China S May Fourth Movement

During the 1920s, China's intellectuals called for a new literature, system of thought and orientation towards modern life: the May Fourth Movement or the New Culture Movement spilled beyond China to the overseas Chinese communities. This work analyzes the New Culture Movement from a diaspora perspective of the overseas Chinese in Singapore.

This symposium commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 in China. This volume contains six essays on various aspects of the movement.

It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.

There are few major events in modern Chinese history so controversial, so much discussed, yet so inadequately treated as the May Fourth Movement. For some Chinese it marks a national renaissance or liberation, for others a national catastrophe. Among those who discuss or celebrate it most, views vary greatly. Every May for the last forty years, numerous articles have analyzed and commented on the movement. Several books devoted entirely to the subject and hundreds touching on it have been published in Chinese. The literature on the subject is massive, yet most of it offers more polemic than factual accounts. Most Westerners possess but fragmentary and inaccurate information on the subject. For these reasons, preparation of this volume recounting the events of the movement and examining in detail its currents and effects has seemed to me worthwhile.

"For much of the twentieth century, the May Fourth movement of 1919 was seen as the foundational moment of modernity in China. Recent examinations of literary and cultural modernity in China have, however, led to a questioning of this view. By approaching May Fourth from novel perspectives, the authors of the eight studies in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of the movement. The essays are centered on the intellectual and cultural/historical motivations and practices behind May Fourth discourse and highlight issues such as strategies of discourse formation, scholarly methodologies, rhetorical dispositions, the manipulation of historical sources, and the construction of modernity by means of the reification of China’s literary past."