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May Fourth Movement: Chinas
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The May Fourth Movement was part cultural revolution, part social movement. On the cultural side, the students had been inspired in the preceding two decades by Western thought, creating a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction with Chinese tradition. In the intellectual ferment that resulted from this, answers were sought for the questions why and how China had lagged behind the West. The negative influences of traditional morality, the clan system and Confucianism were seen as the main causes. China in its sorry state could only be cured by ‘Two Doctors’: Doctor Science and Doctor Democracy.
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Intellectually one of the richest periods of China's history, the May Fourth Movement deserves great attention. An important moment of democratization, it ... introduced some extreme negative views on China's tradition that still impact intellectual debates. A scholar like Wang Yuanhua - born in 1920 - understands that the May Fourth Movement might have gone too far in its criticism of tradition. One does not have to reject tradition entirely to be modern. On the contrary, balanced and sustainable overall modernization grows from a reinterpretation of tradition, and the revolutionary myth of discontinuity fails to integrate this idea.
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The May Fourth Movement revolutionaries sought to replace China’s heavy dependence on traditionalism with Western rationalism, democracy, and individualism. One of the cultural changes demanded by the activists, and one that has great consequences for modern Chinese literature, was the abandonment of classical Chinese, a language written but no longer spoken, in favor of a vernacular modern Chinese. The intellectuals wanted to adopt a written Chinese that was closer to colloquial Chinese, known as baihua. In support of this change, modern Chinese writers began adopting Western literary genres, including the novel, dramatic play, and short story. Writing for and about the general population, they created a new literary tradition using the spoken colloquial language, devoid of the sterile and overly stylized writing of ancient Chinese. Prominent in many of these new works are narratives using a first-person point of view, as well as themes of individualism and psychological self-examination.
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The May Fourth Movement was a famous rvolutionary movement in China. Some scholars call it "the Chinese Enlightenment." Taking place on May 4, 1919, it marked the beginning of the upsurge of nationalist feeling, with unity of purpose among patriotic Chinese of all classes. The movement grew out of anger at the racist and colonialist inequities in the Treaty of Versailles settlement and the effect of the New Cultural Movement.
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In 1919, the earth-shaking the May Fourth Movement took place in China. It was both a patriotic movement and a new cultural movement designed to emancipate people's minds. Holding high the banner of democracy and science, the movement opposed the outdated morality and advocated new morality, attacked classical Chinese and promoted the use of colloquialisms. A new literature emeopd as a natural result and new drama, namely modern Chinese drama was ... taking shape during this grand cultural movement.
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In the period of the May Fourth Movement as Chow defines it, there were obvious strides towards national-consolidation, and certain analogies with the ideological elements of the Meiji Restoration come to mind. However, it does not seem that Chinese intellectuals in the Movement were able to arrive at the kind of formula, employing both progressive or liberal elements as well as representations and putative embodiments of tradition or the past, which were key to the Meiji success. This shortcoming is probably due to the advanced stage of the West�s and Japan�s imperialistic exploitation of China at the time when compared to Japan in 1868: the imperialist nations were long entrenched in China and too many powerful Chinese had an interest in the perpetuation of a status quo which would not lead to China�s consolidation, democratization, and independence. This status quo was (somewhat problematically) identified with tradition. And this particular sort of tradition was identified too completely with China�s problems. Confucianism and so on as tradition were ... not available in the same way Japan�s �unbroken line of emperors,� the �family-nation-state,� and so on were.
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