New Youth and the New Culture Movement

Abstract: In existing historical narratives, the New Culture Movement was motivated by the magazine New Youth (Xin Qingnian). But actually, the New Culture Movement was promoted by the Kuomintang and the Kiangsu Provincial Educational Association to continue the attack on Duan Qirui and the An Fu Clique after the May Fourth Movement. Thus, in essence, it was a social movement. Among the members of the New Youth, only Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao went with the tide and became advocates of the New Culture Movement. In contrast, Hu Shi opposed the New Culture Movement explicitly, and even blamed it for disrupting the New Thought Movement. Similarly, the other members also did not approve of the mass social and political movement. Consequently, except when Zhang Shizhao and the intellectuals of the Xue Heng School attacked the New Culture Movement fiercely, they rarely wrote or acted in response to it. However, the New Youth was influential in the New Culture Movement in terms of new thoughts. In return, the New Culture Movement contributed to the nation-wide flow of the new currents of thoughts (Xin Sichao). Moreover, public opinions at the time usually regarded the members of the New Youth as leaders of the New Culture Movement. Accordingly, later historians were misled about the historical sequence of the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement, which resulted in neglect of the disagreements among the members of the New Youth and the contradictions between two ways of innovation and progress in modern China.