Lu Zongyu were dismissed on June 10, and China refused to sign the Treaty of Ver-sailles on June 28.48
May Fourth and New Culture
The narratives that later emerged about May Fourth and New Culture have con-veyed upon us the impression that May Fourth was the same as New Culture, and that the “New Faction” was the leader of both. The logic reads that the “New Faction” put forward reformist ideas with the goal to save the nation in the face of Western imperialism, and that May Fourth also sought to save the nation in the face of Western imperialism. Therefore it was obvious that the two were intricately connected.49 May Fourth and New Culture, moreover, are said to have shared a general sense of “newness” or “modernity.”50 According to another narrative, May Fourth made the New Culture agenda more plausible. Baihua, for example, came to be regarded as a worthwhile project because student demonstrators started communicating with the “common people,” who did not understand Lit-erary Chinese.51 The May Fourth demonstrators, it has also been said, were the same people as, or they were at least led by, the New Culture intellectuals.52 For all these reasons, the two events were, the narratives state, naturally connected.
Even though some scholars have treated the two as separate, if related, events,53 it is a widespread habit to use “May Fourth” and “New Culture” synonymously.
That this connection was in fact a construction, as I claim, therefore needs some arguing for. The first hint is, as I have shown in the introduction to this
48 Huang Banghe and Pi Mingxiu, eds., “Zhang Zongxiang” (Zhang Zongxiang), Zhong-wai lishi renwu cidian (Dictionary of Historical Figures in China and Abroad) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1987), Changsha; Chen, “The May Fourth Movement and Provincial Warlords,” 153.
49 Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness; Weston, The Power of Position, 147; Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, “Reconsidering Xueheng: Neo-Conservatism in Republican China,” in Liter-ary Societies Of Republican China, ed. Michel Hockx and Kirk A. Denton (Plymoth: Lexington Books, 2008), 144; Rudolf G. Wagner, “The Canonization of May Fourth,” in The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, ed. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 79.
50 According to Lanza, the essays in the edited volume by Milena Doleželová-Velingerová and Oldřich Král fall into this category. See Lanza, “Of Chronology, Failure, and Fidelity,” 57;
Doleželová-Velingerová and Král, The Appropriation of Cultural Capital.
51 Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 178; Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, 204–05.
52 Li Quan, Fu Sinian xueshu sixiang pingzhuan (A Critical Biography of the Scholarship and Thought of Fu Sinian) (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1999), 23–24.
53 Lanza points this out, see Lanza, “Of Chronology, Failure, and Fidelity,” 54–55.
chapter, that even well-informed contemporaries did not always make the con-nection. Even when they did make it later on and then felt that May Fourth, New Culture and the “New Faction” were somehow the same, they could not put their finger on why exactly this was the case. The head of the History Department of Yanjing University and Hu Shi’s friend Philippe de Vargas called the connection a “historical puzzle.”54
In fact, the connections pointed to in scholarship on May Fourth, New Culture and the Hu-Chen circle do not withstand a closer scrutiny. People then called the
“New Faction” were not simply the leaders of May Fourth. Allegedly 3,000 stu-dents protested in Beijing on May 4. 1,000 Beijing University stu3,000 stu-dents planned the demonstrations the day before. The New Tide and New Youth societies only had around forty-five members altogether.55 This is about 1.5 percent of all the demonstrators. The numbers of the protesters should of course be regarded as an educated guess, rather than as precise calculations. But even when they are taken with a pinch of salt, the overall ratio stands.
It would, of course, make little sense to write Beijing University and its baihua advocates completely out of May Fourth. New Tide editor Fu Sinian led Beijing University into the demonstrations on Tian’anmen Square.56 Luo Jialun issued a manifesto that purported to speak for “all students of Beijing” and that was said to have been handed out “[a]long the route of the march.”57 His essay “The Spirit of the ‘May Fourth Movement’” of May 26 was later on even regarded as the text that invented the expression “New Culture Movement.”58 Xu Deheng, one of the authors of Citizen (Guomin) and thus close to those labelled “New Faction,” was a co-author of another manifesto against the “country-selling traitors.”59
However, it would be equally problematic to overstate Beijing University’s role in May Fourth. Fu Sinian soon abhorred the violence of his fellow protesters
54 de Vargas, “Some Elements in the Chinese Renaissance (Manuscript),” 18.
55 On the number of protesters overall, see Chen, “The May Fourth Movement and Provincial Warlords,” 144. The planners of the protests from Beijing University: Li, Fu Sinian xueshu sixiang pingzhuan, 23. In December 1919, the New Tide Society stated that they had grown from 20 members to 37 members over the course of 1919. Over the course of 1919, no more than 18 people published articles in New Youth, “Xinchaoshe jishi” (Records of the New Tide Society), in Xinchao (New Tide), vol. 3 (Beijing, 2006), 200; Xin qingnian (New Youth), vol. 6, 14 vols. (Tokyo:
Taian, 1963).
56 Li, Fu Sinian xueshu sixiang pingzhuan, 23–24.
57 Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 15.
58 Shen Weiwei, “Xueheng pai” biannian wenshi (Compiling the Literary Matters of the “Critical Review Faction”), vol. 1 (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 2015), 19.
59 Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 18. On the two manifestos, see also Lanza, Behind the Gate, 130.
May Fourth and New Culture 71
and withdrew.60 Luo Jialun’s essay may have become the most prominent early usage of the expression “May Fourth Movement,” but Luo had not invented it. An earlier mention of the term, for example, can be found in the Shanghai News and in the Morning Post.61 Luo’s essay on “The Spirit of the ‘May Fourth Movement’”
does not seem to have been reprinted by very many other journals, after it had appeared the Weekly Critic.62 Even in later years, when people started reflecting on the “spirit of the May Fourth Movement,” they did not mention Luo Jialun by name, nor did they appear to engage with the content of his essay.63 Xu Deheng’s manifesto had merely thirty-two signatories.64 To the extent that his manifesto was reported on at the time, it was treated as one among very many other, similar manifestos written by other groups.65
Original reports in internal letters and newspapers consequently were not about how “Beijing University,” let alone the “New Faction,” was protesting on May 4. They talked about how “the schools of Beijing” were protesting.66 When Beijing University was at some point associated with the demonstrations more
60 Li, Fu Sinian xueshu sixiang pingzhuan, 23–24.
61 Shanghai News: “Jing xuejie zhi zuijin xiaoxi” (Most Recent News from Academia in Beijing), Shenbao (Shanghai News), May 18, 1919, 7, Shanghai. Morning Post: Chen, Touches of History, 52–53.
62 This, at least, is suggested by a search of the database Quanguo baokan suoyin ( National Index of Chinese Newspapers and Periodicals [Database]), accessed January 8, 2013, http://www.cnbksy.com, which does not list any reprints for 1919.
63 Yu Ying, “Wu si yundong de zhen jingshen” (The True Spirit of the May Fourth Movement), Gong jin (Advancing Together), no. 61 (1924): 1–2; Zhang Liushi, “Beijing xuesheng you you wu si yundong shi de jingshen” (Beijing’s Students Still Have the Spirit from the Time of the May Fourth Movement), Juewu (Enlightenment), 1924, 4–6, Shanghai.
64 Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 18.
65 “Guomin duiyu Shandong wenti zhi banfa” (Ways in Which the Citizens Deal with the Shandong Question), Shenbao (Shanghai News), May 6, 1919, 6, Shanghai. Searches of the da-tabases Quanguo baokan suoyin; Shenbao 1872–1949 do not turn up any results for the title of Luo Jialun’s manifesto “Manifesto of All of Academia in Beijing” (Beijing xuejie quanti xuanyan), which indicates that it was not reprinted very widely.
66 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”;
Jiangsu sheng jiaoyuhui, “Kaihui jilu” (Meeting Minutes), Jiangsu sheng jiaoyuhui yuebao ( Jiangsu Educational Association Monthly Report), May 1919, 21; Jiangsu sheng jiaoyuhui,
“ Kaihui jilu” ( Meeting Minutes), Jiangsu sheng jiaoyuhui yuebao (Jiangsu Educational Association Monthly Report), June 1919, 15–18; “Jiang Zhe zhi jinian guochi yu zheng Qingdao” ( Jiangsu’s and Zhejiang’s Commemoration of the National Disgrace and Fight for Qingdao), Shenbao (Shanghai News), May 11, 1919, 7, Shanghai; Guowuyuan, “Beijing guowuyuan zhi dian” (Telegram of the 4th [of May 1919] from the State Council in Beijing), in Yan Xishan dang’an (Yan Xishan Papers), ed. Lin Qingfen, vol. 5 (Taibei: Guoshiguan, 2003), 26–27.
than other schools (for details on how this happened, see below in this chapter), its chancellor Cai Yuanpei was rumored to have complained that “thirteen schools” were protesting and only Beijing University was held responsible. He, or at least the persona depicted in the rumor, appeared to find this highly unfair.67
People associated with the “Old Faction,” moreover, did not have anything more or less positive to say about May Fourth than those classified as “New Faction.” Hu Shi and Lin Shu had, at least officially, the same opinion of May Fourth. They approved of the patriotic spirit of the demonstrations, but despised the idea of students being outside the classroom – an opinion repeated by Cai Yuanpei one year later in the newspaper Morning Post.68 Students as a “political category” and “student activism” were only just being defined during the May Fourth protests, as Fabio Lanza shows, so it was unsurprising that these members of the teacher generation should be uncomfortable with the protests.69
Secondly, there are problems with the idea that May Fourth evidenced the need to speak with the common people in baihua: Baihua was not the language of the common people. It was meant to be the (Westernized) language of glob-ally envisioned present times (see chapter 1). As scholars like Edward Gunn and Shih Shu-mei have shown in recent years, it was therefore full of Western and Japanese loanwords and was as incomprehensible to the common people as Literary Chinese, if not more so.70 Already in the 1930s, Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) therefore called it a “new Literary Chinese.”71 Consequently it could not have been very useful in communicating with the common people. Thirdly, as shown in chapter 1, the group around Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were by no means the only
67 “Cai Yuanpei ciqu xiaozhang zhi zhenyin” (The True Reasons for Cai Yuanpei’s Resignation as Chancellor), Chenbao (Morning Post), May 13, 1919, 2, Beijing; “Cai Zimin jue ci Beijing Daxue xiaozhang zhi zhenyin” (The True Reasons for Cai Zimin’s Decision to Resign as Chancellor of Beijing University), Guomin gongbao (Citizen News), May 13, 1919, 3, Beijing; “Cai Yuanpei cizhi zhi zhenyin” (The True Reasons for Cai Yuanpei’s Resignation), Shishi xinbao (China Times), May 15, 1919, 2.1, Shanghai; “Fengyu piaopiao zhi Jing xuejie” (Academia in Beijing Shaking in Wind and Rain), Shenbao (Shanghai News), May 15, 1919, 7, Shanghai.
68 Hu Shi and Jiang Menglin, “Women duiyu xuesheng de xiwang” (Our Hopes for the Stu-dents), in Minguo shiqi mingren tan wu si: lishi jiyi yu lishi jieshi (Famous People of the Republican Period Talk about May Fourth: Historical Reminiscences and Historical Explanations), ed. Yang Hu (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), 93–97; Zhang, Lin Shu pingzhuan, 241; Cai Yuanpei,
“Qunian wu yue si ri yilai de huigu yu jinhou de xiwang” (A Review of [Events] since 4 May of Last Year and Hopes for the Future), in Minguo shiqi mingren tan wu si: lishi jiyi yu lishi jieshi (Famous People of the Republican Period Talk about May Fourth: Historical Reminiscences and Historical Explanations), ed. Yang Hu (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), 90.
69 Lanza, Behind the Gate, 16, 11–12.
70 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 217–96; Shih, The Lure of the Modern, 71.
71 Mei Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text, 39.