents an analysis of both the obvious and the seemingly odd to explore the usage of the New Culture Movement as a buzzword.
The argument is grafted on case studies, chosen for their importance at the time and for their pungency in illustrating the argument. As a case study for the declared ‘stars’ of the New Culture rhetoric, I choose Hu Shi, to whom the lesser-known intellectuals referred very frequently. For the periphery of the New Culture myth, I discuss the Jiangsu Educational Association (Jiangsu sheng jiaoyu hui), an educational-political group based in Shanghai, and the Apologetic Group (Zhengdao tuan), an association of Christian intellectuals based in Beijing.Footnote 13
These people all lived in the culturally bourgeoning areas of Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu, which have often been treated as geographical centres of the New Culture Movement.Footnote 14 A number of important studies in the past few years have shown differences in the New Culture Movement and May Fourth Movement in other provinces, implying that locality was responsible for any variations from more established narratives which these works found.Footnote 15 By turning the gaze back to the areas that the discourse has declared to be the heartland of the New Culture Movement, this article reframes the New Culture Movement from its (discursive) core.
Moreover, the implications of these case studies go far beyond the regions in which the texts were printed, because intellectuals and educators were a very mobile group. Like academics today, they could have gone to school in one place, found employment in another,Footnote 16 held summer schools in a third,Footnote 17 and published in journals printed all over the country's urban centres.Footnote 18 They corresponded with colleagues everywhere in China, and in fact anywhere the world.Footnote 19 Living in Beijing, they read newspapers from Shanghai.Footnote 20 And even if they lived in, say, Shandong, their local newspaper copied articles from the Shanghai press.Footnote 21 The same applied to organizations. The Guomindang, for example, was then based in Guangdong, but ran publications that were printed in Shanghai.Footnote 22 The local Guangdong Educational Association (Guangdong sheng jiaoyu hui) referenced ideas coming from the cultural heartland of Jiangsu and Beijing.Footnote 23 In other words, the texts discussed in this article were printed in Beijing, Shanghai, and Jiangsu. But they resonated far beyond these areas.
The invention of the New Culture Movement
The expression
The expression ‘New Culture Movement’ appeared in the summer of 1919. It is always difficult to say with certainty when a term emerged for the first time. A search of databases like the digitized version of the Shanghai News (Shenbao) or the National Index of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals, which contains holdings of the Shanghai Library, points to the late summer of 1919.Footnote 24 This view is also supported by Rudolf Wagner and Ouyang Junxi.Footnote 25 Before that, people talked about a ‘new intellectual tide’ (xin sichao)Footnote 26 or ‘new thought’ (xin sixiang) more generally.Footnote 27 Even ‘New Culture’ appeared, albeit rarely. The first known combination of ‘New Culture Movement’ dates to an article in the Guomindang-run Weekly Review (Xingqi pinglun) of 31 August 1919.Footnote 28 It then appeared again in a school journal of a normal school in Jiangsu (November), in the reports of the Jiangsu Educational Association (October), the Shanghai News (October), and the Chinese Christian Advocate (Xinghua), which was a missionary journal.Footnote 29
Only in April 1920, Ouyang Junxi has said that New Youth (Xin qingnian) dedicated an article to it.Footnote 30 This indicates that the expression was coined by lesser-known intellectuals—those who wrote in the Weekly Review or the Chinese Christian Advocate—and only later was it taken up by Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. Moreover, it is curious how the phrase appeared suddenly in several publications in the autumn of 1919, and how people then used it as if it were well known. There are no articles that purport to introduce the expression as new. I therefore speculate that it was invented orally in discussion and study groups in the summer of 1919 and made it into print later.
The rhetoric
As soon as it was invented, a complex rhetoric was inscribed into the expression ‘New Culture Movement’. This rhetoric claimed that Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, and a few more of their colleagues at Beijing University were the ‘centre of the New Culture Movement’.Footnote 31
Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu had moved into the public gaze in the months leading up to the May Fourth demonstrations of 1919. Chen had launched the magazine New Youth in 1915 and Hu Shi had published in it. Before 1919, the journal was anything but successful.Footnote 32 But it incited the interest of Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940), who had become chancellor of Beijing University in 1916. Consequently, Cai hired some New Youth authors to the university, Hu and Chen among them. At Beijing University, they continued promoting their ideas, together with several colleagues and students. One of their most central notions was the suggestion to stop writing in the classical written language, ‘classical Chinese’ (wenyan), and to write in plain language instead. Their argument was that plain language was more suitable to the present times,Footnote 33 whereas classical Chinese was ‘out-dated’.Footnote 34
In later years, plain-language advocacy would become very influential and it would be regarded as part of the New Culture Movement. However, before the label ‘New Culture Movement’ was invented in the autumn of 1919, this idea was strongly contested. The most outspoken critic was the famous translator-scholar Lin Shu (1852–1924). In February and March 1919, Lin Shu published tirades against the advocates of plain language in newspapers.Footnote 35 Rumour even had it that he was enlisting his friends in the government to oust people like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu from Beijing University. Chen Duxiu was indeed dismissed in April 1919.Footnote 36 This led the newspaper Shanghai News, which had followed Lin Shu's attacks with interest, to conclude in the same month that Chen and his circle had lost the debates.Footnote 37 In other words, although Hu Shi enjoyed some prestige as a professor at Beijing University, his situation was precarious on the eve of the May Fourth demonstrations.
This was to change over the next few months. From 4 May 1919 onwards, people in urban centres all over the country started protesting against a clause in the Treaty of Versailles, which awarded formerly German regions in China to Japan. As the government was held responsible for this debacle, these protests were also directed against the government. As in this situation newspapers kept repeating that Lin Shu had incited the government to get rid of people like Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu,Footnote 38 these academics were soon associated with the May Fourth demonstrators.Footnote 39 This was surprising, since Hu Shi at least did not have much to do with the demonstrations. Nevertheless, thanks to this association, their ideas came to be regarded as expressions of anti-government sentiment, which was now very popular. In this way, a young teacher in Shanghai who went by the name of Jing Guan (no dates) explained that he did not demonstrate during May Fourth. However, he expressed his solidarity with the demonstrators by discussing the sort of new-style questions that Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu had been debating. He was, he said, just ‘like the professors at Beida [that is, Beijing University], Mr Chen Duxiu and Mr Hu Shizhi [that is, Hu Shi]’.Footnote 40 Jing Guan and many like him then founded journals to support ideas that they traced back to Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi.
It is not unthinkable that the inventors of the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ were thinking of this surge in publications in the summer of 1919. But even so, this descriptive moment was extremely short, and soon a lot of constructed rhetoric was filled into the phrase. Part of this construction was the idea that Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were the movement's inspiration. This notion did not only find expression in calling them explicitly ‘centre of the New Culture Movement’Footnote 41 ; it also showed when people cited them or referred to them when talking about the New Culture Movement. For example, the missionary and head of the History Department at Yanjing University Philippe de Vargas (1888–1956) explained that it was Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu who had started the plain-language project.Footnote 42 When the Beijing University professor Zhu Jingnong (1887–1951) held a speech at a normal school in Jiangsu, he made mention of the ‘first-class people, the New Culture activists Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi’.Footnote 43
The appeal of this conversation needs to be carefully placed within its limits. Participants in it tended to claim that the whole country was being swept away by the New Culture Movement.Footnote 44 But, in reality, the conversation mainly took place within the humanities and in educational circles. Wang Jingwei (1883–1944), who in the Second World War became infamous for his collaboration with the Japanese, but who was then head of the Guangdong Educational Association, made it clear that the New Culture Movement was a phenomenon in the humanities.Footnote 45 The Shanghai News only mentioned the New Culture Movement twice in the whole year of 1919.Footnote 46 So this was not a mass-media event. However, within the circle of humanities students and scholars, and of educators, the New Culture Movement was a vibrant topic.
This, albeit limited, vibrancy of the New Culture Movement, along with Hu Shi's and Chen Duxiu's assigned place in it, increased their prestige for a second time since the May Fourth demonstrations. In the early 1920s, a veritable star cult was created around them. The Shanghai News articles adopted a gossipy quality usually reserved for articles about celebrities. For example, readers learnt that Hu Shi's old secondary school had found and published essays their now famous alumnus had written at the tender age of 13. It also related that a teacher remembered having a photo of Hu Shi at the age of 12 stored away somewhere; he was now frantically looking for it.Footnote 47 On a different occasion, the Shanghai News provided a detailed report about what Hu Shi had said at a banquet given in his honour.Footnote 48
At this point, Hu Shi's lectures at Beijing University became extremely well attended too. Such a high number of students from different departments wanted to hear him speak that additional chairs had to be brought into the lecture room. Sometimes students even had to stand.Footnote 49 During a speech at Beijing University in the autumn of 1920, Hu Shi reported that, during his latest visit to Nanjing, 800 people had come to each of his lectures and around 30 to all of his parties.Footnote 50 It was on the occasion of this visit to Nanjing in August 1920 that ‘everybody who was making me [Hu Shi] compliments’ called him ‘the centre of the New Culture Movement’.Footnote 51 Hu Shi was even invited to an audience with the Puyi emperor (1906–67).Footnote 52 As the emperor's tutor Reginald F. Johnston (1874–1938) remembered, Hu Shi was much relieved when it turned out that ‘the emperor would certainly not expect him to kneel’.Footnote 53
Another important element in this rhetoric about the New Culture Movement was to call it a ‘movement’. Ironically, this label ‘movement’ hints at the fact that New Culture was in fact not a movement, but a buzzword. Why did intellectuals choose to call New Culture a ‘movement’? There are two ways of exploring this. One is to look into the connotations of the Chinese word ‘yundong’ (‘movement’) at the time. The other one is to ask what people sought to project with it.
With respect to the first approach (the search for connotations), Rudolf Wagner has explored the way Chen Duxiu used the expression in New Youth in 1916. For Chen, a ‘yundong’ was a radical break with the past, anti-imperialist, something that would give independence and international importance to China. It was a global form of political action undertaken by citizens, rather than by politicians.Footnote 54 But a look at the colloquial use of ‘yundong’, as displayed by newspapers and journals, shows that this approach is fraught with difficulties: in its actual usage, ‘yundong’ had incredibly broad connotations before May Fourth. ‘Yundong’ could be anything from physical movementFootnote 55 to any kind of ‘activities’,Footnote 56 and mostly it simply meant ‘sports’.Footnote 57 It could also mean social movements and was then often associated with demonstration activities. It referred to the Korean independence movement,Footnote 58 the suffragette movement,Footnote 59 the Prohibition movement in the United States,Footnote 60 the Mongolian independence movement under Ataman Semenov (1890–1946),Footnote 61 or the ‘new-parliament movement’ (xin guohui yundong),Footnote 62 which was conducted by politicians (contrary to Chen's definition). Ataman Semenov was a general who was (unsuccessfully) trying to create a pan-Mongolian state that was to be a stronghold of White (that is, anti-Bolshevik) forces in Russia. This state would have included Inner Mongolia, which was then part of China.Footnote 63 The ‘new-parliament movement’ dated back to 1917 and was a ploy of the ruling warlord Duan Qirui (1865–1936) to give more power to his own political clique.Footnote 64 ‘Yundong’ did not appear to mean ‘intellectual movement’. But the wide range of meanings in the colloquial usage of ‘yundong’, which far exceeded Chen Duxiu's reflections, suggests that the term was so flexible that not too much should be read into this and that a search for definitions is almost futile.
However, Rudolf Wagner also indicates that this may be the wrong approach. The real question was not what ‘yundong’ connoted, but what people wanted to project with it (the aforementioned second approach). Wagner shows that intellectuals in 1919 did not necessarily call their activities a ‘yundong’ because they identified certain criteria in their actions that matched a ‘yundong’. Instead, they wanted to communicate something with it. Engaging in a ‘yundong’ was—mostlyFootnote 65 —good, and Chinese students and intellectuals in 1919 also wanted to have such a ‘movement’. During the May Fourth demonstrations, the label ‘movement’ had the distinct advantage of communicating to the public that the demonstrators were ‘patriotic heroes’, rather than ‘a bunch of youngsters who instead of studying were disturbing the public order’.Footnote 66 Wagner's observation opens up the possibility of moving away from finding criteria that match contemporary definitions of ‘movement’ in New Culture and asking instead how the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ was used. The choice of the label ‘movement’ did not need to be descriptive, but it could be ‘programmatic’,Footnote 67 or, as this article argues, communicative. The following section shows the example of two groups that used the New Culture Movement as a buzzword to sell their own agendas, which they had been endorsing for some time.
Claiming the New Culture Movement from the periphery: two case studies
The Jiangsu Educational Association: one among many buzzwords
The first case study is the Jiangsu Educational Association. This association was one of the first to use the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ in writing. They did so in the announcement of a student lecture competition in October 1919, the topic of which was ‘the various questions of the New Culture Movement and ways to promote it’ (xin wenhua yundong zhi zhongzhong wenti ji tuixing fangfa).Footnote 68 They were also an important player in shaping the meaning of the New Culture Movement in the Jiangsu region, as their announcement was distributed widely. It was, first of all, sent to various schools in the province, out of which 28 schools sent altogether 45 students to the competition. Since it was stipulated that each school had to hold an internal lecture competition to choose their representatives, it can be assumed that a much higher number of students had seen the announcement and spent time thinking about it in order to prepare a speech.Footnote 69 In this way, the Jiangsu Educational Association's announcement brought their version of the New Culture Movement to a fair number of students.
However, they also reached a wider public. The same announcement was reprinted in the Shanghai News Footnote 70 and the Shanghai journal Chinese Christian Advocate in November.Footnote 71 Newspapers and journals often reprinted articles from other publications, or they informed their readers about local events in specific sections with titles like ‘local news’.Footnote 72 This was how the Jiangsu Educational Association's announcement appeared in these two periodicals. The circle of humanities scholars and educators also intersected with that of journalists. Unfortunately, journalists wrote under pseudonyms or anonymously, so it is impossible to trace their personal networks. But it is known that the Shanghai News’s editor, Shi Liangcai (1880–1934), was personally acquainted with Cai Yuanpei and Huang Yanpei (1878–1965), the vice president of the Jiangsu Educational Association.Footnote 73 Thanks to these practices and connections, the Jiangsu Educational association's announcement of the speech competition had a certain impact within Jiangsu.
The Jiangsu Educational Association was a political-educational group. Educational associations existed on the level of provinces, counties, and towns or villages, and they had the right to make recommendations on educational policies to the Ministry of Education and the provincial Departments of Education.Footnote 74 Precursors of the Jiangsu Educational Association had existed since the mid-1900s, but it was in 1912 that the association received the name it had in 1919. Its headquarters were in Shanghai.Footnote 75 The Jiangsu Educational Association published monthly reports, which contained letters or telegrams they had exchanged with politicians or educators, as well as conference minutes that gave insights into their activities. These are the sources for this case study.
Long before the invention of the expression ‘New Culture Movement’, the Jiangsu Educational Association had supported a cluster of agendas consisting of popular education, ‘national language’ (guoyu), and vocational education. National language was an artificial language used for writing and speaking, which was intended among other things to unify China's many dialects. Its aim was also to put an end to the Chinese custom of writing in classical Chinese, which differed considerably from any spoken dialect. Vocational education was education that trained students specifically with a view to the job market and in skills needed in commerce, the industry, and so forth. Not only had regulations for the Educational Associations issued in 1911 stipulated that these areas were their task.Footnote 76 In 1915, the Jiangsu Educational Association had also founded a Popular Education Research Association (Tongsu jiaoyu yanjiu hui), designed to ‘improve society and popularise education’.Footnote 77 Together with other Educational Associations, they petitioned the government to introduce a national language programme, and they held local national-language training classes.Footnote 78 Their commitment to vocational education, moreover, manifested itself in the foundation, by the vice president Huang Yanpei, of a Chinese Society for Vocational Education (Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she) in 1917.Footnote 79
The members of the Jiangsu Educational Association were very pragmatic people, and the New Culture Movement was by no means the first buzzword they used. Over the course of 1919, they claimed repeatedly that current events evidenced the necessity of their educational agenda. For instance, in January 1919, they pointed out that now that the war in Europe (the First World War) had ended, ‘the establishment of the country will be founded on scholarship’. This introduced an application for permission to establish a New Education Society (Xin jiaoyu she), which would need government funding.Footnote 80 This was clearly a marketing ploy. After all, the idea that scholarship was the basis for a strong country long predated the end of the First World War, or even its beginning. It could be traced back to Confucian notions, as for example expressed in the Great Learning (Da xue), that the moral constitution of a country affected its political situation. It was a popular argument for the national language, and also a common topos in petitions to the government that existed independently of the First World War.Footnote 81 This suggests that the reference to the war was designed to give the funding application more weight. Connecting their agenda to important events, in other words, was a well-established marketing strategy of the Jiangsu Educational Association.
A ‘remedy’ against May Fourth
The May Fourth demonstrations broke out in the spring of 1919, and just like with the First World War, the Jiangsu Educational Association again decided to make use of this political event. The Association was for a while ordered by the Ministry of Education to calm down the student protests.Footnote 82 When the students left for their hometowns after the end of the academic year of 1919, the situation relaxed. But in September the students were to return for the new term. The government was therefore worried that new protests might flare up again—a fear that came true, particularly around the national holiday on 10 October. At this point, the Jiangsu Educational Association saw its chance to capitalize on the student protests. In September 1919, they sent a letter to Provincial Governor Qi Yaolin (1863–?), in which it offered a ‘remedy’ (jiuji fangfa, lit: ‘a rescue method’) against the May Fourth demonstrations.Footnote 83 One element in this ‘remedy’ was, surprisingly, internships.
The Jiangsu Educational Association wrote that they believed the student protests to have been partially caused by patriotism, and partially by the fact that schools only imparted their students with ‘book knowledge’. Therefore, methods needed to be introduced to teach them additional skills. This could be done by having students do ‘internships at [places] like farms, factories or shops’. As it turned out, this letter was again an application for funding, which was needed to implement these suggestions.Footnote 84 The Association's ‘remedy’ for student demonstrations was not only surprising, but also suspiciously congruent with its long-standing goal to promote vocational education. Internships were part of this programme. They had been mentioned in the manifesto of the Chinese Society for Vocational Education,Footnote 85 and the students of a school run by this society had to do internships in the local industry.Footnote 86 In other words, even though it is difficult to see how internships were related to the May Fourth demonstrations, they appeared in this letter under ‘remedy against May Fourth’, a headline that would certainly get the governor's attention. Whether it was because of the reference to May Fourth or not is unclear, but the application was successful, and Governor Qi granted the money.Footnote 87
‘The New Culture Movement that continues the May Fourth Movement’
This letter was sent at around the same time at which the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ was invented. The Jiangsu Educational Association was clearly aware of these developments, and they must have decided to capitalize on them. In October 1919, they advertised their educational programme to people who had stood on the opposing side of the May Fourth demonstrations to the government—namely, to students.
This was the aforementioned announcement of a student lecture competition on the topic of ‘the various questions of the New Culture Movement and ways to promote it’.Footnote 88 In this announcement, the Jiangsu Educational Association presented their agenda of popular education as the exact opposite to a ‘remedy’ for May Fourth. It called it the ‘New Culture Movement that continues the May Fourth Movement’ (xin wenhua yundong shi jixu wu si yundong).Footnote 89 New Culture and May Fourth were two separate things, and the terms had been invented at different points in time. But in the autumn of 1919, it became common to conflate the two, and this was what the Jiangsu Educational Association did. The association then defined the ‘New Culture Movement’ as the agenda they had been promoting for a long time —among other things as a ‘remedy’ against May Fourth, which it was now said to ‘continue’. They described the New Culture Movement as the ‘spread of culture to the majority of our countrymen’, which included ‘the promulgation of literature in the plain language, the establishment of free schools and of lecture groups’.Footnote 90
To be sure, internships were not part of this definition. However, ‘free schools’ and ‘lecture groups’ belonged to the same cluster of popular education, vocational education, and national language, which the Jiangsu Educational Association had presented as ‘remedy’ against May Fourth in September. Now they were displaying it as its ‘continuation’. This whole agenda had existed long before and had been sold under various labels over the course of time. Moreover, although institutions in Republican China were often fragmented into competing factions,Footnote 91 this was not the reason for this use of the New Culture Movement. The Jiangsu Educational Association's reports indicate that the September letter to Governor Qi and the October announcement of the lecture competition were issued by the ‘regular secretaries’ meeting’.Footnote 92 This was a committee of around ten men chaired by Huang Yanpei. It is improbable that this small group was split into factions, and it is more plausible to conclude that the Jiangsu Educational Association was using the ‘New Culture Movement’ as a new buzzword to sell their own agenda.
The Apologetic Group: Christianity as the better New Culture Movement
Much of the Jiangsu Educational Association's agenda made it permanently into the narrative of the New Culture Movement. Influenced by twenty-first-century ideas about what the New Culture Movement is, it would therefore be easy to conclude that the Jiangsu Educational Association was tapping into an existing phenomenon that happened to be close to their own ideas. But that the New Culture Movement was a flexible and malleable buzzword becomes more evident from attempts by contemporaries to sell ideas as the New Culture Movement that are completely at odds with the way the movement has made it into present times. One such group were Chinese Christian intellectuals. They converged in an association called the ‘Apologetic Group’, which consisted mainly of members of the YMCA in Beijing and faculty members of Yanjing University.Footnote 93 In the style of the time, they also published a journal by the name of Life (Shengming), launched on 1 June 1920.Footnote 94 According to an advertisement of Life, the group's goal was to present a ‘response’ to the New Culture Movement.Footnote 95 The Apologetic Group has often been interpreted as an attempt to indigenize Christianity, which was inspired by the New Culture Movement.Footnote 96 But the openly pragmatic tone chosen by some of the Apologetic Group's members suggests that they too used the New Culture Movement as a buzzword to sell their Christian agenda.
By the time Life was launched in June 1920, the discourse around the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ had developed features that made it a double-edged sword for China's Christians. The emphasis on ‘science’ and the rise of Marxism under the headline ‘New Culture Movement’ posed a challenge to Christianity and, in fact, any religion. It was only too easy to file Christianity under unscientific ‘superstition’ (mixin), the manifesto of Life complained.Footnote 97 Xu Baoqian (1892–1944), one member of the Apologetic Group, admitted that the New Culture Movement ‘doubted and opposed Christianity’.Footnote 98 Appropriating the New Culture Movement for Christianity was therefore an escape-forwards approach. But the Christians of the Apologetic Group were also fascinated by the phenomenon ‘New Culture Movement’ and wanted to harness its power. In 1920, Xu Baoqian marvelled that Christianity had been in China for so many centuries and yet had achieved relatively little. The New Culture Movement, by contrast, had only been around for a year, and already had a huge fellowship. He asked what the New Culture Movement had done right that the Christians did wrong.Footnote 99 It was time for the Christians to tap into the New Culture Movement for their own ends.
In order to solve this two-fold problem, these Christians took to presenting Christianity as a superior variant of the New Culture Movement. One of the people to make this claim was Liu Tingfang (Timothy Tingfang Lew, 1891–1947), a theologian at Qinghua University. He did so in a speech before the China Continuation Committee (Zhonghua xuxing weiban hui) in 1921. This speech made it into the media: it was reprinted in the Apologetic Group's in-house journal Life (in Beijing), and also in the Shanghai journal Chinese Christian Advocate.Footnote 100
Liu Tingfang recommended to his fellow missionaries that they should modify their rhetoric in a way that resonated better with the ideals associated by now with the New Culture Movement. For example, missionaries should preach Jesus's ‘social gospel’ (shehui fuyin).Footnote 101 That is, they should emphasize the social message in Christianity and thereby address questions that were also being discussed under the headline ‘New Culture Movement’. The Bible, Liu claimed, talked about all those urgent issues the New Culture Movement was tackling. These were, in Liu's words, ‘“the problem of labour”, “the problem of capital”, “the problem of limiting the population”’, and many more. Christianity even, Liu Tingfang argued, dealt with ‘the problem of free love’—though Liu did not reveal how.Footnote 102 However, these social problems were extremely complicated. It had to be respected how New Culture activists tried their best to ‘reform society’. But their weakness was, Liu went on, that they did not acknowledge that all the real solutions to these issues came from God. So it was only reasonable to get help from him, which of course the Christians did.Footnote 103 The logical conclusion was that the Christians were undertaking the better New Culture Movement.
The Apologetic Group's definition of the New Culture Movement is perplexing from today's perspective. This contrast to our intuitions, which result from 100 years of (re)defining the New Culture Movement, shows that it was then considered a malleable expression, used even by the most improbable groups to sell their agendas.
A new argument for plain language
Not all agendas could be successfully sold as New Culture Movement. The expression was flexible, but not empty. It was structured by a certain skeleton of notions, such as who constituted its official ‘centre’ (the circle around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu), or what constituted its rhetoric. Therefore, while many groups used the New Culture Movement as a buzzword, it was only beneficial for some. Christianity, for example, could apparently not successfully be sold as ‘New Culture Movement’. It presumably clashed too much with notions around ‘science’ and the, however latent, scepticism of the avowed ‘centre’ towards religion.Footnote 104 The way in which politics would evolve on the mainland (notably the rise of Communism) could not be glossed over by a good sales strategy either. However, where agendas were more compatible with the rhetoric of the New Culture Movement, they could be successfully promoted as the movement. They could even shape the discourses around the New Culture Movement, and change the meaning of keywords which were traced back to Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, but for which Hu and Chen had offered different arguments. One example for such a group is the Jiangsu Educational Association and their reformulation of plain language.
The circle around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu had argued for plain language on the grounds that it was the language best suited to the present times. Weighing the advantages of plain language against classical Chinese, Hu Shi claimed that ‘[i]t is preferable to use the living words of the twentieth century than the dead words of three millennia past’.Footnote 105 They made it explicit that their calls for plain language were not calls for using the language of the ‘common people’. In a letter to Lin Shu from March 1919, the chancellor of Beijing University, Cai Yuanpei, specifically explained that the plain language of his professors was not the language of ‘carriage pullers and jam sellers’, that is, of people who did not belong to the intellectual elite.Footnote 106
But plain language as the language of ‘carriage pullers and jam sellers’ was exactly how the Jiangsu Educational Association presented it. In its announcement of the student lecture competition, the Jiangsu Educational Association wrote:
The New Culture movement wants to spread culture to the majority of our countrymen. It does not limit itself to one single class or group. (For example, it popularizes Bopomofo [that is, a transcription system for Chinese characters]. It promotes writing in plain language. It establishes free schools and presentation groups. It [the ‘New Culture Movement’] means all this.)Footnote 107
This argument was much closer to the national-language project than to Hu Shi's plain language. The origins of this project went back to the nineteenth century, when scholars like Wu Rulun (1840–1903) saw that a national language had been successfully established in Japan and started advocating a similar project for China. In 1911, the project got underway when the Qing Dynasty's (1644–1911) Ministry of Education convened a conference to create a unified national language. When the Republic was established one year later in 1912, the project was continued.Footnote 108 These efforts were interrupted when the general Yuan Shikai (1859–1916) lost interest in them after he became president of the Republic in 1912.Footnote 109 But after his death in 1916, the national-language project was resumed. According to national-language activist Li Jinxi (1890–1978), the motivation for establishing the national language was now the idea that a republican form of state could only be maintained if the common people possessed a certain degree of education—a language that was both national and used for writing and speaking was a useful tool to achieve this goal.Footnote 110 In line with this, Li Jinxi argued in 1919 that the national language would enable ‘chauffeurs and maids’ to read books and newspapers.Footnote 111 This quest to further popular education through a language that could be used for writing and for speaking was now, in late 1919, inscribed into the keyword baihua (‘plain language’), and this plain language was explicitly ascribed to people like Hu Shi or Chen Duxiu.
This was the way in which plain language came to be known throughout China. A female trainee teacher in Jiangsu, Zhu Daihen (no dates), claimed that plain language was the language of the common people.Footnote 112 The Jiangsu Educational Association's vice president, Huang Yanpei, reasserted his view that plain language could ‘connect with common society’ in the Changsha newspaper Impartial (Dagong bao).Footnote 113 The Weekly Review, a Shanghai-based journal of the Guangdong-based Guomindang, called for an even more extreme form of writing for the people. The later Guomindang politician Wu Zhihui (1865–1953) regarded plain language as still too difficult for the ‘workers’ (gongren) and advocated the popularization of Bopomofo, a transcription system for Chinese characters. This could, or should, be achieved through the New Culture Movement, he said.Footnote 114 Speaking from Beijing to the Western world, the missionary-professor Philippe de Vargas called plain language the ‘popular language’.Footnote 115 This idea, which had been created by people other than those who were declared to be the ‘centre’ of the New Culture Movement, thus became highly influential.
For a long time, the idea even entered academic discourses about plain language. Often ‘baihua’ has been translated as ‘the vernacular’,Footnote 116 and it has been described as a language that was designed to tear down the boundaries between intellectual elite and ‘common folk’.Footnote 117 Only in recent years, scholars have pointed out that New Culture plain language was anything but the language of the people, as it was full of neologisms imported from Japanese or coined to match Western-language words and sentence structures, and it was therefore as incomprehensible to the common people as classical Chinese.Footnote 118 Not everybody at the periphery who tried to appropriate the New Culture Movement for their agendas was successful in doing so. But some, like the Jiangsu Educational Association and national-language advocates like them, succeeded in inscribing their own ideals permanently in the New Culture Movement and into its rhetoric.
The ‘centre's’ responses
This change in the arguments behind plain language considerably dismayed Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. In practical terms, there was little difference between the plain language written by them and the one composed by the local intellectuals and educators. However, the circle around Hu and Chen took the change in the argument very seriously, and it was the cause of some distress for them. Hu's friend Lin Yutang (1895–1976), for example, sighed in a letter to Hu Shi that it was ‘blasphemy’ (xiedu)Footnote 119 when New Culture activists regarded plain language as merely the language of the people. Chen Duxiu, too, made it clear that plain language was not simply the language of the common people. Such a language would not form a ‘new literature’, which was the goal. Regarding plain language mainly as ‘vulgar and easy to understand’ (tongsu yijie) was ‘a mistake easily made in the New Culture Movement’.Footnote 120
This dismay at the New Culture Movement went further than criticism of plain language. Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi expressed that they disliked the New Culture Movement in general. Their problem with it was that it was beyond their control. It was ‘society’Footnote 121 or ‘newspapers’,Footnote 122 they stated, that were negotiating the New Culture Movement, rather than their own circle. In 1920, Hu Shi expressed in a particularly vivid way his feeling of inability to control the New Culture Movement when he said: ‘After it [the New Culture Movement] has [started] moving, one cannot induce it not to move.’Footnote 123 Hu Shi was most determined in his dislike of the New Culture Movement. For a long time, he did not even use the expression. Instead, he talked about a ‘new intellectual tide’ (xin sichao)Footnote 124 and, when speaking to Western audiences, about a ‘Chinese Renaissance’.Footnote 125
But Hu and Chen could not avoid the New Culture Movement. So, from late 1919 onwards, the declared ‘centre’ and inspiration of the New Culture Movement saw itself compelled to respond to ‘society's’ co-optation of their personas and vocabulary, and to try and create their own New Culture franchises. The definitions they put forward were influential, but they also changed constantly. In November 1919, Chen Duxiu suggested that the New Culture Movement meant to replace a ‘literary way of thinking’ (wenxue naojin) with a ‘scientific way of thinking’ (kexue naojin).Footnote 126 This shifted in April 1920 when he defined the New Culture Movement as the renewal of all things cultural. ‘Culture’ he defined very broadly as ‘including things like science, religion, morality, arts, literature, and music’.Footnote 127 Hu Shi suggested in December of 1919 that the ‘new intellectual tide’ was about the ‘critical spirit’.Footnote 128 But this was not his final opinion. When talking to Western audiences, as mentioned above, he would soon present the New Culture Movement as the ‘Chinese Renaissance’. This was doubtlessly designed to make it more palatable and comprehensible to them, by using an expression they were familiar with.Footnote 129
The creation of a new New Culture franchise by the declared ‘centre’ was further complicated by the fact that Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi were at the time already drifting apart into camps that have been described as ‘Marxist’Footnote 130 (Chen Duxiu) and more scientificallyFootnote 131 or apoliticallyFootnote 132 minded (Hu Shi). This had found expression in the famous ‘problems versus isms’ (wenti yu zhuyi) debate of the summer of 1919, when Hu Shi had, according to most interpretations, criticized Marxism, whereupon various members of the Marxist camp had talked back at him.Footnote 133 But even though they criticized each other's notions in New Youth, they made it clear that they considered ‘society's’ notions to be even more erroneous.Footnote 134 That ‘society’ was in charge of the New Culture Movement was a considerable bother to them, but one they did not see themselves able to do away with.
Conclusion
Rana Mitter has argued that May Fourth became a ‘brand name’ in later years, used by political parties to justify their power.Footnote 135 More than this, though, the New Culture Movement was used in this way from the very beginning. It was a buzzword deployed by intellectuals and educators at the periphery of the New Culture myth to market agendas which they had been promoting for several years. From the beginning, they filled the New Culture Movement with a rhetoric which conjured up notions that are still attached to it today—they claimed that the New Culture Movement ‘centred’ on Beijing University's academics, most notably Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, and that it was a ‘movement’. But, in spite of this, the intellectuals at the periphery did as much as, if not more than, the declared ‘centre’ to shape the meaning of the New Culture Movement.
Scholarship has long depicted the New Culture Movement as a multi-faceted phenomenon and, in recent years, scholars like Yeh Wen-hsin, Timothy Weston, Fabio Lanza, Feng Xiaocai, and Shakhar Rahav have reinforced this observation.Footnote 136 It is indeed difficult to reduce the New Culture Movement to a simple definition and, when trying to describe it, it is much easier to make lists of ideas (plain language, Marxism, feminism, social reform, and so forth), rather than pinpointing a core agenda. This article offers an explanation for why this is the case. The ideas were there first and were proposed by many different groups and individuals. Only later, in the summer of 1919, was the expression ‘New Culture Movement’ invented and retrospectively applied to all these ideas. In fact, as the case study of the Christian intellectuals shows, the New Culture Movement used to be even more heterogeneous than it is now, and the redefinitions and reinterpretations over the decades until today have streamlined it considerably.
Suggesting that the New Culture Movement was a buzzword does, finally, not mean that it was not important. Instead, it offers a different perspective on how ideas become influential. The New Culture Movement as a label filtered out a plethora of ideas that had been developed, for example, since the nineteenth century to tackle imperialism and a changed world order. Our contemporary picture of the New Culture Movement suggests that some ideas could not be credibly sold under this label (such as Christianity). One reason might be that they were just too far removed from ideas supported by the avowed ‘centre’ of New Culture at Beijing University. Other ideas, however, such as the national language, were close enough to Beijing University's plain language to be credibly promoted as ‘New Culture Movement’. Having this label attached to them could suddenly give traction to these ideas; although the Educational Associations had lobbied for the introduction of the national language into primary school curricula throughout the 1910s,Footnote 137 they were only successful in 1920.Footnote 138 The New Culture Movement thus did mark a turning point in Chinese history. However, it did not do so by being a ‘movement’, but rather by being one of the most successful marketing buzzwords in the history of modern China.
