China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

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alt="Images"/>)—which was imputed as the mode of the social reproduction of hierarchy in elevated and everyday behavior alike. The basic social relations and bonds that this supposed all-encompassing Confucianism (ruxue or rujiao, ) prescribed as the definition of a well-ordered state—the subordination of young to old, of sons to fathers, of women to men, of wives to husbands, of students to teachers, of ruled to ruler, and so on—were now exposed as the building blocks of Chinese “slavishness” and offered as reasons for the supposed inability of the Chinese to adapt to the modern world.³ Soon enough, these were gathered into the catchall negative designation “feudal” (fengjian / ) culture, which was said to be marked by blind obedience to and respect for authority. The feudal infestation had to be overcome.

      From the mid 1910s into the 1920s, the claims made for culture (wenhua or wenming, ) were totalistic. Everything was said to have a cultural root, and that cultural root was said to be not gently sinological nor quaintly traditional nor harmoniously uniting, but rather entirely rotten, toxic even. Cultural rot became an explanation for all manner of vice and ill and social problem—from the high-level corruption of officials through to the everyday gendered practices that sacrificed women’s individuality (renge / ) and men’s freedom (ziyou / ) to family honor on the altar of marriage. Indeed, the proliferation of what were identified as “social problems” (shehui wenti / ) went hand in hand with what were understood to be the devolutionary properties of Chinese culture, where the insufficiencies of the latter were now said to subtend all failures of China’s modern historical passage. This radical critique and condemnation of culture and of China not only characterized but animated the New Culture / May Fourth movement, an extended period of existential crisis in “Chinese-ness” that constituted the first of several cultural revolutions in China’s twentieth century.

      The New Culture / May Fourth movement has been called China’s “Renaissance.” Or, more frequently, its “Enlightenment.” In these designations, the period is defined as the exclusive historical possession of intellectuals. This is a paradigm of modernity that reinforces an elitist ideological bias, rooted in a version of historical narrative where popular mass movements are understood to be radically disruptive of the more “rational” social transformation pursued by the educated and the already empowered. Such a paradigmatic containment privileges the liberal over the revolutionary momentums behind the period’s upheavals and has guided much research on the period in Euro-American and Chinese Nationalist (Taiwan) scholarship.⁴ An alternative paradigm of the New Culture / May Fourth—purveyed until very recently in PRC scholarship—holds that this period led teleologically to the introduction of Marxism and the formation of the Communist Party (1921), which is the true revolutionary successor to this (petty) bourgeois phase of culture critique. Highlighting the role of the Communist Party in organizing and leading progressive historical initiatives, this PRC narrative turns the New Culture / May Fourth into a mere transmission belt for Marxism; it thus forecloses the more radical aspects of the culture critique (its anarchistic tendencies, for example), consigns to historical oblivion the competing liberal contribution (slated for inevitable historical obsolescence), and emphasizes to the exclusion of much else the coming-into-being of the Bolshevik-Communist nexus of political-cultural social relations and knowledge production. In this party-centered narrative, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 propels history into motion in a linear unbroken line traced from Russia to China to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.⁵ Each of these narratives contains elements of truth. But none of them covers the complexity of the historical questions raised (and never answered) at the time about modernity, Chinese-ness, and China’s modern revolutionary histories.

      In 1917, Chen Duxiu, later one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but at this point still just a professor at Beijing University with a reputation for radicalism, wrote a rallying call to the youth of China to cast off the old and create something new. The youth—a category of Chinese social life just emerging into relevance, as elders had hitherto been venerated to the exclusion of others—were, according to Chen, still relatively unsullied by blind adherence to tradition and thus the only ones capable of challenging commitments to hierarchy so as to produce new social values. Chen’s argument proceeded as a call for a literary revolution, where revolution is named—as cited at the opening of this chapter—the tide of modern times. His exhortation is comprised of three positions. The first is encapsulated in the slogan “Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people!”: a wholesale attack on what he considered the formulaic, dead classical mode of writing characteristic of ancient Chinese texts, with a concomitant call for a writing style and system closer to the everyday lives of living human beings. The former type of writing, in his estimation, perpetuated the reproduction of a social hierarchy of the classically educated and the elders, whereas the latter would be productive of new values ideally rooted in “the people.” Second and relatedly, Chen called for an end to “the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism!” Realism, at that time in China and Japan, as well as in Euro-American literature, was understood to be an advanced form of literary expression: it was unadorned, clean, socially useful, and devoid of the show-offy and imitative flourishes required of “good” classical writing. Realism was imbued not with timelessness but with the timeliness and dynamism of rapidly changing social life itself. Chen’s third position was expressed as: “Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!” In juxtaposing the recluse to popular society, Chen indicated that literature could not be created by and for individuals insulated from society, but rather had to be a politically and socially democratic creative act.⁶

      Chen’s focus on the literary/cultural sphere signaled a retreat from politics in its state form. However, in its invocation of “the people” and its totalistic critique of the hitherto-accepted intertwined reproductive relation of textual practice and social hierarchy, Chen’s call exhibits the elements of the conjunctural moment of New Culture in China, when the arrival of the working class and social division, along with the emergence of the intelligentsia, became a potential social and political alliance that could transform China.⁷ This is when socialism—as well as anarchism, syndicalism, feminism, nationalism, and patriotism, among others—became visibly and viscerally relevant to social life, as well as an urgent matter of intellectual investigation and practice. The realm of the cultural, from this time forward, became a primary sphere in which many “isms” were battled into shape and debated into everyday parlance.

      In a less radical mode than Chen Duxiu, the philosopher and literary scholar Hu Shi—educated at Cornell and then under John Dewey at Columbia University, and newly returned to China in the mid 1910s—wrote of his own “modest” sense that literature should be reformed. In an early 1917 essay on the topic, Hu’s proposals revolved around linguistic matters: What language should be used for literary writing? For him, the problem was shaped by the extreme imitative formalism characterizing Chinese writing, an imitative ideal inimical to a creative style or timely content. For Hu, the turn to the vernacular—a written language that in one way or the other would reflect, create, and give literary form to a spoken language—was necessary and yet also fraught with the threat of vulgarity. Neither politically revolutionary nor imbued with any sentimental notion of the “the people,” Hu understood that the trend toward vernacularization, begun already in the late Qing and now gaining traction with the growth of urban literacy and the increase in popular writing for profit-seeking journals and publishing houses, required careful management by elite intellectuals, lest such

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