Talk:New Culture Movement

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 1 September 2020 and 22 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mjwng. Peer reviewers: Ldc30507, Yanjun-Liu3, Sf999129.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 05:11, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Old talk
There seems to be a common misunderstanding that the New Culture Movement (began in 1915) is the May Fourth Movement (began in 1919). In order to reduce this confusion, the section that discusses the New Culture Movement in May Fourth Movement is recommended to be moved to this page. Also, see ongoing discussion already at Talk:May_Fourth_Movement.Caorongjin 23:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * My understanding is this order from reading up different materials.


 * New Culture Movement started in 1915 with the new youth book. It didn't do much at the time..... just raised questions on science, democracy and such.
 * The May 4th Movement and all the national embarrassment of poor handling of the Treaty of Versailles gave the group all the excuses.
 * Those old discussions in the New Culture Movement now have new meanings, Communist meaning. Benjwong 06:16, 3 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I would say your assessment is relatively accurate. The thing is the May 4th movement (named after the May 4th, 1919 protests to the Treaty of Versailles) got its momentum primarily from the New Culture Movement.  The New Culture Movement essentially brought challenges to the problems of China through the medium of the New Youth journal and was hence most influential within the intelligencia.  It was the impetus for things like the vernacular to propagate its message and challenging Confucianism as a medium of control.  When the Treaty of Versailles denied China its assumed privilege, the May 4th movement took the momentum of the New Culture Movement to the masses and focused on more political structures (e.g. CPC, anti-imperialist/-capitalist emphasis of the Anti-Christian Movement, etc.).  So, though you are right in that it did not do much at the time, the May 4th movement probably would not have grown to its strength without it.  The CPC, for example, used the New Youth journal as the platform to expand itself. Caorongjin 19:59, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Why don't we just throw on an easy time table onto the article background and move all the new culture movement stuff over to this article?


 * New Culture Movement of 1915
 * New youth book
 * New Culture Movement of 1917
 * Treaties versailles 1919
 * May Fourth movement 1919
 * Same Culture Movement (whether it should be mentioned at all?)
 * Push for Vernacular Chinese
 * Communist Party of China 1921/1922

When I think about the May fourth movement, I see it as one big protest. Surely different people see it differently. Whereas the New Culture movement keeps on going for years and years. Whether it should be mentioned a 3rd time, I can see why you feel it is questionable. Benjwong 04:25, 9 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, my objection to a table would be the fact that the May Fourth and New Culture movements are seen by Western and Chinese historians as two distinct movements. One was primarily an intellectual movement; the other a movement of the masses on a political level.  I think there is actually more stuff that can be placed in the May Fourth movement section that is not already. Caorongjin 05:26, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok I think I know what you are saying. Keep all the political stuff at the May fourth movement article.  Move all the anti-capitalist/christianity/traditionalism stuff here.  Benjwong 21:59, 27 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I note this hasn't been done yet - the moving of the new culture movement material. Given how very cursory the new culture movement entry is as well as the problem with conflating the New Culture and May Fourth movements mentioned here I would strongly urge the people working on these pages to follow through on this. --Isoldest (talk) 23:20, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

New Culture Movement expansion
I support the expansion of the present New Culture article, in fact, a whole new article, not simply moving the one short paragraph from the May Fourth article. ch (talk) 06:12, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

New Lead paragraph
To promote this idea, I have composed a new and more detailed lead. CAn we fill out the article to covers the topics I mention? 75.4.146.134 (talk) 06:17, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

The changes by Caorongjin are a great improvement! But I did have minor disagreements.


 * 1) I didn't think our sources would support the contrast between the "cultural" movement of the "intelligentsia" and the political movement of the "masses." My reason is that "intelligentsia" is an anachronistic concept. Although "intellectuals" is better, the new phase of the movement after 1919 was still not a movement of the "masses," only of more democratic intellectuals.


 * 1) Moving the sentences about the assessment of the New Culture Movement. Would it be ok to move this back? It's not limited to the relation to the CCP and it seems better to have it in the summary opening section of what hopefully will become a more detailed article.

I look forward to hearing your ideas for this expansion. ch (talk) 05:38, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Opposition
I believe there should be a section on dissent/opposition to the New Culture Movement on a whole. Xiong Shili was quite vocal in opposing the movement, and for 2 generations, overseas Chinese communities and Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong were deeply influenced by the scholarship of Chien Mu who, by the time of his death in 1990, was the last living prominent Chinese intellectual completely rejecting the merits of the movement.

Even though after the lifting of the martial law in Taiwan of 1987, the voices opposing the New Culture Movement were marginalized in Taiwan with the lifting of a ban of mainland Chinese scholarship's distributions in Taiwan, there are still many voices disputing the movement on a fundamental level. From a academic perspective, Hsu Cho-yun (Xu Zhuoyun), Professor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh, disputes the standards of contemporary use of Chinese language because of a lack of education and training in Classical Chinese, and calls it a "A cultural crisis that is a 'mission impossible' to remedy" in a newspaper opinion piece and traces its source to the New Cultural Source in the same article (United Daily, June 1999, Taiwan). Likewise on a popular history level, To Kit also disputes the movement on similar grounds.--JNZ (talk) 05:14, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Recent edits of Evaluation section
Recent edits have sought to change a summary of historians' assessments - which is well referenced - according to the editor's apparent personal assessment. Please don't do that. Mozzy66 (talk) 12:49, 21 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your suggestion, which probably refers to my recent edits. Maybe you could expand a little, since I'm not sure whether the problem is that the edits are "personal" or ... what? I appreciate your saying that the summary was "well referenced," since I was the one who supplied them. But I think that you are right that the section could be better spelled out, and I tried to improve it with more references which are not "personal." Please let me know if this is what you have in mind. ch (talk) 01:14, 22 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi ch. Actually I was referring to the edits by HypatiaPrometheus. From what I tell, your changes all seem to be good expansions of this article - thanks for doing that! Cheers, Mozzy66 (talk) 11:03, 22 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks -- sometimes a comment like yours gets good results because of those famous "unintended consequences"! Maybe we should post random "please clean up this article" comments and see what happens. ch (talk) 18:43, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

Chen Duxiu, Hu Shih, Shenbao
For my first edit, I added some more detail as to how Chen Duxiu contributed to the emergence of the New Culture Movement, as well as adding the English pronunciation in the article text directly to add more clarity. There seems to be multiple references to his contributions, but no clear introductory statement of his connection to the movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mjwng/sandbox Mjwng (talk) 00:16, 20 November 2020 (UTC) mjwng

I just added some more detail as to what Hu Shih advocated with respect to the scientific principles. I also added some clarification as to how the newspaper Shenbao contributed to shaping the New Culture Movement. For images, I added the cover of a New Youth magazine since the whole page had no images. I also added a sentence in the lead to introduce the importance of the New Youth magazine to the whole movement. For clarity, I grouped the information regarding Hu Shih into one paragraph as it was split into two previously since it seems like Yuan Shikai and Chen Duxiu each had their own paragraph of their contributions to the movement. I also made some grammatical changes to where I thought it was needed. The biggest edit I made was to the visual outlay of the page, as I thought categorizing the different contributors with their own respective paragraphs would help readers digest the information more easily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mjwng/sandbox Mjwng (talk) 05:30, 18 December 2020 (UTC) mjwng