History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 20

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Chapter 20: The May Fourth Movement and the Literary Revolution (1915–1927)

1. Introduction: A Revolution in Language and Thought

The literary revolution that erupted in China between 1915 and 1927 was, by any measure, one of the most radical and consequential transformations in the history of world literature. In the space of little more than a decade, a generation of young Chinese intellectuals — many of them educated abroad, all of them profoundly dissatisfied with the condition of Chinese civilization — undertook to demolish the classical literary tradition that had dominated Chinese culture for more than two thousand years and to replace it with an entirely new literature written in the vernacular language, informed by Western literary models, and dedicated to the creation of a modern Chinese society. The scope of their ambition was breathtaking: they proposed nothing less than the replacement of the entire linguistic, aesthetic, and philosophical foundation of Chinese literary culture. And to a remarkable degree, they succeeded. By the late 1920s, the vernacular language had displaced classical Chinese as the medium of serious literary expression, a new generation of writers had produced works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism that bore little resemblance to anything in the Chinese literary past, and the terms of literary debate had been transformed so thoroughly that the assumptions that had guided Chinese writers for millennia — about the nature of literary language, the hierarchy of literary genres, the purpose of literary creation — had been effectively overthrown.

This literary revolution did not occur in isolation. It was part of a broader cultural movement — the New Culture Movement (新文化运动, xin wenhua yundong) — that sought to transform every aspect of Chinese society: its political institutions, its social customs, its family structure, its moral values, its philosophical traditions, and its relationship to the rest of the world. The New Culture Movement was itself a response to the political crisis that had followed the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911: the failure of the new Republic to establish a stable democratic government, the reversion to warlordism and political fragmentation, the continuing encroachment of foreign imperialism (culminating in Japan's Twenty-One Demands of 1915), and the deepening sense among Chinese intellectuals that the problem facing China was not merely political or institutional but cultural — that China's weakness was rooted in the fundamental inadequacy of its traditional culture, including its literary culture, to meet the demands of the modern world.

The literary revolution was catalyzed by a specific event — the publication in January 1917 of Hu Shi's article "A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Reform" (文学改良刍议, Wenxue gailiang chuyi) in the journal Xin qingnian (新青年, New Youth) — but its roots extended deep into the late Qing period, where writers like Liang Qichao, Lin Shu, and Huang Zunxian had already begun the work of questioning the classical tradition and exploring the possibilities of literary modernization. What distinguished the May Fourth literary revolution from these earlier efforts was its radicalism: where the late Qing reformers had sought to adapt the classical tradition to modern purposes, the May Fourth writers sought to abolish it entirely and to build a new literature from the ground up.

2. Hu Shi's Manifesto for a Living Literature in the Vernacular

Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962) was a young graduate student at Cornell and later Columbia University when he first began to formulate the ideas that would ignite the literary revolution. Educated in the classical tradition as a boy, Hu Shi had been exposed during his years in the United States (1910–1917) to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and to the democratic, experimental spirit of American intellectual life. He had also engaged in spirited debates with his fellow Chinese students about the future of the Chinese language and Chinese literature — debates that convinced him that the reform of Chinese literature was the most urgent cultural task facing the Chinese nation.

Hu Shi's manifesto — published in the January 1917 issue of Xin qingnian under the deliberately modest title "A Preliminary Discussion of Literary Reform" — proposed eight principles for the reform of Chinese literature. These principles, which would become the founding charter of the literary revolution, were deceptively simple: (1) writing should have substance; (2) do not imitate the ancients; (3) pay attention to grammar; (4) do not groan without being ill (i.e., do not affect emotions you do not feel); (5) eliminate clichés and outworn expressions; (6) do not use classical allusions; (7) do not use parallel constructions; and (8) do not avoid common speech and common characters. The eighth principle was the most radical, for it amounted to a call for the replacement of classical Chinese (文言, wenyan) — the literary language that had been the medium of all serious Chinese writing for more than two thousand years — with the vernacular (白话, baihua) — the spoken language of the common people.

Hu Shi's argument for the vernacular was both pragmatic and historical. Pragmatically, he argued that classical Chinese — a dead language that no one had spoken for centuries and that could only be mastered after years of arduous study — was an insuperable barrier to the creation of a genuinely popular literature and a genuinely literate society. A literature written in the vernacular would be accessible to millions of Chinese who could never hope to master the classical language, and it would enable writers to express their thoughts and feelings with a directness and an authenticity that the rigid conventions of classical Chinese did not allow. Historically, Hu Shi argued that the Chinese literary tradition itself contained a rich vernacular tradition — the great novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the popular drama of the Yuan dynasty, the folk songs and ballads of earlier periods — that was in many respects more vital and more creative than the classical tradition that scholars had always privileged. The literary revolution, Hu Shi insisted, was not an act of cultural destruction but an act of cultural liberation: it was the elevation of a living literary tradition that had been suppressed by the artificial authority of a dead language.

Hu Shi's essay was met with immediate and enthusiastic support from the editors of Xin qingnian and from a growing circle of intellectuals who shared his conviction that the classical tradition was an obstacle to China's modernization. It was also met with fierce opposition from defenders of the classical tradition — most notably Lin Shu, the great translator of Western fiction, who composed a series of allegorical stories attacking the advocates of the vernacular and who warned, with genuine anguish, that the destruction of classical Chinese would mean the destruction of Chinese civilization itself. The debate between the advocates and opponents of the vernacular was one of the most passionate and consequential intellectual debates in modern Chinese history, and its outcome — the decisive victory of the vernacular — transformed the Chinese literary landscape irreversibly.

In 1920, the Chinese Ministry of Education officially decreed that the vernacular language would replace classical Chinese as the medium of instruction in primary schools — a decision that effectively sealed the fate of the classical tradition as a living literary language. By the mid-1920s, virtually all serious new literary works were being written in the vernacular, and classical Chinese had been relegated to the status of a historical curiosity — still studied, still admired, but no longer a viable medium for contemporary literary expression.

3. Chen Duxiu and the New Youth Magazine

If Hu Shi provided the literary revolution with its intellectual manifesto, Chen Duxiu (陈独秀, 1879–1942) provided it with its institutional platform and its ideological fire. Chen Duxiu was the founder and editor of Xin qingnian (New Youth), the journal that served as the primary organ of the New Culture Movement and that published the most important literary, philosophical, and political essays of the era. A fiery polemicist with a gift for provocative formulation, Chen Duxiu was more radical in his cultural iconoclasm than Hu Shi and more explicit in linking the literary revolution to the broader project of social and political transformation.

Xin qingnian was founded in Shanghai in September 1915 under the title Qingnian zazhi (青年杂志, Youth Magazine) and was renamed Xin qingnian in 1916. From its inception, the journal was dedicated to the proposition that China's salvation depended on a thorough-going cultural revolution — a revolution that would replace Confucian values with Western values, replace the classical language with the vernacular, replace traditional social customs with modern ones, and replace the submissive mentality of the old society with the independent, critical, scientific spirit of the new. Chen Duxiu's inaugural editorial — "Call to Youth" (敬告青年, Jinggao qingnian) — was a passionate appeal to the young people of China to reject the authority of tradition and to embrace the values of democracy and science (德先生和赛先生, De xiansheng he Sai xiansheng, "Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science") — values that, Chen Duxiu argued, were the foundations of Western civilization's strength and China's only hope for national survival.

In February 1917 — one month after the publication of Hu Shi's essay — Chen Duxiu published his own literary manifesto, "On Literary Revolution" (文学革命论, Wenxue geming lun), in which he went far beyond Hu Shi's cautious proposals and issued a ringing call for the overthrow of the classical literary tradition. Where Hu Shi had spoken of "reform" (改良, gailiang), Chen Duxiu spoke of "revolution" (革命, geming); where Hu Shi had formulated his proposals in the language of scholarly discussion, Chen Duxiu used the language of political combat. He raised "three great banners" of literary revolution: (1) the overthrow of the "painted, powdered, aristocratic literature" of the classical tradition and its replacement with a "plain, simple, expressive literature of the people"; (2) the overthrow of the "stale, extravagant, classical literature" and its replacement with a "fresh, sincere, realistic literature"; and (3) the overthrow of the "obscure, difficult, literature of the hermits" and its replacement with a "clear, popular literature of society."

The Xin qingnian editorial board — which by 1917 included Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, Li Dazhao, and other leading intellectuals — formed the nucleus of the New Culture Movement. The journal's offices at Peking University (where Chen Duxiu had been appointed dean of the College of Letters by the progressive chancellor Cai Yuanpei in 1917) became a center of intellectual ferment, and the journal's pages became the arena in which the most important debates of the era were conducted. It was in Xin qingnian that Hu Shi published his proposals for literary reform, that Lu Xun published his first short stories, that Li Dazhao published his first essays on Marxism, and that Chen Duxiu himself published the increasingly radical political analyses that would eventually lead him to co-found the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

4. Lu Xun: "A Madman's Diary" and the Birth of Modern Chinese Fiction

Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881–1936) — the pen name of Zhou Shuren (周树人) — is universally recognized as the greatest writer of modern Chinese literature and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His literary output was relatively small — two slim collections of short stories, a collection of prose poems, and several volumes of essays — but its impact on Chinese literature and Chinese culture was enormous and enduring. Lu Xun's work gave the literary revolution its supreme artistic achievement; without it, the movement might have remained a program of cultural criticism rather than a literary tradition.

Lu Xun's path to literature was circuitous. Born into a declining gentry family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, he studied mining engineering and then medicine in Japan before abandoning his medical studies in 1906 for literature — a decision prompted, as he famously recounted, by the experience of watching a lantern slide in which a crowd of Chinese passively watched the execution of a fellow Chinese by Japanese soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War. The incident convinced Lu Xun that China's problem was not physical but spiritual: that what the Chinese people needed was not medicine for their bodies but medicine for their souls — and that literature was the most powerful form of that medicine.

For more than a decade after his return from Japan, Lu Xun published nothing. He worked as a minor government official, studied classical literature and philology, and sank into a depression that he would later describe as living in an "iron house" from which there was no escape. It was not until 1918, when his friend Qian Xuantong urged him to contribute to Xin qingnian, that Lu Xun finally broke his silence — and broke it with a work that transformed Chinese literature.

"A Madman's Diary" (狂人日记, Kuangren riji), published in the May 1918 issue of Xin qingnian, is generally regarded as the first work of modern Chinese fiction — the work that inaugurated a new literary tradition and established the terms of reference for all subsequent Chinese literature. The story takes the form of a diary written by a man who is apparently suffering from paranoid delusions: he believes that everyone around him — his neighbors, his brother, even the doctor who has been called to treat him — is plotting to eat him. But as the diary progresses, the reader comes to understand that the "madman" is in fact the only sane person in a society that is literally cannibalistic — a society that has been "eating people" (吃人, chiren) for four thousand years under the guise of Confucian morality. The story's final cry — "Save the children!" — is at once a plea for the salvation of the next generation and a declaration of war against the entire Confucian tradition.

"A Madman's Diary" was revolutionary in several respects. Formally, it was the first work of serious fiction to be written entirely in the vernacular language — or rather, almost entirely, for the story begins with a brief preface in classical Chinese, written by a "narrator" who introduces the madman's diary with the condescending urbanity of the traditional literati, thus establishing a brilliant structural contrast between the classical language of the sane (and complicit) narrator and the vernacular language of the mad (and truthful) diarist. Thematically, it introduced the central preoccupation of modern Chinese literature: the diagnosis and critique of the "national character" (国民性, guominxing) — the ingrained habits of thought, feeling, and behavior that, in Lu Xun's view, had made the Chinese people passive, conformist, and complicit in their own oppression. Artistically, it demonstrated that the vernacular language was capable of producing literature of the highest power and sophistication — literature that could stand comparison with the best work of any literary tradition in the world.

Lu Xun's subsequent stories — collected in Nahan (呐喊, Call to Arms, 1923) and Panghuang (彷徨, Wandering, 1926) — deepened and extended the critique that "A Madman's Diary" had inaugurated. "The True Story of Ah Q" (阿Q正传, A Q zhengzhuan, 1921–1922), the longest and most famous of these stories, created an archetypal figure of Chinese literature: a pathetic rural bumpkin whose capacity for self-deception is so great that he can interpret every humiliation and defeat as a "spiritual victory" (精神胜利法, jingshen shengli fa). Ah Q became the definitive symbol of the national character that Lu Xun sought to expose and reform — and his story became the most widely read and most frequently discussed work of modern Chinese fiction. Other masterpieces followed: "Kong Yiji" (孔乙己, 1919), the portrait of a failed scholar destroyed by the examination system; "Medicine" (药, Yao, 1919), an allegory of revolutionary sacrifice consumed by a superstitious populace; "The New Year's Sacrifice" (祝福, Zhufu, 1924), the devastating account of a peasant woman ground to death by patriarchal custom and religious fatalism; and "Regret for the Past" (伤逝, Shangshi, 1925), a somber tale of a modern couple whose emancipation from tradition leads not to fulfillment but to despair.

5. The Creation Society and the Romantic Impulse

The literary landscape of the early 1920s was not dominated by Lu Xun alone. A variety of literary societies, journals, and movements sprang up in the wake of the May Fourth revolution, each offering its own vision of what modern Chinese literature should be. Among the most important and most influential of these was the Creation Society (创造社, Chuangzao she), founded in 1921 by a group of Chinese students in Japan — including Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, Cheng Fangwu, and Zhang Ziping — who were united by their enthusiasm for Western Romantic literature and their conviction that literature should be an expression of the individual self rather than an instrument of social reform.

Guo Moruo (郭沫若, 1892–1978) was the most talented and the most influential member of the Creation Society. His collection of poems Nüshen (女神, The Goddesses, 1921) — written in free verse, in a language of ecstatic self-expression that owed more to Whitman, Shelley, and Goethe than to any Chinese poetic tradition — was one of the landmark publications of the May Fourth era and the founding work of modern Chinese poetry. The poems of Nüshen celebrate the self, nature, the cosmos, and the creative power of the individual with a Romantic intensity that was unprecedented in Chinese literature. In "The Nirvana of the Phoenixes" (凤凰涅槃, Fenghuang niepan), the longest and most famous poem in the collection, Guo Moruo uses the mythical image of phoenixes immolating themselves and rising renewed from the ashes as a symbol of China's self-destruction and rebirth — a vision of national regeneration through the annihilation of the old and the creation of the new that captured the apocalyptic mood of the May Fourth generation.

Yu Dafu (郁达夫, 1896–1945) was the other major literary figure to emerge from the Creation Society. His short story "Sinking" (沉沦, Chenlun, 1921) — the confessional narrative of a Chinese student in Japan who is tormented by sexual desire, racial humiliation, and an overwhelming sense of personal and national inadequacy — shocked Chinese readers with its frank treatment of sexuality and its raw emotional honesty. "Sinking" inaugurated a tradition of confessional fiction in Chinese literature — fiction that laid bare the most intimate and often shameful feelings of its narrator with a ruthlessness that was influenced by the "I-novel" (私小説, shi-shōsetsu) tradition of Japanese literature and by the confessional writings of Rousseau and Goethe.

The Creation Society's emphasis on self-expression and individual subjectivity placed it in sharp contrast with the other major literary organization of the early 1920s — the Literary Research Society — which advocated a literature of social engagement and realistic observation. The tension between these two visions — literature as self-expression and literature as social document — would remain a central fault line in Chinese literary culture throughout the twentieth century.

6. The Literary Research Society and Realism

The Literary Research Society (文学研究会, Wenxue yanjiu hui), founded in Beijing in January 1921 by Zheng Zhenduo, Mao Dun, Ye Shengtao, Xu Dishan, Wang Tongzhao, and eight other writers and critics, represented a very different conception of modern Chinese literature from the one advanced by the Creation Society. Where the Creation Society championed Romantic self-expression, the Literary Research Society advocated realism — the faithful and sympathetic depiction of social life, with particular attention to the suffering of the poor and the oppressed. Where the Creation Society looked to Goethe, Byron, and Shelley for literary models, the Literary Research Society looked to Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, and the European realist tradition. Where the Creation Society declared that literature existed "for its own sake" (为艺术而艺术, wei yishu er yishu), the Literary Research Society insisted that literature must be "for life's sake" (为人生而艺术, wei rensheng er yishu) — that the purpose of literature was to illuminate the realities of human experience and to contribute to the improvement of human society.

The Literary Research Society took over the editorship of the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (小说月报, Short Story Monthly) — which under its previous editorial management had been a vehicle for the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction that the May Fourth writers despised — and transformed it into the most important literary journal of the 1920s. Under the editorship of Mao Dun (茅盾, 1896–1981), the journal published translations of Western realist and naturalist fiction alongside original Chinese fiction, essays on literary theory and criticism, and surveys of contemporary Western literary movements. The journal was instrumental in introducing Chinese readers to the full range of European literary traditions — not only the realism that the Literary Research Society officially favored but also naturalism, symbolism, and other literary movements.

Ye Shengtao (叶圣陶, 1894–1988) was one of the most accomplished fiction writers associated with the Literary Research Society. His short stories — which depicted the lives of schoolteachers, petty clerks, and other members of the educated urban middle class with a quiet precision and a sympathetic irony — established a mode of Chinese realist fiction that would prove enormously influential. His novel Ni Huanzhi (倪焕之, 1928) — one of the first full-length novels to emerge from the May Fourth Movement — traces the idealistic hopes and ultimate disillusionment of a young schoolteacher who throws himself into educational reform and revolutionary politics, only to discover that the forces of tradition, corruption, and political violence are too powerful for an individual to overcome.

Xu Dishan (许地山, 1893–1941), another member of the Literary Research Society, brought a different sensibility to the group's realist program. His stories — which drew on his knowledge of Southeast Asian cultures and his interest in Buddhism — combined realistic observation with a lyrical, almost mystical quality that set them apart from the more strictly documentary realism of his colleagues. His best-known story, "The Peanut" (落花生, Luohuasheng), used the humble peanut as a symbol of the unassuming virtue that Xu Dishan valued above all else — a virtue that contrasts with the showy but empty achievements that society tends to reward.

7. The Introduction of Western Literary Forms

The May Fourth literary revolution was, among other things, a massive act of cultural importation. In the space of a single decade, Chinese writers absorbed, adapted, and transformed virtually the entire repertoire of Western literary forms, techniques, and aesthetic philosophies — an act of cultural assimilation that has few parallels in literary history. The speed and comprehensiveness of this absorption was made possible by several factors: the large number of Chinese students who had studied abroad (particularly in Japan, the United States, Britain, France, and Germany) and who could read Western literatures in the original or in Japanese translation; the intense desire of Chinese intellectuals to break free of the constraints of the Chinese literary tradition and to create a literature that could engage with the modern world on equal terms; and the remarkable openness and intellectual curiosity of the May Fourth generation, which was willing to experiment with any literary form that might serve the purposes of cultural renewal.

Realism — the literary movement that sought to depict social reality with fidelity and accuracy, without idealization or sentimentality — was the Western literary tradition that exerted the most immediate and the most widespread influence on May Fourth fiction. The Literary Research Society explicitly adopted realism as its guiding literary principle, and the fiction produced by its members — with its attention to social detail, its sympathetic portrayal of ordinary people, and its implicit social criticism — was clearly influenced by the European realist tradition, particularly the works of Tolstoy, Maupassant, and Chekhov. Lu Xun's fiction, while not easily classified within any single Western literary category, also drew heavily on realist techniques — particularly the realist commitment to unflinching observation and the realist refusal to offer easy consolation.

Romanticism — with its emphasis on individual self-expression, emotional intensity, and the creative power of the imagination — was the other major Western literary influence on the May Fourth generation. The Creation Society was the primary vehicle for Chinese Romantic literature, and the works of Guo Moruo, Yu Dafu, and their associates — with their ecstatic celebrations of the self, their frank explorations of sexuality and emotion, and their defiant rejection of social convention — were clearly influenced by the European Romantic tradition, particularly the works of Byron, Shelley, Goethe, and the German Romantics.

Symbolism — the late nineteenth-century French literary movement that sought to express spiritual and emotional realities through the use of suggestive images, musical language, and indirect representation — also found receptive readers among Chinese writers, particularly poets. Li Jinfa (李金发, 1900–1976), who studied in France and was deeply influenced by Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, introduced symbolist techniques into Chinese poetry in the early 1920s, producing poems of haunting obscurity and linguistic beauty that were unlike anything in the Chinese poetic tradition. Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950), whose poem "Rain Lane" (雨巷, Yuxiang, 1928) — with its evocation of a mysterious, lilac-carrying woman glimpsed in a narrow, rain-drenched alley — is one of the most beloved poems in modern Chinese literature, also drew on symbolist techniques, combining them with the musical resources of the Chinese language to create a style of luminous suggestiveness.

Expressionism, naturalism, and other Western literary movements also found adherents among Chinese writers, though their influence was generally less widespread than that of realism, Romanticism, and symbolism. The point is not that Chinese writers slavishly imitated Western models — many of the best works of the May Fourth era are distinctive precisely because they combine Western literary techniques with Chinese literary resources in original and unexpected ways — but that the May Fourth literary revolution opened Chinese literature to the full range of possibilities that world literature had to offer, and that the consequences of this opening would continue to shape Chinese literature for decades to come.

8. The New Poetry Movement

The revolution in Chinese poetry was, in some respects, even more radical than the revolution in fiction. Poetry occupied a more exalted position in the Chinese literary hierarchy than fiction — it was the oldest, the most prestigious, and the most technically demanding of all Chinese literary genres — and the classical poetic tradition, with its intricate patterns of rhyme, tone, and parallelism, was the supreme embodiment of the aesthetic values of classical Chinese civilization. To write poetry in the vernacular — to abandon the tonal patterns, the fixed line lengths, the classical allusions, and the compressed allusiveness that defined Chinese poetry — was, for many Chinese intellectuals, a far more shocking act of cultural iconoclasm than writing fiction in the vernacular.

Hu Shi was the first to attempt the new vernacular poetry. His collection Changshi ji (尝试集, A Book of Experiments, 1920) — the first collection of vernacular poetry to be published — was, as its title suggests, deliberately experimental: the poems were tentative, sometimes awkward, and often closer to prose than to what most readers would recognize as poetry. Hu Shi himself acknowledged that his poems were experiments rather than finished works of art, and he hoped that more talented poets would follow his lead and create a vernacular poetry of genuine artistic power.

That hope was fulfilled with striking speed. Guo Moruo's Nüshen (1921), as noted above, demonstrated that the vernacular language was capable of producing poetry of extraordinary passion and power. Xu Zhimo (徐志摩, 1897–1931), who studied at Cambridge and was deeply influenced by the English Romantic poets — particularly Shelley, Keats, and the Georgian poets — brought to Chinese poetry a musicality, a delicacy of feeling, and a sensuous apprehension of the natural world that the vernacular language had never before been called upon to express. His poem "On Leaving Cambridge Again" (再别康桥, Zai bie Kangqiao, 1928) — with its evocation of the golden willows, the green pools, and the haunting beauty of the Cambridge landscape — is one of the most frequently recited and most deeply loved poems in modern Chinese literature. Xu Zhimo's verse demonstrated that the vernacular language could achieve effects of delicacy and refinement comparable to those of classical Chinese poetry — but in a register of feeling that was unmistakably modern.

Wen Yiduo (闻一多, 1899–1946) brought a different approach to the new poetry. Trained as a painter at the Art Institute of Chicago, Wen Yiduo was deeply concerned with the formal qualities of poetry — with rhythm, pattern, and visual form — and he argued that the new vernacular poetry needed to develop its own formal discipline rather than simply abandoning all the formal resources of the classical tradition. In his influential essay "The Form of Poetry" (诗的格律, Shi de gelü, 1926), Wen Yiduo proposed that the new poetry should embody three "beauties" (三美, san mei): the beauty of music (音乐美, yinyue mei) — achieved through rhythm and rhyme; the beauty of painting (绘画美, huihua mei) — achieved through vivid imagery; and the beauty of architecture (建筑美, jianzhu mei) — achieved through the visual arrangement of lines and stanzas on the page. His own poetry — particularly his masterpiece "Dead Water" (死水, Sishui, 1928), a savagely ironic poem that transforms a stagnant ditch into a vision of horrifying beauty as an allegory for the corruption of Chinese society — demonstrated the power of formal discipline in the service of emotional and intellectual content.

9. Modern Drama (Huaju) and Its Pioneers

Before the May Fourth Movement, China had no tradition of spoken drama. Chinese theatrical tradition — including the many forms of regional opera, from the refined Kunqu to the popular Peking Opera — was a composite art form that combined singing, recitation, dance, acrobatics, and stylized movement within a highly codified system of conventions. The concept of a drama consisting entirely of spoken dialogue — without singing, without stylized movement, without the elaborate conventions of the operatic tradition — was a Western import, and the creation of a Chinese spoken drama tradition (话剧, huaju, literally "spoken drama") was one of the major cultural achievements of the May Fourth era.

The earliest experiments in Chinese spoken drama date from the first decade of the twentieth century, when Chinese students in Tokyo — inspired by the Japanese shinpa (new wave) and shingeki (new drama) movements, which were themselves adaptations of Western dramatic forms — began to stage plays in Chinese that were based on Western models. These early experiments — collectively known as "civilized plays" (文明戏, wenming xi) — were crude and amateurish by later standards, but they established the basic principle that a Chinese drama based on spoken dialogue and realistic representation was both possible and desirable.

The May Fourth era saw the first attempts to create a Chinese spoken drama of genuine literary quality. Hu Shi's one-act play The Greatest Event in Life (终身大事, Zhongshen dashi, 1919) — which depicted a young woman's defiance of her parents' insistence on an arranged marriage — was the first published play of the new drama, and its theme of individual freedom versus traditional authority was characteristic of the May Fourth ethos. Tian Han (田汉, 1898–1968) was a more ambitious and more prolific dramatist whose romantic, sometimes melodramatic plays — often dealing with the suffering of artists and intellectuals in a hostile society — helped to establish spoken drama as a serious literary genre. Hong Shen (洪深, 1894–1955), who studied drama at Harvard under George Pierce Baker, brought professional theatrical knowledge to the Chinese stage and helped to develop a standard of dramatic production that lifted the new drama above its amateur origins.

But the supreme achievement of modern Chinese drama was the work of Cao Yu (曹禺, 1910–1996), whose play Leiyu (雷雨, Thunderstorm, 1934) — written when Cao Yu was still a university student — is generally regarded as the greatest work of Chinese spoken drama and one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world drama. Thunderstorm depicts the destruction of a wealthy industrial family through the convergence of past sins, hidden relationships, and suppressed passions — a convergence that culminates, on a single stormy night, in a catastrophe of Sophoclean proportions. The play owes much to Ibsen, O'Neill, and the tradition of Western naturalistic drama, but its emotional intensity, its structural complexity, and its profound understanding of human psychology give it a power that transcends its sources. Cao Yu's subsequent plays — Richu (日出, Sunrise, 1936), a panoramic portrait of social corruption in a modern Chinese city, and Yuanye (原野, The Wilderness, 1937), a darkly expressionistic drama of revenge set in the rural countryside — confirmed his status as modern China's greatest dramatist.

10. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and Its Literary Aftermath

The May Fourth Movement — in its narrow sense, the student demonstrations that erupted in Beijing on May 4, 1919, in protest against the decision of the Paris Peace Conference to transfer Germany's colonial concessions in Shandong province to Japan rather than returning them to China — was the political event that gave its name to the entire cultural revolution of the 1910s and 1920s. The demonstrations, which began at Peking University and quickly spread to other cities, galvanized the Chinese intelligentsia and transformed the New Culture Movement from a program of intellectual and cultural reform into a broad-based political movement that engaged workers, merchants, and the general public.

The literary consequences of the May Fourth demonstrations were complex and far-reaching. The demonstrations radicalized many Chinese intellectuals and deepened their conviction that China's cultural transformation must be accompanied by political transformation. The failure of the Western powers at Versailles to uphold the principles of justice and self-determination that they had proclaimed during the war discredited Western liberalism in the eyes of many Chinese intellectuals and directed their attention toward more radical political ideologies — particularly Marxism and anarchism. Li Dazhao (李大钊, 1888–1927), the Peking University librarian and a contributor to Xin qingnian, was among the first Chinese intellectuals to embrace Marxism, and his writings — published in Xin qingnian and other journals — helped to lay the intellectual foundations for the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

The radicalization of the Chinese intelligentsia had profound implications for literature. In the early years of the literary revolution, the dominant conception of literature had been broadly liberal and humanistic: literature was valued as an instrument of enlightenment, education, and individual liberation. But in the aftermath of the May Fourth demonstrations, a growing number of writers began to argue that literature must serve more explicitly political purposes — that it must be an instrument of revolutionary struggle rather than merely an instrument of cultural reform. This tension between the liberal-humanistic and the revolutionary-political conceptions of literature would become the central fault line of Chinese literary culture in the late 1920s and 1930s and would ultimately be resolved — at least temporarily — in favor of the revolutionary-political conception.

11. The Mandarin Ducks and the "Popular" Counterweight

The May Fourth literary revolution did not, of course, conquer the entire Chinese literary landscape overnight. Throughout the 1920s and beyond, a large and commercially successful popular literature continued to flourish alongside — and often in defiance of — the "serious" literature promoted by the May Fourth intellectuals. The most important strand of this popular literature was the so-called "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" fiction (鸳鸯蝴蝶派, Yuanyang hudie pai) — a genre of romantic, sentimental, and often formulaic fiction that had emerged in the late Qing period and that continued to attract a mass readership throughout the Republican era.

The May Fourth intellectuals — who regarded Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction as the epitome of everything that was wrong with Chinese literature: sentimental, escapist, morally frivolous, and aesthetically crude — attacked it with unrelenting ferocity. But the popularity of this fiction — which outsold the "serious" literature of the May Fourth movement by a wide margin — suggested that the literary revolution had not yet reached the mass reading public, and that the gap between the literary tastes of the educated elite and those of the general public remained as wide as ever.

Recent scholarship has challenged the May Fourth intellectuals' dismissive assessment of Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction, arguing that it was a more complex and more interesting literary phenomenon than its detractors acknowledged. Some scholars have pointed out that Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction addressed themes — romantic love, family conflict, social mobility, the experience of urbanization — that were of genuine concern to its readers and that the "serious" literature of the May Fourth movement often neglected. Others have argued that the rigid distinction between "serious" literature and "popular" literature that the May Fourth intellectuals insisted upon was itself a Western import that did not necessarily correspond to the realities of Chinese literary culture.

12. Conclusion: The Achievement and the Legacy of the Literary Revolution

The literary revolution of 1915–1927 was one of the most radical and most consequential cultural transformations in human history. In the space of little more than a decade, a generation of Chinese writers overthrew a literary tradition of more than two thousand years' standing, replaced the classical literary language with the vernacular, absorbed and adapted the entire repertoire of Western literary forms and techniques, and created a new Chinese literature that was fundamentally different — in language, in form, in subject matter, and in purpose — from anything that had come before. The speed and the comprehensiveness of this transformation were remarkable; the audacity of the ambition that drove it was extraordinary; and the artistic achievements that it produced — particularly the fiction of Lu Xun, the poetry of Guo Moruo, Xu Zhimo, and Wen Yiduo, and the drama of Cao Yu — were of enduring literary value.

But the literary revolution also left a complicated and often troubling legacy. The radical break with the classical tradition — however necessary it may have been — severed modern Chinese literature from its roots in a way that many Chinese writers would come to regret. The subordination of aesthetic values to political and social purposes — which began as an understandable response to the urgency of China's national crisis — would become, in the decades that followed, a justification for the political control of literature and the suppression of artistic freedom. And the May Fourth writers' faith in the power of literature to transform society — a faith that was both their greatest strength and their greatest vulnerability — would be tested, and in many cases shattered, by the political upheavals that lay ahead.

The next phase of Chinese literary history — the period from 1927 to 1949 — would see the May Fourth literary revolution confronted with the realities of political power: the Nationalist government's attempts to control literary production, the Communist Party's demands for a literature in the service of revolution, the devastating impact of the Japanese invasion, and the intensifying conflict between political engagement and artistic integrity that would define the lives and careers of virtually every Chinese writer of the era.

References

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