SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The intention in this thesis is to look at the changing political beliefs of China's radical intellectuals in the May Fourth Movement through an examination of the history of the Hsin ch'ing-nien (New Youth) magazine, published from 1915 to 1926 and recognised then and now as the most influential periodical of the movement. Attention is first given to the pre-1919 stage of the May Fourth Movement, generally known as the New Culture Movement, in which the Hsin ch'ing-nien intellectuals were in the forefront of a cultural-intellectual effort to transform Chinese society by an attack on Chinese traditionalism and a promotion of Western liberal-bourgeois ideas. From the time of the May fourth Incident, several members of the magazine became committed to Marxism. The growing Marxist orientation of the magazine led to a split between its liberal and Marxist members in 1921, after which it was an organ of China's first Marxists until it ceased publication in 1926. The emphasis in the thesis is on the process by which Marxism came to be accepted and interpreted by a crucial section of the May Fourth intellectuals, and the subsequent ideological conflict in the early 1920s between the Marxists and other radical intellectuals. A tentative perspective on the May Fourth Movement is put forward in the concluding chapter, in which it is suggested that the movement, though being one of several nationalism-motivated efforts at "modernisation" in modern Chinese history, was qualitatively different from the earlier attempts in that its participants not only sought throughout for a solution beyond the Chinese cultural horizon, but also resorted to direct political action in its later stove. It was in such a context that Marxism tool: root in China.