Chinas quest for modernity:

a critical review of its philosophical and cultural backgrounds in the early twentieth century (1905-1919)

Vernica Noelia Flores

ABSTRACT

Over the last twenty years the question on Chinese modernity has raised an extended scholar debate which has deepen its
definition and thought over its analytical strength to study Chinas intellectual changes during the early twentieth century. In a
first stage, this study reviews this recent historiografical trends as they have contributed to revise and overcome the classic Euro-
centric perspectives upon this subject and have enriched and problematized our understanding of Chinas quest for modernity
from an approach that emphasize a more dynamic East-West cultural communication. Based on this scope, in a second stage our
focus is narrowed down to analyze the discursive practices and political pronouncements of two generations of representative
Chinese intellectuals as Zhang Binglin, Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming and Hu Shi during the late years of Qing dynasty and the
first decade of the Republican era. Our research problem consists on demonstrating how a common theoretical framework to
define modernity was built during these years, through an array of representations, cognitive understandings and heterogeneous
discursive practices that shaped an intellectual community rather than individual singularities. Since this process involved creating,
undermining, affirming or re-composing new and traditional- specific categories, our final purpose in this instance is to clarify
the cultural identity and philosophical stances underlying those actions to better comprehend their conceptions of modernity, as
autonomous responses to Chinas integration to the world but also as divergent pathways of concrete social and political
mobilization in the veering early years of the twentieth century.

KEYWORDS: Modernity, discursive practices, intellectual community, cultural interaction.

I. TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF CHINESE MODERNITY

a) The interpretive problem of defining modernity
In recent decades, driven by scholar debate on economic globalization, the question on how East Asian
countries are currently conducting a fast and dynamic modernization has sparked worldwide academic
interventions. Although increasing attention has been paid to the economic and politic resultants, there are
diverging opinions about the origins, outcomes and implications of both philosophical and cultural roots
of this phenomenon, as well as valuable debates about the historical and ontological framework in which
they should be analyzed (Duara, 1995; Liu, 2003, Rocca, 2006, Yue Dong, 2006).

In 1997 a lively debate took place among intellectuals in the Peoples Republic of China, basically
between the liberals (or neoliberals) and the so-called New Left especially from the publication of the
literary scholar and intellectual historian Wang Huis article Contemporary Chinese thought and the
question of Modernity. In many respects the debate was between liberal thought, especially classical
liberalism, and socialist thought in the contexts of Chinas transition to a global market economy and of
the social and economic inequalities spawned by the economic reforms. The debate is on-going, which
reminds us of the cultural and intellectual controversies of the pre-communist period. There are
similarities between intellectuals of the early twentieth century and contemporary ones (He, 2001; Fung,
2010). They grappled with the question of whither China, using a similar language of critical inquiry to

University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Ministry of Foreign Affairs "Taiwan Scholarship" Visiting Scholar. Research project conducted with the
support of National Taiwan University, Department of History and National Central Library, Center for Chinese Studies.
explore issues some of which stretch back many decades. That leads us to believe that the search for a
genealogy of Chinese modernity and modernization date back to the late Qing-early Republican era.


The academic exploration on the concepts of modernity and modernization in East Asia, and specifically
in China, has been addressed by scholars and theorists from different perspectives. The persistence of
these debates in the 1990s shows how problematic has been any effort to re-think, for the bottom up, the
foundation of the modern Chinese state and indeed of modernity itself, partly because of the divergence
in retaining conventional concepts which have traditionally organized modern Western euro-centric
societies.

Modernity has been a subject of considerable interest and a shift of attention among scholars to review its
definition, rethink its analytical strength to study differential patterns of modern historical experience in
non-Western societies, as well as to study its own actual validity facing the postmodernist claim that
modernity is dead. However, to launch a critique aimed at problematizing and enriching our understanding
of Chinese modernity, primary it is necessary to define the complex concept of modernity itself.
As a broad philosophy, modernity has been historically identified with the European Enlightenment and
its faith in reason, in progress and in unbounded human capacity for pursuing material benefits without
religious constraints. Accordingly, the core beliefs of the Enlightenment philosophy in Western countries
include secularism, perfectibility and the application of science, technology and rational governing
principles to solve problems both in human and natural worlds.
Other qualities are often associated with modernity as well: an ever-increasing pace and physical extent of
change; globalization and the shrinking of distances; urbanism, industrialization, consumerism, and other
facets of socioeconomic modernization; iconoclasm and contempt for the past; the image of universals in
linear progressive time (the nation, the truths of sciences, the claims of social theories) and the uniformity
of time and space.1
Modernity also involves a set of cognitive and stresses the overall rationalization of social life that has led
to what Max Weber called the iron cage of economic compulsion and bureaucratic domination. In this
sense, two interrelated features widely associated with the essence of modernity since Weber were
secularity and rationality (instrumental, formal and bureaucratic). Anthony Giddens also follows this
interpretive line when he defines the concept as a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial
civilization, associated with a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to
transformation, by human intervention; a complex of economic institutions, especially industrial
production and a market economy; a certain range of political institutions, including the nation-state and
mass democracy (Giddens, 1998: 97). Modernity, Giddens adds, refers to modes of social life or
organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which
subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.2
This dualism has evoked different responses from contemporary social thinkers. The postmodernist Jean-
Francois Lyotard has challenged the underlying legitimation of the grand narratives of modernity and

1 Francis Ching Wah Yip, Towards a critic of Capitalism as Quasi-religion: a study of Paul Tillichs critical interpretation of Capitalism and
Modernity, ThPd. Thesis, Harvard University, 2004, p. 5.
2 See Anthony Giddens, The consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Standford University Press , 1990), 1.
has pronounced modernitys end. 3 Jungen Habermas, however, defended it as an unfinished,
redeemable project. 4 Giddens has argued also that rather than entering a period of postmodernity,
contemporary societies are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more
radicalized and universalized than before.5
If we move to Michel Foucault, we can also see how rationality in modern times spread in the forms of
disciplines of power. The advanced nation-state achieved unprecedented capacity for coercion and access
to wealth, and as colonial power, it maintained or coordinated a widespread network of bureaucratically-
organized administrators, armies, plantations, factories and schools. Moreover, in creating citizens and
colonial subjects, it developed new techniques of internalizing values and disciplines in the individual.
The very process of achieving individuation as a political subject took and takes place complicit with
disciplinary institutions.
Modernity then, as it seems there is a consensus in reckoning, is a multifarious and complex phenomenon.
It is both an epochal concept, the new age, as Friedrich Hegel conceptualized, and an attitude, as
Foucault also maintains. By attitude, Foucault, echoing Kant, means a mode of relating to
contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people: to an end, a way of thinking and feeling;
a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and at the same time marks relation of belonging and
presents itself as a task6. What is important to Foucault is a type of philosophical interrogation, one
that simultaneously problematizes mans relation to the present, mans historical mode of being, and the
constitution of the self as an autonomous subject, coupled with a philosophical ethos that could be
described as permanent critique of our historical era.
In other words, modernity, intellectually, is an attitude of questioning the past and the present and linking
them with the future. It questions everything and, Weber would say, measures everything against a unitary
principle of rationality. It is this spirit of critique that is the most valued legacy of the Enlightenment, even
though today, the Enlightenment is viewed by postmodernist, postcolonial and post structural theorists as
an historical anomaly.
Therefore, as an attitude of questioning the past and the present, modernity entails a criticism of modernity
itself. Habermas has affirmed that the assumptions of progress and of the superiority of the new age
respect to the past need to be justified and that self-reflection is inherent to the very nature of modernist
culture.7 As Habermas tells us modernity is internally complex and contains many paradoxes, tensions
and contradictions.
Reach to this point, we need to face the other complex issue of how Chinese modernity has been defined
by historiographical trends, how they posed the question on this issue and from which social and historical
interpretive.


3
Jean Francois Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota, 1984).
4
Habermas, Jrgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987.
5
Giddens, The consequences of Modernity, 3.
6
Michael Foucault, What is Enlightment, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 39.
7
Andrew Edgar, The philosophy of Habermas (Chesham: Acumen Publishing, 2005), 191-2.
b) Modernity in non-Western historical experiences. The question on Chinese modernity by recent
historiographical trends

In recent years, historians of China have renewed their attention to the first half of the twentieth century.
This interest has been fueled by various factors, including new access to archives since the late 1970s, the
advent of new social science theories and new perspectives on looking at Chinese nationalism and state
building. From a modest start in the 1970s, with a relative small number of researchers working on a
limited range of topics, the field has grown exponentially over the past two decades, bringing to the field a
diversity of perspectives.
The first and more extended trend considers Chinas modernity as a phenomenon that occurred with the
consequences of Chinese contact with the West since the period of the Opium War. According to this
narrative which emphasizes Chinese modernity as a response to the West, the influence of the core
values of philosophical heritage of the Enlightenment directly affected the outlook of the educated elite on
the possibilities of continuity of the imperial regime, but also point out new ways of conceiving the
political community. This particular process enabled the conception of national state building, as a modern
political project par excellence (Loewe, 1966; Bernstein, 1981; De Bary, 2001, Gernet, 2005)
8
. This
prospect considers the emergence of the modern nation state and the nationalist discourse that supports it,
as inner conditions of modernity. Accordingly, China would achieve its modernization as a practical
correlate of modernity- only through its cultural change and adoption of western cultural and political
references. Hence, the project of "modernization" became the inner practice for building "modernity",
through concrete reform programs not only in politics but also in culture, art and education fields.

The advent of post-colonial studies during the last two decades and their concept of alternative
modernities, have broaden the definition from an exclusively denoting concept of Western European
culture centered in nation-state building to a plural condition whose key processes and dynamics unfold
within specific cultures (Chatterjee,1993; Chakrabarty, 2000; Eisenstadt, 2003; Delanty, 2007). Certain
modern categories may not exist per se, although similar social processes and reciprocal dynamics can
and may effectively exist under different forms. Therefore, from this transnational and transcultural
prospect, modernity in China not only took multiple forms but also had multiple meanings (Mazlish,
2002). The potentiality of the concept lies in the fact that it can be understood to express a wider range of
possibilities for institutional settings, sociopolitical orders and value-systems (Sachsenmaier, 2002).
Madelaine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein have pointed out that arguments for deconstructing or
pluralizing modernity into a range of alternative modernities leave the impression that there is still some
original modernity that began in the West and that all other instances are somehow derivated copies that
resemble Western modernity but have a Chinese, Japanese or other non-Western flavor. Goldstein adds
that this position underwrites the assumption that were the term modernity appears unmarked, it must, by
default, mean Western. As Partha Chatterjee plainly put it, if we persist in viewing modernity as a
modular form originating in the West and borrowed by the Other, then history, it would seem, has
decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity.
9


8
Many of these terms, however, have gradually entered into the Chinese language, initially thanks to a marginal group of Chinese intellectuals
who worked and studied in Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, during the social, political and economic aggiornamiento of the Meiji Era.
For a critical analysis of the translation and translocation of modern Western concepts into Chinese see Lidia Liu, Translingual Practice:
Literature, National Culture, and the Translated Modernity - China 1900-1930, Stanford University Press, 1995.
9
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories,Oxford University Press, 1995, 5.
A somewhat more effective approach has been to attack the Western-equals-Modern equation by showing
that the key conceptual and systemic bulwarks of modernity were born not in Europe but in the colonial
periphery
10
. Yet despite scholarly efforts, the conflation Western equals modern remains almost automatic.
The West, more than being an arbitrary term for a geographical zone, is a pliant, resilient, and
ideologically loaded concept that does much of our mapping for us, incessantly returning to rationalize
and locate historical and political differences in a system of unequal power relations.

Despite the intransigence of this conceptual coupling, the critique goes on, and not, one hopes,
unproductively. Many of the most lucid and poetic descriptions, as well as the most trenchant critiques of
modernity have taken as their focus everyday practice and experience (Yeh, 2000, Yue Dong & Goldstein,
2006; Zarrow, 2006). A proliferation of things found in everyday life, were seen in terms of distinctively
modern formulations of science, commerce, nation and even of self-identities constructions. The
phenomenon of modernity, according to this perspective, certainly implies a break from the past, yet not a
wrenching loss. If the break with the tradition, the civilizational form of Confucianized bureaucratic-
monarchy haunted some in the early twentieth century, this break was more a creative than an imitative
act, or better, new regime of practices. The West and Japan provided models, not blueprints. Chinese ideas
about modernity were a product of rapidly changing global and domestic circumstances. At the same time,
precisely because the drive for enlightenment was imbricated with everyday life and informed by it, a
unique Chinese modernity emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Chinese modernity was thus
located among and pursed by, numerous groups that shared a roughly common set of practices: acceptable
behaviors, norms, discourses and institutions.
Although these approaches constitute a remarkable advance in the studies on early modern Chinese
history, the main historical conceptual frame remains being the western frame of modernity and its
concepts of civil-society, nation-state and nationalism. Due to the permanence of this conflicting
assessment in contemporary historiography, our project will carefully review the connection between
Chinas quest for modernity and the emergence of the nation state, rethinking its philosophical, historical
and cultural background, as it has been the main connection established by these persistent lines of
inquires. The purpose of this project is to try and move away from conventional categorizations which
interpret developments in China through pre-existing cognitive and theoretical filters and instead, shift
towards a study of Chinese modernity, in terms of its relations to the past and its changed sense of time.
At this point, if modernity cannot be reduced to a simple integrated system, neither tradition can be. To
illuminate the process, it is worthy to address broader questions on underlying issues that cannot be
analyzed by applying binary explanatory categories. Following Benjamin Schwartzs idea of the limits of
tradition vs modernity notion, to better-understand the dialogic and inclusive relationship between these
terms, it will be valuable to distinguish in those intellectual disquisitions, internal factors that led to
simultaneous dialogue and confrontation between Western liberal heritage and classic Chinese heritage
(Schwartz, 1993; Duara, 1995). As Edmund Fung convincingly remarks, modern Chinese thought is
marked by a plurality of compelling ideas. Unraveling their complexity, interrelatedness, interactions and

10
Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism and Particularism, Verso, 1991.
dialectical relationship is the key to understand Chinese modernity in its intellectual, cultural and political
configurations
11
.

2) THE QUESTION ON MODERNITY IN LATE QING - EARLY REPUBLICAN PERIOD

Taking account those different approaches to modernitys definition, what can we said then about Chinese
conception on modernity? How its theoretical frame of references was conceived by Chinese intellectuals?
To approach to an answer to these questions, we need to briefly contextualize the period of time in with
their discourses took place.During the first decades of twentieth century, Chinas self perception, its
cultural ideology and its vision of its relation to the outside world have significantly changed. It is our aim
to trace the course of this ideological change and to study how Chinese intellectuals discoursed on
modernity.
What makes these decades particularly fascinating and complex is that they can be read under neither the
sign of the imperial system nor that of the nation-state, but must be seen in the light of both. The early
1900s are, in Chakrabartys words, a time that insists on being viewed as irreducibly not -one. It is
precisely because these decades inhabit two overlapping and often incompatible systems, two different
and contending cosmologies, that are drawn inexorably into questions of discourse.
To understand how modernity was imagined, discourse and pursued by the Chinese intellectuals in the
early twentieth century, we need a clear insight into the historicity of Modern Chinese thought its origins
and changes in specific cultural and political circumstances. During the first decades of twentieth century,
under intense pressure from Western and Japanese imperialism, China began in earnest its transition from
empire to nation-state, yet this transition was far from universally embraced or certain of completion.
Our study is focus in the period between 1905 and 1919, considering focal-points the post-Boxers period
of Qings Reforms, the 1911 Revolution and the May 4
th
Movement. As Peter Zarrow describes it, this is
transitional and foundational period
12
. Transitional, because it marked the end of a sociopolitical system
and the beginning of another. An empire ruled by a dynastic house became a nation with a constitution,
even if the organs of the nation-state remained weak. It was a time of hard generational struggles, but
ameliorated by commonly held assumptions and solidarities. Foundational, because with the advantage of
hindsight, we can see that much of what would mark China in the twentieth century was built in this
period.
Historical studies have long recognized that the roots of many of the features of the urban Chinese society
in the early decades of twentieth century can be traced back to the nineteenth century, and that the
Communist Revolution of 1949 did not bring them to an end in the interest of creating a new society.
The importance of the late Qing to Chinese modernity has been repeatedly confirmed over the last
generation of scholarship. The limitations of the 1911 Revolution have long been clear; since the 1980s,
the May Fourth narrative has also come under challenge. Historians and literary scholars have made

11
Fung Edmund S. K., The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era, Cambridge
University Press, 2010, p.36.
12 Peter Zarrow (ed), Creating Chinese modernity. Knowledge and everyday life, 1900-1940, P. Lang Publising, 2006, p. 6.
clear that many of the features once attributed to the May Fourth era can in fact be found in the last
decades of the Qing.

The second half of the nineteenth century presented nearly insurmountable challenges for the Qing
dynasty. But these decades also saw the emergence of unprecedented social and economic developments,
particularly in Chinas coastal areas and treaty ports: the rapid growth of newspapers and printed mass
media, especially in Shanghai; a gradual increase in the number of Chinese studying overseas; and the
expansion of new technologies such as railroads, roads, electricity and telegraphs.

Nonetheless, Qing ruling elites proved to be incapable of the far-reaching and systematic reforms
necessary to strengthen the state in the newly competitive international nation-state system. The balance of
power among central, provincial and local elites was fundamentally altered by reform programs. Even if
the late Qing court attempted to create a more efficient bureaucracy and tax regime with the New Policy
(Xn zhng) reforms of 1902, it provoked greater opposition. In terms of traditional political ideology, the
Qing had lost its Mandate to rule; in terms of new political ideas, the nation should be welded by active
and educated citizens.

After its defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War (1895) and the foreign invasion occasioned by the Boxer
uprising (1900), the Qing imperial state burdened by enormous indemnities and a feeble international
reputation began instituting an unprecedented series of modernizing reforms: abolishing the civil service
exam, modernizing military and police forces, supporting female education and banning foot binding,
initiating provincial and constitutional assemblies, and more. As potentially radical as many of these
reforms were, they served mainly to further weaken the imperial courts hold on centralized power, and in
1911 a series of provincial secessionist revolts brought the collapse of the Qing empire and the
establishment of the Republic of China a republic that within a few short years spiraled into chaos and
civil war that did not let up until the late 1920s.
In any case, modernity is not a moment but a process. The late Qing and the Republican period as a whole
mark the origin of modern Chinese discourses. Many of these discourses found positive elements in what
was increasingly reified as the tradition. Trends beginning in the late Qing took several generations to
unfold.

The fall of the Qing state in 1911 left an institutional vacuum that was filled only slowly and with fitful
and violent effort. Imperialist pressures and civil wars, first between warlord governments and later
between the GMD center and its rivals, shaped an era characterized by fragmented state-power power
that on the local level could be authoritarian and overbearing but on the national level was often feeble
and ineffectual. The Revolution of 1911 was a moment in this process. It did not resemble the French
Revolution in marking for its participants, victims and observers a clear break with the past. In spite of the
changes in ritual, behavior and the vast political changes, few Chinese probably subjectively felt 1911 as a
new beginning. Even when the notion of revolution (Gmng) was understood as the overthrow of an
entire political system, the term originally simply referred to replacing the mandate of one dynasty that of
another and it undoubtedly still carried the flavor of the dynastic cycle. The events of 1911 could be
understood in the old story of dynastic cycle as easily as with the new notion of revolution. A certain
sense of temporality was not, for the vast majority of people, immediately changed by 1911. Many factors
meant that the past remained a part of daily life.

Some of the most influential historical work on the republican period wrestles with this failure to create an
effective central government. Typically, Chinas failure to develop a stronger nation-state is interpreted as
confirmation of the assumption that republican-era Chinese modernity was somehow incomplete, that
China somehow fell short of being truly modern. This line of thought has in fact produced some excellent
scholarship. The 1980s debate over whether or not republican China developed a public sphere based on
ideas of civil society and individual autonomy in part reflected this assumption (equating modernity and
national identity). This equation remains the guiding framework for studies of that era. But as invaluable
as many of these studies are, they still explicitly assume that modern identities and the discursive practices
which support them must be nation centered, unified, and individual in the classically liberal
Enlightenment sense.
We consider, however, that the period of the last Qing and the early Republic was a time of a great
pluralism of ideas. Often contradictory, often overlapping, they included populism, democracy, feminism,
liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism, iconoclasm, parliamentarism, new-Confucianism, peoples
livelihood, conservatism, radicalism, freedom, restorationism, and so forth. All these ideas and currents of
thought were expressed in material discursive practices that were shaped through often striving for unity
and coherence, but that were often multiple, contradictory, and in tensions with one another. These
practices announced the epochal change of modernity and at the same time revealed a new vivid attitude
of self-question on Chinese intellectuals and a strong sense of criticism towards their own historical
circumstances.

3. THE EMERGENT DISCOURSE OF CHINESE INTELLECTUALS ON MODERNITY:
The intellectuals in our study belonged to two generations. The first generation consisted on those born
between 1865 and 1880, such as Zhang Binglin (1868-1936), Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei. They were
classical scholars with varying degrees of knowledge of the West and the modern world. This was a
transitional generation, from the late Qing to the early Republic and from literati to modern intellectuals.
The second was the New Culture/May Fourth generation, comprising those born between 1880 and 1895,
such as Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Liang Shuming and Lu Xun, who no longer followed the same career path as
the literati of old but instead developed new ones in their respective fields. Initially trained in Chinese
classical studies, most of them received further education overseas (in Japan, Europe and the United
States), completing their educational their intellectual transition to the modern world. This generation
explored new thought and new possibilities with boldness never seen before.
This intellectual community is not reducible to one single, distinct category. They were critical
intellectuals critical not only regarding cultural issues but also of the prevailing sociopolitical order. Due
to they grappled with specific issues about the nation and its future, their role as both individuals and
members of groups involved in various forms of political action is in the forefront.
Therefore, understanding modernity as both an epoch and an attitude of questioning the past and the
present is important to this study.
a) Chinas enlightenment project, separating past time from the present and future, was inevitably both
top-down and bottom-up. The concept of the age defines the way we understand the relationships among
different schools of thought because underscores the relationships among Chinese liberal, conservative
and socialist thought. It relates to the responses to the crisis of modernization and is linked to the
different modes of integrating China into the world.

Late Qing intellectuals opened Chinas modernity project insofar as they were beginning to explore
cosmologies that were distinct from the traditional ones and insofar as they were focusing their interest on
genuinely new social, political, and institutional arrangements.
13
Charlotte Furth showed how the
intellectual generation of the 1880s turned to an evolutionary and culturally relativistic- worldview,
admired much of the Wests institutional arrangements, and began to rethink ontological and
epistemological questions.
Much of the Republican Chinese literature in culture and politics has its roots in an attempt to analyze the
conditions governing the changes that must take place in the nation. Few intellectuals were detached from
the social and political realities. Such issues as imperialism, underdevelopment and capitalism impinged
on their consciousness and had a definite influence on their thought and action.
At the same time, society was undergoing rapid modernization as lifestyles in the full sense of the word
began to change. Early twentieth-century China experienced rationalization of administration, coming of
consumer culture, industrial projects, and the deliberate presentation of the new. And many Chinese, of
course, subjectively experienced themselves as modern or deliberately sought to become modern.
Modernity was simultaneously Western at least at origins- and universal, open to all, at least in theory.
Chinese modernity was thus located among and pursed by, numerous groups that shared a roughly
common set of practices: acceptable behaviors, norms, discourses and institutions.
This is not to say, however, that the past or tradition must be or even could be entirely repudiated. The
particular and local cannot be placed outside the boundaries of modernity. Nor does it suggest that
Chinese modernity is best understood in terms of Western definitions, though clearly the influence or
impact of Western ideas, the various effects produced by Western imperialism, and certain post-colonial
conditions cannot be ignored. Rather, Chinese ideas about modernity were a product of rapidly changing
global and domestic circumstances. It naturally contained many traditional features but reworked and
evolving in new syntheses.
b) In terms of attitude, a spirit of reflection, critique and self-consciousness pervaded the intellectual
discourse of this period.
Wang Hui puts it in an historical perspective: The basic characteristics of Chinese though on modernity
are doubt and critique. As a result, at the heart of the search for Chinese modernity in Chinese thinking
and in some of Chinas most important intellectuals stands a huge paradox.
14
In the quest for modernity,
Chinese intellectuals critiqued it not only because of its very nature but also and especially because of
Chinas different culture and recent history. They reflected on Chinas past and present, on imperialist
expansion and on the social inequities of capitalism in the West all at once. They believed that it was
important to consider how modernization could avoid or remedy the political and social problems that

13
This might be distinguished from, though perhaps encompassing, the modernization project more narrowly focused on economic standards as
developed by Walt Rostow among others in the 1950s, as again promoted by Chinese leaders today, and, for that matter, similar in some respects
to the self-strengthening reforms of the 1860s.
14
Wang Hui, Contemporary Chinese thought , 150.
would inevitably arise in the wake of liberal democracy, capitalist development and the advance of
modern science and technology.
First, we intended to look for what Benjamin Schwartz calls a framework of common concepts of the
age to comprehend the intricate relationships among different schools of thought. Schwartz pointed out
that the three entities arose at roughly the same time and that they all operated within a framework of
common concepts
15
.
The common concepts were nationalism, progress, change, organic growth, science and democracy, which
provided a shared central ground on which the themes of national survival, state building, capitalist
development, social and political reform, liberty, equally and social justice were thrashed out. This
common frame of reference underscores what Wang Hui has called the identity of attitudes, of the May
Fourth intellectuals, despite their diverse thought.
16
Wang means that, although there was no unified
epistemology or common methodology in thinking about Chinas problems, a belief in being modern was
shared across the intellectual spectrum. Understanding of modernity varied from person to person and
from group to group. But each made his or her own judgment and cultural selection through a process of
critical reflection, using the same keywords and raising the same or similar questions, even if the answers
were different.
Liberal, conservative and socialist thought on organic growth, reform and gradual change drew so close as
to be almost indistinguishable (Fung, 2010). Mainstream Chinese thought rejected political violence but
not social engineering, which sought to eradicate such problems as poverty, illiteracy and corruption and
promote education and industrial development.
17
The intellectual boundaries were not demarcated. Many
educated Chinese were liberal in one respect, conservative in another and socialist in a third, each
representing a modern response to Chinas sociopolitical crisis. They debated about fundamental
difference between Chinese and Western cultures, about Westernization, about the future of China and
about capitalism and socialism. Yet all were interested in achieving a modern society that was liberal,
democratic, just and still Chinese. Although some would sometimes think in terms of opposites, many
more were disposed towards reconciling East and West, modern and traditional, liberal and conservative,
liberty and equality, reason and emotions, value and history and so forth. It was clear to them that
modernity and modernization, meant progress, liberty and national wealth and power, and that it entailed a
reevaluation of Chinese traditions against Western values. But they thought the West should be criticized,
too, where appropriate. Therefore, Chinese modernity was defined by both Chinese and Western historical
experiences and by reflections on both the past and the present.
The recent Chinese past brought into sharp relief foreign intrusions, imperialism, the demise of the
imperial system , military ascendancy, political instability, incessant civil strife and state and nation
building, among other things. This history is very different from the grand narrative of the European
Enlightenment. Yet the Western experience was important for an understanding of how the West had
blazed a trail to modernity and what lessons it had for China.

15
Benjamin Schwartz, Notes on conservatism in general and in China in particular: the case of Chinese intellectuals in China and other
matters, ed. By Benjamin Schwartz, 1-21. Harvard University Press, 1996.
16
Wang Hui, Yuyan yu lishi (shang pian): Zhongguo xiandai lishi zhong de wusi qimeng yundong, Wenxue pinglun 3, 1989, 18-20.
17
On social engineering, see Tung Chen Chiang, Social engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949 , Cambridge University Press,
2001.
It is unnecessary to view Chinese modernity as an alternative modernity that breaks with universal truths
where modernization is undertaken with local particularities. To do so is to acknowledge the existence of a
universal modernity that has been called into question. It is more useful to think about Chinese modernity
as a discourse that underscores the universality-particularity nexus. Drawing on the contemporary notion
of global modernity, Chinese modernity can be seen as having both global and local aspects that interact
and are negotiable it is possible to embed one in the other. Chinese intellectuals have reason to think that
the West has quite as much to learn from China as they from the West. While they deal with local issues,
they also do it with questions concerning all humankind and those about Chinas place in the world.
Historically, the rise of Chinese modernity, the crisis it faced as it evolved and its internal dynamics were
all embedded in the process of East-West cultural communication. Writing in contemporary context,
Wang Hui argues that questions about Chinese modernity and its pathologies should not be considered
merely issues within Chinese society or as simply the results of the transplant of foreign cultures into
Chinese soil; more importantly, they should be considered as issues of cultural interactions using common
language of being modern. It is important to recognize the cultural autonomy of Chinese modernity as it
evolves, taking into consideration Chinas historical narrative. The study of Chinese modernity, in essence,
involves a kind of cultural communicative action
18
.
The belief in the possibility of the construction of crucial aspects of social, cultural and natural orders by
conscious human activities became a central premise of modernity. This view of the possibility of
transformation of socio-cultural orders and their continuous exploration of, and potential mastery over
them is bizarre to traditional ideology such as Confucian philosophy. The idea of progress and through
such historical progress utopian views inherent in revolution and modernity take root. Modernity is
therefore linked to the idea that is possible to realize some of the utopian visions in social life. The idea of
modernity carries the transformation of the premises of the preceding traditions. Among these was the
change of the perception of the place of God/supreme ruler in the construction of the cosmos, and of man,
and of belief in God or in some metaphysical principles. Man and nature tended to be perceived not as
directly regulated by these, but as autonomous entities regulated by some internal laws which could be
fully explained and grasped by human reason and inquiry (Eisenstadt, 1962). Hence, closely related to the
idea of modernity was the transformation of the basic orientations to tradition and authority. The authority
of the past as the major symbolic regulator of social, political and cultural change and innovation gave
way to the acceptance of innovation as a cultural orientation and a possible component of the legitimation
of authority.
The traditional notion of self-identity and the desire to insist on this identity was hard to abandon. Cultural
changes and adjustment were therefore particularly sensitive and difficult.

Chinas quest for modernity as the deconstruction of the natural was a difficult path. The unnatural
arrangement of modernity implies the deconstruction of the natural artifice.
19
It brought the destruction
of tradition, including many beliefs, convictions, certainties, morals, religions and ways of life. It means a
radical rearrangement of forms of human co-operation and the mechanism of problem-solving. What is
natural to the pre-modern conceptions is no longer natural to the modern. Modernity begins to appear
when and where the natural appears as artificial (He Ping: 2002, 5).


18
Wang Hui, Weibo yu Zhongguo de xiangdaixing wenti, in Wang Hui, Wang Hui zixuanji, Nanning: Guanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997, 35.
19
He Ping, Chinas search for modernity. Cultural discourse in the late 20
th
century, Palmgrave, 2002.
The cultural discourse for modernity in the first half of the century was a rivalry between the contentions
of different claims and alternatives for modernization. Many of the newly emerging Chinese intellectuals
came to assure that the problem was, fundamentally, a culture one. The Chinese cultural discourse was
affected by both international and domestic events as well as by the different actors with contentious
ideological commitments and class interests.
Young-tsu Wong showed that Zhang Binglin also both appreciated the new knowledge he could acquire
from the West (via Japan) and was critical of much he learned about Western civilization. He followed the
German idealists whom he read in Japanese translation, and ontologizes some of the key oppositions of
capitalism in thought. He draws on this ontology to cultivate the subjective conditions for a revolutionary
anti-Manchu nationalism, but unlike the German idealists, Zhang did not merely endorse such ontology.
Rather, he used Buddhist categories and the theory of nothingness to negate the basic structure of capital
in ontological form. Such a negation was extremely important since it enabled Zhang to be critical of
many concepts, such as evolutionary history and statism, which became increasingly hegemonic in the
years to come. Zhang thought that Western modernity was not the same as modernity itself. It was his
critique of certain features of the modern West that caused him to be labeled a cultural conservative
along the lines of a Liang Shuming.
20
However, it was his concern for the common people that led Zhang
to skepticism about copying the West.

Liang Qichao and Liang Shuming were also radical intellectuals who critically wanted to preserve
Chinese cultural characteristics. They frequently evaluated modernization from a perspective
characterized by a suspicion of the results of the industrialization, modern urban life and individual
material self-interest. They valued the non utilitarian aspects of human existence. The main thrust of their
critique of modernization was an emphasis on the limits of pure rationalism in solving all the problems of
the human condition.

In early 1919, Liang Qichao expressed strong disillusionment with Western modernity. He believed that
the present situation in Europe had proved that Modern West was not so perfect. Chinese culture, which
contained humanistic ideals, might help correct the defects. His main argument was that rationalism had
destroyed all spiritual values by reducing man to material mechanism. Liang Shuming shared common
themes and approaches with Liang Qichao in his anti-positivist leanings, in his search of the core
significance of Chinese culture under the encrustment of traditions, and his distaste for the Western
modernity
21
. Liang Shumings philosophical discourse emanated from the idea that culture is essentially
characterized by the way the will attempts to deal with environmental obstacles. Liang suggested that
Western cultures in response to their basic problems of survival take a normal or forward direction and
choose to conquer the environment and satisfy their primal desires. All the characteristic and products of
Western culture, such as science, democracy and power over nature, have developed naturally from this
direction of the will. Chinese culture, on the other hand, is characterized by harmonizing demands of the
will itself and the environment, thus this cultural type achieves greater inner contentment.

Modernist intellectuals, such as Hu Shi, on the other hand saw tension between the values of Chinese
culture and the rationalization of social and economic organization towards modernization. In his view,

20
See Guy Alitto, The last confucian Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese dilemma of modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
21
Liang Shuming, Civilization and Philosophy of the Orient and the Occident, 1921.
the preservation of Chinese ways and the acquisition of power-producing modernity could not coexist.
Hence, the Chinese had no choice than abandon their past. This radical anti-traditionalist stance can be
partly attributed to Chinas specific situation at the time (the 1910s to the 1920s). It also originated from a
different value orientation and was shaped by a different mental model about culture. Westernization
theorists had an overwhelming preference for modernity. They also had a far more flexible approach to
cultural tradition. Hu Shi, for whom culture meant only a pattern of adaptation to the environment,
articulated this most explicitly. Thus, there was nothing that could not be changed and no culture from
which China could not borrow. In the debate between Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi and Liang Shuming who
insisted that China could and should rely on some, or the essencial parts of its traditions in its future
development, modernization was coined as neutral term describing the process of acquiring those
universal characteristics of modern Western societies.
These discursive practices were significant because they exemplify how Chinese intellectuals, through the
deconstruction of the natural constantly tried to find resources to create an alternative to western
capitalism. Modernity therefore, was as a discursive representation of a change of epoch, embodied in the
critical attitudes of Chinese intellectuals during this period. They were determined to seek Chinas own
integration to the world, as much as they were concern to define their own concrete ways of social and
political mobilization to get it.
Modernity, as an epoch concept and a self-critical attitude, was expressed through the discourses and
political pronouncements of this critical intellectual community that, as today, beyond the evident
difference of thought among its individuals was also involved in the new social and political context of the
early twentieth century, in the quest for its own independent voice and autonomous position.



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