Youth Is Like Early Spring: The New Culture Movement, Lu Xun, and the Women's Movement

Central interpretation

The republic's failure persuaded a generation of young Chinese that the problem lay deeper than politics. Between 1915 and the early 1920s a small group of writers and teachers, gathered around Chen Duxiu's magazine New Youth and Cai Yuanpei's Beijing University, argued that Confucian family ethics and the classical written language had kept China weak, and that only science, democracy, individual freedom and a literature written in the spoken language could save it. Their most powerful writer, Lu Xun, used fiction to diagnose what he and his readers called China's "national character," blaming China's plight on China's own habits more than on foreigners. The same years transformed the place of women, at least in the cities: foot binding lost its prestige, girls' schools multiplied, a woman revolutionary became a national martyr, Ibsen's Nora became a model and a warning, and the new parties promised equality and free divorce. In the villages, change came far more slowly.

Act I: Youth Is Like Early Spring (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 420–422, 426. Reading-guide sentence (p. 420): "In the first issue of New Youth in 1915, Chen challenged the long-standing Confucian value of deference toward elders."

A magazine for the young

Review Question 6 asks what the New Culture Movement wanted and how its leaders tried to cut China off from its Confucian past. Begin with timing. In September 1915, while Yuan Shikai's supporters were preparing his throne (Lecture 2), Chen Duxiu, a thirty-six-year-old former revolutionary, launched a monthly in the French Concession of Shanghai. Its first title was Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi), with the French subtitle La Jeunesse; it became New Youth (Xin qingnian) with the first issue of its second volume in September 1916 (slides a, b). Ebrey uses the later title throughout.¹

The opening essay, "A Call to Youth," set the tone. "Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade," Chen wrote; the young should "fight" the old and not let it "contaminate" them (Ebrey, p. 420). Ebrey's reading-guide sentence makes the point that matters for the question: Chen began by challenging "deference toward elders," the core of filial piety and so of the Confucian family.

The editor

Chen was not a born iconoclast (slide c). He came from a gentry family in Anhui, passed the county examination in 1896 to become a xiucai, and failed the provincial examination in Nanjing the following year. He went to Japan several times between 1901 and 1914, joined anti-Manchu groups, and took part in the 1911 revolution in Anhui. Ebrey says he studied in "Japan and France" (p. 420). The Japanese years are well documented; the French ones are disputed. Boorman's Biographical Dictionary of Republican China says that "at some time between 1907 and 1910" he studied in France, while Yves Chevrier, re-examining the record, finds no stay in France in those years. Either way, France was the model he admired most, as his 1915 essay on French civilization shows.² The failure of 1911 to produce a working republic, and the spectacle of Yuan's monarchy, convinced him that political change was useless without a change in values.

"A slavish morality"

Chen's attack was explicit (slide d). In an essay of early 1916 he called loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness "a slavish morality," and in "The Way of Confucius and Modern Life" (December 1916) he argued that Confucianism, built for a society of ranks and families, was incompatible with "the new society, and the new state."³ The occasion was political as well as philosophical: Kang Youwei and his Confucian Society were campaigning to make Confucianism the state religion, and Yuan had restored the state Confucian sacrifices in 1914. In January 1919, defending the magazine against its critics, Chen summed up its program in two names: "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science."

The movement and its university

Slide e defines the New Culture Movement as the campaign, led by teachers and writers at Beijing University in the late 1910s, to replace Confucian values and the classical language with science, democracy, individual freedom and writing in everyday speech. Ebrey's list on p. 426 is the best summary of its aims: the May Fourth generation stood for "science, democracy, individualism, freedom, progress, and the vernacular," and against "Confucian family patriarchy, blind adherence to tradition, and classical Chinese."

The movement had a home because of Cai Yuanpei (slide f). A Hanlin academician of the old regime who had joined the revolutionaries and studied in Germany, Cai became president of Beijing University in January 1917. He opened the university to every school of thought, kept old classicists (one, Gu Hongming, still wore his queue) alongside anarchists and radicals, and asked Chen Duxiu to become dean of letters. New Youth moved to Beijing with him. Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, Qian Xuantong and Zhou Zuoren, Lu Xun's younger brother, joined the faculty or the magazine.⁴ The photograph on slide e, taken in March 1920, shows four of the leaders together: Jiang Menglin, Cai, Hu Shi and Li Dazhao. All four had studied abroad, in the United States, Germany or Japan.

Hu Shi and the vernacular

The movement's most lasting victory was linguistic (slides g–i). Hu Shi, a Cornell and Columbia student and a disciple of John Dewey, sent New Youth his "Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature," published in January 1917. His slogan was blunt: "A dead language can never produce a living literature" (Ebrey, p. 420). Classical Chinese (wenyan) was a written language shared across China but spoken by no one; the vernacular (baihua) followed ordinary northern speech. The difference is easy to see in a short phrase: the classical 吾欲往 and the vernacular 我要去 both mean "I want to go" (slide h). Ebrey notes that Hu understood the cost: the classical language "had allowed speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects to communicate," and a national vernacular would have to become a standard, "much as standard vernaculars had developed in Europe" (p. 420).

The campaign moved quickly. From January 1918 New Youth was written entirely in the vernacular, and in 1919 hundreds of new vernacular periodicals appeared. In January 1920 the Ministry of Education ordered that the first two grades of primary school use vernacular textbooks, and by 1922 classical textbooks were to be phased out of the elementary schools.⁵

Visitors and critics

Ebrey stresses how eager the students were for Western ideas (p. 426; slide j). John Dewey arrived at the end of April 1919, just before the May Fourth demonstrations, and lectured across China for two years, often with Hu Shi as his interpreter; Bertrand Russell lectured in 1920–1921; Margaret Sanger spoke in Beijing in 1922. Dewey wrote that he had never seen students "so unanimously and eagerly interested in what is modern and new." Ebrey also lists Einstein among those invited. The invitation was real, but the visit fell through: after a series of misunderstandings over dates and terms, Einstein wrote to Cai Yuanpei on 22 December 1922 that he could not come to Beijing, and he stopped only briefly in Shanghai on his way to and from Japan. The deck therefore leaves him off the slide.⁶

Not everyone agreed. Liang Qichao, the great reformer of 1898 and 1903 (Lecture 1), toured Europe after the war and came home in 1920 convinced that the West's faith in material progress had led to catastrophe (slide k). Ebrey writes that some Chinese now found Western culture "too materialistic" and feared for China's "national essence" (p. 426). These critics matter for the question: the New Culture leaders tried to sever China from its Confucian past, but the argument over what to keep never ended.

Act II: The Iron House (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 422–423. Reading-guide sentence (p. 422): "Lu Xun put the blame for China's plight on China's own flaws much more than on the flaws of foreigners."

From Shaoxing to Sendai

Lu Xun was the pen name of Zhou Shuren (1881–1936), from a declining gentry family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang (slide m). His father's long illness and death in 1896, after years of expensive and useless traditional remedies, turned him against Chinese medicine. He studied at Western-style schools in Nanjing and in 1902 went to Tokyo on a government scholarship, where he cut off his queue (the photograph of 1903 on slide m); Lecture 1's Tokyo slide shows the student world he joined. In 1904 he enrolled at the medical college in Sendai, the only Chinese student there.

The lantern slide

Ebrey says he gave up medicine after watching "a newsreel" of the Russo-Japanese War (p. 422; slide n). Lu Xun's own account, in the 1922 preface to his first story collection, Call to Arms, is more precise: in a microbiology class the teacher filled spare minutes with lantern slides of the war, and one showed a Chinese man, said to be a Russian spy, about to be executed by Japanese soldiers, while a crowd of Chinese looked on, "completely apathetic." "The most important thing, therefore," he concluded, "was to change their spirit," and literature was the best means to do it.⁷ Students should notice that the account was written sixteen years later, by a famous author shaping his own story. That makes it a primary source about how Lu Xun understood his vocation, not a neutral record of 1906.

Setting up the reading: "Diary of a Madman"

The chapter's primary-source reading is "Diary of a Madman" (Kuangren riji), published in New Youth, vol. 4, no. 5, in May 1918 (slides o, p). Its context is worth knowing before you read. Back in China, Zhou Shuren had joined the Ministry of Education in 1912 and spent his evenings copying ancient inscriptions. In the 1922 preface he describes how Qian Xuantong, an editor of New Youth, urged him to write, and how he answered with the image of an iron house without windows, full of sleepers who will suffocate. Is it kinder to wake them? Qian's reply, that if a few wake up "you can't say there is no hope of destroying the iron house," persuaded him. He wrote the story in April 1918 and signed it, for the first time, "Lu Xun." Its title echoes Gogol's "Diary of a Madman" (1835). It is usually counted as the first modern Chinese short story in the vernacular, though Sophia Chen's "One Day" (1917; see the Pierian Spring) was earlier.

Slide p gives five questions to read with; they are repeated here so that you can keep notes as you go. First, the short preface that opens the story is written in classical Chinese and the diary in the vernacular, which no translation can show; ask who speaks in each voice, and which one the story trusts. Second, follow the eyes: who looks at the diarist, and what he believes their looks mean. Third, when he studies a history book at night, copy down exactly the words he says he finds there. Fourth, watch for the name of a real revolutionary of 1907, whom Act III introduces. Fifth, read the last line twice and decide whether it is hopeful. Reading Guide Q7 asks how Lu Xun's work served as a diagnosis; your own notes on these five points are the evidence for your answer.

Ah Q and "national character"

"The True Story of Ah Q," serialized in the Beijing Morning Post supplement from December 1921 to February 1922, gave the diagnosis a face (slide q). Ah Q is, in Ebrey's words, "too cowardly and self-deceiving ever to succeed," and "no matter how he is humiliated, he claims moral superiority" (p. 422). Readers named his habit his "method of spiritual victory." The story ends in the revolution of 1911, which in Lu Xun's telling changes the masters but not the system. Ah Q was translated into several languages within a few years; the photograph on slide q was taken in 1925 for the Russian edition.⁸

The phrase "national character" (guominxing) needs care (slide r). Around 1900 many writers in Europe, America, Japan and China assumed that each people had a collective set of traits that explained its fate. Arthur H. Smith's Chinese Characteristics (1894), a missionary's catalogue of supposed Chinese traits, was translated into Japanese in 1896 and read by Lu Xun as a student. Lydia Liu has shown how Chinese reformers took over this foreign discourse and turned it into a program of self-criticism.⁹ Lu Xun's stories dramatize the traits he blamed: indifference to others' suffering, self-deception, servility to the strong and cruelty to the weak. Ebrey's reading-guide sentence sums up what was new in his stance: he blamed "China's own flaws much more than … the flaws of foreigners."

"Sudden Notions"

The Documents box on p. 423 prints part of "Sudden Notions" (1925), collected in Huagai ji (1926) (slide s). Comparing the republic with the last years of the Ming, Lu Xun writes that "China alone is untouched by the passage of time," asks whether "national character" is "so difficult to change," and attacks the "clever people" who adapt to any master. Yet he ends with a qualified hope: "Luckily no one can say for certain that the national character will never change." Ebrey's questions for analysis ask which features of the past Lu Xun saw persisting, and why he was so pessimistic; both answers are in the text.

Act III: Nora's Sisters (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 426–428. Reading-guide sentence (p. 427): "Women debated whether, like Ibsen's Nora, they could leave the old system and create their own identities."

Feet

Ebrey's summary is that "women's seclusion and tiny feet went from being a source of pride in Chinese refinement to a source of embarrassment at China's backwardness" (p. 426; slides u, v). Chapter 8 (linked from slide u) explained the custom's long history and the Qing's failed ban of the 1660s. The first anti-foot-binding societies of the 1890s were made up of men who pledged to leave their daughters' feet natural and to marry their sons to women with natural feet. The second promise was the important one: binding persisted because it improved a daughter's marriage prospects, so families could only stop together. Dorothy Ko warns against seeing the women who bound their feet simply as victims; for many, bound feet were a source of skill, pride and respectability, which is exactly why the reformers' campaign of shame was so effective.¹⁰ By Ebrey's account, after 1930 girls were bound only in remote areas.

Qiu Jin

Qiu Jin (1875–1907) is Ebrey's example of women entering politics (p. 426; slides w, x). Born into an official family in Zhejiang and married in 1896, she became an ardent nationalist after the Boxer War. In 1904 she left her husband and children and went to Japan, where she studied, joined the revolutionaries and, Ebrey notes, learned to make bombs. In speeches and essays she condemned infanticide, foot binding, arranged marriage, wife beating and the cult of widow chastity, and told women they were complicit in their oppression because they made pleasing men their goal. In 1906 she returned to China and in January 1907 published the first issue of the Chinese Women's Journal in Shanghai.

In 1907 she ran the Datong school in Shaoxing, a cover for revolutionary training, and planned risings with Xu Xilin. On 6 July Xu shot the governor of Anhui in Anqing; his rising collapsed and he was executed. A week later troops surrounded the Datong school and arrested Qiu Jin. She was executed in Shaoxing on 15 July 1907, aged about thirty-one. The deck treats her death with restraint (slide x) and shows only the official record of her statement.¹¹ Lu Xun, also from Shaoxing, remembered both; Xu Xilin is the real name that appears in "Diary of a Madman."

Schools

The quiet revolution was in schooling (slide y). The Qing mandated girls' schools in 1907, when 11,936 girls were enrolled in 391 primary schools; by 1919 there were 215,626 girl pupils, about twenty times as many. Yet in 1922–1923 only 3,249 girls attended middle school, against 100,136 boys (Ebrey, p. 426). Ebrey's key point is that schools "offered a respectable way for girls to interact with unrelated people," and that after 1920 higher education opened careers for women as teachers, nurses and civil servants in the larger cities.¹²

Lu Xun on women, and Nora

Lu Xun applied his diagnosis to women too (slide z). His essay on chastity (New Youth, 1918) pointed out that a woman who killed herself to avoid rape was honored, but no writer would commemorate one who killed herself after being raped. In "The New Year's Sacrifice" (1924), collected in Panghuang (Wandering, 1926), a poor widow forced to remarry is treated as ill-omened after her second husband dies and ends as a beggar, afraid that in the afterlife she will be split between two husbands (Ebrey, p. 427). The cruelty in the story comes from ordinary townspeople and shared beliefs, which is Lu Xun's point.

Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) appeared in Chinese in the June 1918 "Ibsen issue" of New Youth, translated by Luo Jialun and Hu Shi, and was soon staged in many cities (slide aa). Nora, who leaves her husband at the end of the play, became a symbol for young women who refused arranged marriages. Lu Xun's lecture of 26 December 1923 at the Beijing Women's Normal College, "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?", asked the hard question: without money of her own, where could Nora go? Economic rights, he argued, had to come first.

Law and the countryside

Legal change lagged (slide bb). Women's suffragists led by Tang Qunying petitioned the provisional senate in Nanjing in 1912 without success, and "efforts to get the vote were generally unsuccessful" (Ebrey, p. 427). In the 1920s the Nationalist and Communist parties both set up women's departments and endorsed equal rights and free marriage and divorce. Song Qingling's remark, from the revolutionary government at Wuhan in 1927, shows the dilemma: refusing women's divorce petitions would make them lose faith in the revolution, but granting them angered the peasant unions, since a poor man "has often paid much for his present unwilling" wife (Ebrey, pp. 427–428).¹³

Finally, scale (slide cc). John Lossing Buck's survey of farm households, carried out between 1929 and 1933, found that about 30 percent of rural men but fewer than 2 percent of rural women could read (Ebrey, p. 426).¹⁴ Most of the changes in this act reached a minority of urban women first.

Pierian Spring: Sophia Chen and H. C. Zen, a Modern Couple

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 424 (Biography).

Ebrey's Biography box shows the New Culture program lived in one marriage (slides gg, hh). Chen Hengzhe, who took the English name Sophia Chen (1890–1976), persuaded her father to cancel an arranged engagement, won a Boxer Indemnity scholarship in 1914, studied history at Vassar and took a master's degree at Chicago in 1920. That year she became the first woman offered a professorship at Peking University and married Ren Hongjun, H. C. Zen (1886–1961). While at Vassar she published "One Day" (1917), a short story in the vernacular, a year before "Diary of a Madman."¹⁵

Zen's career runs through the whole chapter: the first stage of the examinations in 1904, study in Tokyo and the Revolutionary Alliance after the exams were abolished, a post as secretary to President Sun Yatsen in 1912, resignation under Yuan Shikai, and chemistry at Cornell and Columbia (1912–1917). With fellow students at Cornell he founded the Science Society in 1914 (renamed the Science Society of China in 1915) and its journal Kexue (Science), first published in 1915, and he was the society's president until 1923.¹⁶ Ebrey's two questions for analysis, how the couple's lives were shaped by their times and what difference study abroad made, are the natural review for these slides.

Corrections and Cautions

Details that are easy to get wrong

The magazine's name. Ebrey's "first issue of New Youth in 1915" (p. 420) uses the later title. The magazine began in September 1915 as Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi) and became New Youth in September 1916 (slides a, b).
The textbook order. Ebrey dates the switch to vernacular textbooks to 1921 (p. 422). The Ministry of Education's order came in January 1920 (slide i).
The "newsreel." Ebrey says Lu Xun watched a newsreel (p. 422). By his own later account it was a lantern slide shown in class, and the episode is known only from that account (slide n).
Einstein. Ebrey lists Einstein among those invited to lecture (p. 426). He was invited, but the Beijing visit was cancelled in December 1922 (Hu Danian, 2005); the deck leaves him out (slide j).
Chen Duxiu in France. Ebrey says Chen studied in "Japan and France" (p. 420). Japan is certain; France is disputed (Boorman, 1967, says yes; Chevrier, 1984, finds no evidence). The deck keeps Ebrey's claim but flags the doubt (slide c).
The Science Society. It was founded by Chinese students at Cornell in 1914, not "while still in China" (p. 424; Buck, 1975; Wang, 2002; slide hh).
The widow. The widow of "The New Year's Sacrifice" is a character in Lu Xun's story, not a real person, and not Lu Xun's widow (slide z).
The reading. The deck and this essay give the context of "Diary of a Madman" and questions to read with, but no summary. Ebrey's one-sentence summary (p. 422) is best read after the story.

Notes

On the magazine's history, Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), remains the fullest account in English. The covers in the deck come from the 1954 Shanghai facsimile reprint, scanned by the National Library of China; they reproduce the design, not the original paper. ↩
Howard L. Boorman, ed., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), "Ch'en Tu-hsiu," online at X-Boorman; Yves Chevrier, "De l'occidentalisme à la solitude: Chen Duxiu et l'invention de la modernité chinoise," Études chinoises 3 (1984), pp. 7–34, doi:10.3406/etchi.1984.1008. Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), is the standard English biography. The deck links back to Chapter 14 (slide c) so students can compare Chen's examination career with the Ming system. ↩
The translations used in the deck are from Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China's Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), which is also Ebrey's source. ↩
Timothy B. Weston, The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), explains Cai's reforms and the university's place in national politics. Cai's appointment letter for Chen is dated 11 January 1917. ↩
John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), and Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). Ebrey dates the textbook order to 1921 (p. 422); the ministry's order was issued in January 1920. ↩
Hu Danian, China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Ze'ev Rosenkranz, ed., The Travel Diaries of Albert Einstein: The Far East, Palestine, and Spain, 1922–1923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), historical introduction. Peking University's history museum prints Einstein's letters of 17 and 22 December 1922: xsg.pku.edu.cn/details/1584.html. ↩
Lu Xun, "Preface to Call to Arms," in Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1960). The slide has never been found, and scholars such as Leo Ou-fan Lee and Rey Chow have treated the episode as Lu Xun's own retrospective myth of origin. It remains the story he chose to tell. ↩
William A. Lyell, Lu Hsün's Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), is a good introduction to the stories and their background. ↩
Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), ch. 2. Liang Qichao's writings on the "new citizen" (Lecture 1) were the main Chinese channel for the idea. ↩
Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). The comparison photograph on slide v, by C. H. Graves (about 1902), belongs to the visual campaign Ko describes. ↩
Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902–1911 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), and "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing: The Case of Ch'iu Chin," in Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). Hu Ying, Burying Autumn: Poetry, Friendship, and Loss (2016), follows how her friends turned her into a martyr. ↩
Joan Judge, The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), studies the textbooks and debates around late Qing women's education. ↩
Christina K. Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). ↩
John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China (Nanking: University of Nanking, 1937). Ebrey does not name the survey; Buck's is the large 1930s rural survey with these figures. ↩
Denise Gimpel, Chen Hengzhe: A Life Between Orthodoxies (2015). An English translation of "One Day" is in Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson, eds., Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women's Literature from the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). ↩
Zuoyue Wang, "Saving China through Science: The Science Society of China, Scientific Nationalism, and Civil Society in Republican China," Osiris 17 (2002); Peter Buck, "Order and Control: The Scientific Method in China and the United States," Social Studies of Science 5, no. 3 (1975), pp. 237–267, n. 3, doi:10.1177/030631277500500301, which states that the society "was founded in 1914 in Ithaca, New York, by a small number of Chinese students at Cornell." Ebrey says Zen helped found the society "while still in China" (p. 424). ↩