because they both wrote under pseudonyms. For all we know, they could have been the same person. But even if they were, the fact that Cha An repeated Shuang Yu’s story, and that the story was in this way further disseminated in yet another publication, shows how influential the rumors spread in the newspapers were, not only in merging May Fourth with the “New Faction,” but also in recon-solidating the notion of this merger in later narratives.
Control points
Yan Xishan and the conspiracy of the Research Clique
Just how necessary these particular patternings of reality, that is, these particular conspiracy theories, rumors and factional classifications were in associating the baihua advocates at Beijing University with May Fourth becomes evident from looking at people who subscribed to a different set of conspiracy theories or to none at all. These people were utterly astonished by the change of ideas in the wake of the demonstrations.
Yan Xishan was among those people. As shown in the introductory section to this chapter, Yan Xishan was caught entirely unawares by the rise of communism in the summer of 1919, even though his active correspondence with the Beijing government, with other provincial warlords and with his subordinates had fur-nished him with all the information there was.128 The reason was that Yan Xishan had patterned the events of 1919 differently.
Yan Xishan was an ardent believer in political factions and he mistrusted his rival factions thoroughly. This may not be unrelated to the fact that, in the future, he himself would betray his allies frequently.129 While being convinced that factions were omnipresent, Yan Xishan did not believe in the existence of the political consciousness or resourcefulness of China’s protesters. When discuss-ing May Fourth, Yan Xishan did not usually talk about the “public” or even the
“countrymen” as agents of the protests, which was the vocabulary institutions like the State Council in Beijing and the Jiangsu Educational Association were using when describing the demonstrators.130
128 For examples for such correspondence, see the following paragraphs.
129 Gillin, Warlord, 115–257.
130 “Public”: The Jiangsu Educational Association spoke of “public sentiment” (yuqing) in the con-text of May Fourth, Jiangsu sheng jiaoyuhui, “Zhi da zongtong, guowuyuan, jiaoyubu chenming Shanghai ge xiao xuesheng yin jiaoyu zongzhang yiren deng wenti qun yi bake, qing fuxun yuqing dian.” “Countrymen”: Guowuyuan, “Beijing guowuyuan ma dian.”
Consequently, the first reaction of Yan Xishan’s circle to the May Fourth pro-tests was that they had to be directed by a force that had to be taken more seriously politically. The protests were, the circle concluded, a conspiracy by a rival politi-cal faction, the Research Clique. On May 11, Yan received a letter from a contact in Beijing writing that “these protests are, [it appears] on the surface, [instigated] by student groups. But behind the scenes, the Research Clique is inciting them.”131 This story continued in Yan Xishan’s circle for a while. On May 14, 1919, another Beijing contact claimed in a telegram to Yan Xishan that the Research Clique was using May Fourth to topple the Anfu Club.132 Yan Xishan appeared to buy into this, because on May 15 he wrote the same story back to the contact. The Research Clique was “using” the students and “borrowing [the Shandong Ques-tion] as an excuse to further their own cause,” he claimed.133 In this interpreta-tion, May Fourth was not a matter of “good,” patriotic students versus a selfish government. It was the matter of one political intrigue versus another. Beijing University’s “New Faction” did not figure into this at all.
For Yan Xishan, this did not change either when Cai Yuanpei resigned. Yan did know about the resignation, and he did know about the rumors that General Xu Shuzheng was “scheming to burn down the university.” But the reaction of his network was the still focused on factions: his network argued that these rumors were spread, again, by “newspapers of the Research Clique.”134 The implication of this story then was not that the government conspired against Cai Yuanpei, Beijing University and the “New Faction.” It was that the Research Clique was plotting against the Anfu Club. Again there was no reason to associate May Fourth with the “New Faction” or with any change in ideas.
When the growing power of communism became apparent in September 1919, Yan Xishan and his correspondents did not trace this back to May Fourth, but instead blamed it on Russian agents, as well as on other foreign influences coming from Korea and Japan.135 Yan’s colleague in Shaanxi seemed similarly
131 Ge Jingyou, “Beijing Ge canshi zhen dian” (Telegram of the 11th [of May 1919] from Coun-cilor Ge in Beijing), in Yan Xishan dang’an (Yan Xishan Papers), ed. Lin Qingfen, vol. 5 (Taibei:
Guoshiguan, 2003), 24–25.
132 Daiwen Zhao, “Beijing Zhao canmouzhang han dian” (Telegram of the 14th [of May 1919]
from Chief of Staff Zhao in Beijing), in Yan Xishan dang’an (Yan Xishan Papers), ed. Qingfen Lin, vol. 5 (Taibei: Guoshiguan, 2003), 32.
133 Yan, “Fu Beijing Zhao canmouzhang xian dian,” 29.
134 Li Qingfang, “Beijing Li Fenpu qing dian” (Telegram of the 9th [of May 1919] from Li Fenpu in Beijing), in Yan Xishan dang’an (Yan Xishan Papers), ed. Lin Qingfen, vol. 5 (Taibei: Guoshiguan, 2003), 12.
135 Neiwubu, “Beijing neiwubu hao dian”; Waijiaobu, Neiwubu, and Jiaotongbu, “Beijing guowuyuan waijiao deng bu jing dian” (Telegram of the 24th [of April 1920] from the Foreign
Control points 87
flabbergasted at a growing influence of anarchism at the time. While he was unsuspectingly censoring the mail, the warlord of Shaanxi was utterly astonished to find “anarchist” (wuzhengfu zhuyi) journals with titles like Modern Science and Anarchism (Jinshi kexue yu wuzhengfu zhuyi) or Clothing, Food and the New Life of the Nation (Yi-shi yu guojia xin shengming). These publications, he judged, were
“intent on trying to rabble-rouse.” Yan Xishan learnt about this matter from a letter which alarmed departments of the central government forwarded to all the provincial leaders.136 But May Fourth was left unmentioned here too.
In October 1919, Yan Xishan could therefore happily welcome the Union of the Educational Associations to their annual conference in his province. He could tell them that they, as educators, were the people to save the country from its current crisis.137 Little did he know that this Union conference would success-fully petition the government with an agenda which would enter the history books as one of the successes of May Fourth and New Culture, right along with the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. After year-long efforts, this Union meeting finally convinced the Ministry of Education to intro-duce National Language classes into primary-school curricula, and this has been interpreted as a success of the baihua movement.138 For Yan Xishan, all these things were separate events, all of which happened to occur in 1919. They did not belong to the purposeful narrative of “May Fourth and the New Culture Movement.” A different set of conspiracy theories created an entirely different interpretation of that year.
The Public Voice and Cai Yuanpei’s “neurosis”
The reportage of the Public Voice about the events of the year did not suggest any connections between May Fourth and the “New Faction” either. This was again unsurprising, as the Public Voice belonged to the Anfu Club and the Anfu Club was in other newspapers depicted as the villain of the story.
Prior to May Fourth, the Public Voice had also constructed the debating aca-demics at Beijing University into the “New Faction” and the “Old Faction,” and
Ministry, Etc., of the State Council in Beijing), in Yan Xishan dang’an (Yan Xishan Papers), ed.
Qingfen Lin, vol. 5 (Taibei: Guoshiguan, 2003), 102–4.
136 Canmou benbu and Lujunbu, “Beijing guowuyuan can, lubu ge dian,” 84.
137 Yan, “Shanxi dujun jian shengzhang wei quanguo jiaoyu lianhehui di-wu ci kaihui zhici,”
1452.
138 Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 279.
reported about the “New Faction’s” weak position.139 But it differed in its cover-age of Cai Yuanpei’s resignation. According to the paper, Cai Yuanpei resigned because he succumbed to illness. He was, it reported on June 26, 1919, “suffer-ing from neurosis.” Although feign“suffer-ing illness to avoid official office was a very time-honored strategy that administrators in China had deployed for centuries, Cai’s illness was more than just a “pretext,” the paper claimed.140 Instead, Cai Yuanpei and Minister of Education Fu Zengxiang had quit because they “shoul-dered the blame” for the protests of May Fourth.141 Cai Yuanpei had said that he had lost his influence over the students and that “the students’ actions increas-ingly transgress the usual boundaries.”142 In this story, Cai was not a brave man who stood up to an untrustworthy government to defend academic freedom.
Instead, he was a mentally ill person who had lost control over the situation. The government, certainly, had nothing to do with the resignation, the Public Voice implied. Quite on the contrary, it had repeatedly asked Cai Yuanpei to resume his office as chancellor of Beijing University.143 It was, if anything, on Cai’s side, rather than against him.
The Public Voice was strechting and manipulating facts, but it was not com-pletely fabricating them out of thin air. Cai Yuanpei did appear to be ill. In his diary, he wrote about a “stomach ailment,” from which he was suffering, although he did not write about a neurosis.144 His resignation could indeed be interpreted as “shouldering the blame” for the students’ actions. But in this reading, it would have made very little sense to see May Fourth as yet another attack on the “New Faction” and to regard debating “New Faction”-style ideas as a way to express political discontent, as the teacher Jing Guan had done. Again, through the lens of this interpretation of the events of 1919, the “New Faction” and May Fourth did not appear to be connected.
139 “Qing kan Beijing xuejie sixiang chao bianqian zhi jinzhuang,” 3, 6.
140 “Cai Zimin zhen huan shenjingbing ye” (Does Cai Zimin Really Suffer from Neurosis?), Gongyanbao (Public Voice), June 26, 1919, 3, Beijing.
141 “Beijing xuejie da fengchao xuzhi” (Record of the Great Student Protests in Beijing, Contin-ued), Gongyanbao (Public Voice), May 6, 1919, 907 edition, 2, Beijing.
142 On Cai losing his influence over the students: “Cai Zimin zai Hang zhi tanhua” (Talks with Cai Zimin in Hangzhou), Gongyanbao (Public Voice), June 17, 1919, 6, Beijing. On the students
“transgressing the usual boundaries”: “Cai Yuanpei zhi lai dian yu xuejie fengchao” (Telegram from Cai Yuanpei and the Student Protests), Gongyanbao (Public Voice), May 21, 1919, 6, Beijing.
143 “Cai Zimin zhen huan shenjingbing ye,” 3.
144 Cai, Cai Yuanpei riji, 1:257.
Conclusion 89
Conclusion
Between the beginning of 1919 and the first few weeks after May Fourth, thick layers of interpretation were piled upon events, which structured, patterned and, most importantly, connected them. This layering was crucial to the making of the matrix of reference points that would soon be attached to the buzzword New Culture Movement, because it produced an association of May Fourth with Beijing University’s baihua advocates. This presaged the shift in marketing ideals, which eventually effected the reweighting of agendas in the second half of 1919 (this is the topic of chapter 3).
The combination of these layers of interpretation was something that took contemporaries by surprise, as Huang Yanpei’s initial annoyance and Yan Xishan’s continued confusion show. The reason was not that anything out of the ordinary happened. On the contrary, 1919 was full of predictable events and instantiations of longstanding habits and structures. Resentment against imperi-alism had a long history, the Shandong deal at Versailles had been foreseeable for several months145 and similar student protests had happened only a year before.146 There was the long-held Chinese belief that there were factions, political and aca-demic ones. There was the equally longstanding view that politics and academia were somehow related, a notion that went back to the days of the civil service examinations. Warlords had also been loathed for several years. What was new, following Fabio Lanza, was the idea of students as a “political category.”147 But the conceptualization of scholars in the broadest sense as people involved in political protest, also in the broadest sense, had a long history.148
The reason for contemporaries’ astonishment lay in the unexpected way in which these long-term habits were combined. Sahlins has called this the “struc-ture of the conjunc“struc-ture,”149 by which he meant that, when various structures coin-cide, this can produce “contingency” and “change.”150 This boils down to more than mere unpredictability. This “structure of the conjuncture” of May Fourth shows that the history of Chinese culture could easily have turned out differently.
145 “Shandong wenti Zhong-Ri huanwen zhi pilu,” 6; [], “Shandong wenti zhi Beijing xiaoxi,” 6, 6.
146 Chen, “The May Fourth Movement and Provincial Warlords,” 140.
147 Lanza, Behind the Gate, 16.
148 Peter Ditmanson, “The Early Ming National University and Xu Cunren,” in Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History, ed. Sarah Schnee-wind (Minneapolis: Society of Ming Studies, 2008), 42.
149 Sahlins, “Introduction,” 192.
150 Erickson and Murphy, Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, 626.
Interpretations of reality could have been pressed into a different network of associations, and the buzzword New Culture Movement (or maybe even a differ-ent buzzword) would have had differdiffer-ent reference points attached to it, with the result that different sets of the existing, competing agendas would have become
“hegemonic.”151 (For the mechanisms of the marketing, see chapter 3.)
This “structure of the conjuncture” also says something about agency (in the sense of the “who did what”) in the making of the cultural transformation of 1919.152 On the one hand, a lot of people were involved in it: the academics who debated, the intellectuals who competed with their agendas, the politicians with the bad reputation, the students who protested, the newspapers who restruc-tured reality and so forth. On the other hand, nobody really “made” the change, because the way in which these patternings of reality were combined was not orchestrated by any one group or individual. It was, in other words, made by both many and no one.
How all this then transformed Chinese culture, will be the topic of chapter 3.
151 Cheek, “The Names of Rectification,” 6.
152 “Structure of the conjuncture”: Sahlins, “Introduction,” 192.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110560718-004