Polarities and the May Fourth Polemical Culture: Provenance of the 'Conservative' Category

This essay argues that the conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in the New Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting the intellectual landscape in terms of a "New Culturalists vs. the rest" divide. In this stratagem, those who lat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Twentieth-century China 2019-05, Vol.44 (2), p.174-189
Main Author: Kuo, Ya-Pei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Chen Duxiu
Conservatism
Culture
Historiography
Mapping
Modernity
Provenance
Radical groups
Radicalism
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Summary:This essay argues that the conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in the New Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting the intellectual landscape in terms of a "New Culturalists vs. the rest" divide. In this stratagem, those who later became "the conservatives" were lumped together for dissenting from the New Culture movement and largely defined by who they were not. Historiographically, the establishment of this polarity scheme sidelined alternative mappings of the intellectual scene. Drawing on the case of the Critical Review (1922–1933)—a journal of "cultural conservatism"—and its polemics against the New Culture, this essay explores one such alternative mapping that grouped "conservative" thinker Liang Shuming (1893–1988) with the New Culturalists. Taking this paradigm as one of many that existed before the mid-1920s, the essay discusses the juxtaposition of multiple schemes of grouping as a strategy for superseding the polarity mode of classification.
ISSN:1521-5385
1940-5065
1940-5065
DOI:10.1353/tcc.2019.0018