New Culture Movement

The New Culture Movement was a Chinese intellectual and literary movement of the 1910s and early 1920s, centered on Peking University and the influential journal New Youth, that rejected traditional Confucian values, classical literary Chinese and imperial-era social hierarchy in favor of modern, Western-influenced science, democracy and a new vernacular literature accessible to ordinary readers. Its leading figures included Chen Duxiu, the journal's founding editor, Hu Shih, who championed writing in vernacular Chinese, or baihua, rather than classical literary Chinese, and Li Dazhao, and the movement's call for Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy directly shaped a new generation of Chinese fiction and essay writing, most notably the vernacular short stories of Lu Xun, generally regarded as modern China's first major fiction writer. The movement's cultural ferment fed directly into the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the student-led political protest against the Treaty of Versailles's treatment of former German concessions in China, after which May Fourth is often used, somewhat interchangeably with New Culture, to describe the era's combined literary and political awakening.