May Fourth period

Following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the republic in 1911/12, many young intellectuals turned their attention to the overhauling of literary traditions, beginning with the language itself. In January 1917 an article by Hu Shih, a student of philosophy at Columbia University, entitled “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” (“Tentative Proposal for Literary Reform”) was published in Xinqingnian (New Youth), a radical monthly magazine published in Beijing. In it Hu called for a new national literature written not in the classical language but in the vernacular, the living “national language” (guoyu). Chen Duxiu, the editor of Xinqingnian, supported Hu’s views in his own article “Wenxue geming lun” (“On Literary Revolution”), which emboldened Hu to hone his arguments further in a second article (1918), “Jianshe de wenxue geming” (“Constructive Literary Revolution”), in which he spelled out his formula for a “literary renaissance.”

The literary reform movement that began with these and other “calls to arms” was an important part of the larger New Culture Movement for cultural and sociopolitical reform, which was greatly strengthened by a student protest on May 4, 1919, against the intellectual performance of the Chinese delegates to the Paris Peace Conference formally terminating World War I. At the outset, the literary reformers met with impassioned but mostly futile opposition from classical literati such as the renowned translator Lin Shu, who would largely give up the battle within a few years.

The first fruits of this movement were seen in 1918 and 1919 with the appearance in Xinqingnian of such stories as “Kuangren riji” (“The Diary of a Madman”), a Gogol-inspired piece about a “madman” who suspects that he alone is sane and the rest of the world is mad, and “Yao” (“Medicine”), both by Zhou Shuren. Known by the pseudonym Lu Xun, Zhou had studied in Japan and, with his younger brother, the noted essayist Zhou Zuoren, had become a leader of the literary revolution soon after returning to China. Lu Xun’s acerbic, somewhat Westernized, and often satirical attacks on China’s feudalistic traditions established him as China’s foremost critic and writer. His “A-Q zhengzhuan” (1921; “The True Story of Ah Q”), a damning critique of early 20th-century conservatism in China, is the representative work of the May Fourth period and has become an international classic.

These early writings provided the impetus for a number of youthful intellectuals to pool their resources and promote shared ideals by forming literary associations. In 1920 Shen Yanbin, better known later as Mao Dun, and others established the Wenxue Yanjiuhui (“Literary Research Association”), generally referred to as the “realist” or “art-for-life’s-sake” school, which assumed the editorship of the established literary magazine Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short Story Monthly). Perhaps the most important literary magazine of the early 1920s, Xiaoshuo yuebao was used by the Association to promote the so-called “new literature,” most major fiction writers publishing their works in it throughout the 1920s, until the magazine’s headquarters was destroyed by Japanese bombs in 1932. The socially reflective, critical-realist writing that characterized this group held sway in China well into the 1940s, when it was gradually eclipsed by more didactic, propagandistic literature. Members of the smaller Chuangzao She (“Creation Society”), on the other hand, were followers of the “Romantic” tradition who eschewed any expressions of social responsibility by writers, referring to their work as “art for art’s sake.” In 1924, however, the society’s leading figure, Guo Moruo, converted to Marxism, and the Creation Society evolved into China’s first Marxist literary society. Much of the energy of members of both associations was expended in translating literature of other cultures, which largely replaced traditional Chinese literature as the foundation upon which the “new literature” was built. This was particularly true in drama and poetry, in which figures such as Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, respectively, were as well known to Chinese readers as indigenous playwrights and poets. In drama, the Nanguo She (“South China Society”), founded by the former Creationist Tian Han, produced and performed several short plays that were a mixture of critical realism and melodrama, while poets of the Xinyue She (“Crescent Moon Society”), such as the British-educated Xu Zhimo and the American-educated Wen Yiduo, were creating new forms based on Western models, introducing the beauty of music and colour into their extremely popular lyrical verse.