RETHINKING THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT
The May Fourth New Culture Movement was one of the most important historical events that had significant influence on Chinese society as well as its modernist discourses. It marked a nation-wide introspection of Chinese traditional culture.
Inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment in Europe but motivated directly by the search for solutions to national crises vis-à-vis foreign imperialist aggressions, the movement reflected great tension between tradition and modernity in Chinese society and ambivalent attitudes of Chinese intellectuals toward the nation's prospects in the changing world. Although it soon gave way to the political struggle for state building, the movement shed great light on how China should modernize.
May Fourth intellectuals' commitment to their historical mission to modernize the country, their radical approaches to social change, and the problematics of their modernist discourses, all had helped to form a neo-tradition of modernization--radicalism, which influenced China's intellectual as well as social and political movements toward modernity for many decades afterward and still influences the current modernist discourses in the country.
Since the May Fourth Movement, various intellectual and political factions have adopted modernity as a dominant thematic even though they have different approaches to its problematics.
The current Chinese modernist discourses, though not repeating those of the May Fourth, still share the same problematics of modernization left behind by May Fourth intellectuals.
In the past decades, literary, historical, and pictographic interpretations of the May Fourth Movement had been done enormously, along with the official reconstruction of the May Fourth for propaganda purpose.
Now the May Fourth still stands as one of focusing points among scholars not only because of its significant influence in modern Chinese history, but also because of an undiminished tension between history and myth hanging over it. Since China once again undertook reform in the late 1970s, Chinese intellectuals have showed great interest in deconstructing the myth of the May Fourth Movement in favor of their modernist discourses.
Most modern Chinese intellectuals and political elites who claim to inherit the spirit of the May Fourth have envisioned modernization as a desirable form of social change and related their political and social behavior to modernity. But why have they claimed to embrace modernity, and how have they understood it? What commitments attracted them to modernity? To what extent tradition influenced Chinese modernization? All these questions have been driven scholars in China and abroad to continuous studies of the May Fourth Movement.
For the purpose of understanding how it has been retrospectively reconstructed and its relation with the current modernist discourses, we need to examine it in a perspective of China's modernization movement.