China’s Revolutions in the Modern World. Rebecca E. Karl

      This incipient bourgeois class in China at times allied itself with a growing intellectual or petty bourgeois fraction of urban society, whom the capitalist elite often funded in their cultural endeavors. And a different fraction of the even-pettier bourgeoisie, men and women alike, moved into the professions, staffing the middle-administrative positions of the burgeoning bureaucracies of corporate, industrial, urban, and state institutions. These petty urbanites (xiaoshimin / ) gradually found a collective identity in the trappings of middle-class life: the nuclear family (rather than life in a multigenerational family), consumerism, hygienic living, love marriages, bank accounts, home economics, children’s education, and more. Much of this was promoted through the exponential growth of a properly capitalist media and press environment—one where daily papers were now supported through advertising and subscription revenue. The new mass medium could reliably peddle pills, potions, and prescriptions; household appliances and conveniences; cosmetics and hygienic products; and opportunities to save for better living and educational activities for children. Alongside, there was a smaller political media presence, whose publications remained dependent upon the generosity of wealthy patrons and sponsors.

      During the same years that dependent development intensified urban wealth and squalor, the overall conditions in rural China also worsened. While it is true that in the brief respite afforded domestic markets in China during the Great War, when imports from Europe were severely curtailed, certain sectors of the rural economy, such as coal mining, saw a temporary increase in profitability;⁹ nevertheless, as the postrevolutionary political mess showed no signs of relenting, various warlords competed with the Republican state du jour to extract revenue from the rural population—either to support military operations, or for more general purposes of urban modernization and bureaucratization. The tax burden became unmanageable, and its arbitrariness sparked frequent resistance that, at times, grew into major regional peasant rebellions.¹⁰ Meanwhile, landlords were busy converting themselves into direct arms of the state—either of the formal state, such as it was, or of whichever local warlord establishment—and through these alliances with revenue-extracting bodies, they became ever more predatory on rural production processes. These developments spread quite unevenly across the Republican Chinese territory, and their forms manifested differently in different geographical regions. North and South China, with different structures of relations of production (rice-based versus wheat-based, for example), experienced these changes in varying degrees. Nevertheless, the scholarly consensus points to a process of peasant immiseration, landlord empowerment, and increasingly sharp social and economic conflicts in the rural areas over land, taxation, and conditions of production. These trends were magnified and compounded over time.

      In sum, in the postrevolutionary years, China saw massive fragmentation in every realm possible: state politics became an arena of strong-arm military factions, with those who happened to hold Beijing formally recognized as the Chinese state by the diplomatic conventions of foreign imperialist powers. Meanwhile, urban-based production spiraled into increasingly evident class divisions, whose conflicts now seemed to shape the contours of any present or projected future; gendered divisions of labor and social life, whose potential toxicity was sometimes muted and sometimes enhanced, moved women into public visibility in schools, factories, offices, streets, or department stores; and increased spatial unevenness within China was enhanced through the elaboration of urban/rural divides, and the relations between coastal regions—enriched by their connections with global markets in finance, commodities, and culture—and the hinterlands, now dominated by new extractive logics of urban and industrial modernization and militarization.

      These developments sparked and informed a new round of revolutionary activity and thinking crystallized in the May Fourth Movement of 1919.

       CHAPTER 3

       The May Fourth Movement (1919) and Cultural Revolution

      What is the foundation of contemporary Europe lying so brilliantly before us? It is the gift of revolutions. The term revolution [geming] in Europe means change from the old to the new, which differs fundamentally from what we call the change of dynasties.

      —Chen Duxiu, “On the Literary Revolution” (February 1917)¹

      What happens after Nora walks out? … What did Nora take with her apart from her awakened mind? … Dreams are fine, but otherwise money is essential … economic rights seem to be the most important factor in present-day society.

      —Lu Xun, “What Happens after Nora Walks Out” (1923)²

      With disappointment rife about the political mess left in the wake of the 1911 Revolution, many intellectuals turned their attention to what they deemed the deeper substratum of Chinese social life: its culture. Critique moved from considerations of politics as state form—now a sphere condemned as endlessly corrupt and ineffectual—to an unsparing critique of the culture that underpinned the structures of everyday social hierarchy. The major target of this critique from the New Culture through the May Fourth period (1915–1925) was Confucianism—or the realm of what was called “man-eating ritual” (chiren lijiao / )—which was imputed as the mode of the social reproduction of hierarchy in elevated and everyday behavior alike. The basic social relations and bonds that this supposed all-encompassing Confucianism (ruxue or rujiao, ) prescribed as the definition of a well-ordered state—the subordination of young to old, of sons to fathers, of women to men, of wives to husbands, of students to teachers, of ruled to ruler, and so on—were now exposed as the building blocks of Chinese “slavishness” and offered as reasons for the supposed inability of the Chinese to adapt to the modern world.³ Soon enough, these were gathered into the catchall negative designation “feudal” (fengjian / ) culture, which was said to be marked by blind obedience to and respect for authority. The feudal infestation had to be overcome.

      From the mid 1910s into the 1920s, the claims made for culture (wenhua or wenming, ) were totalistic. Everything was said to have a cultural root, and that cultural root was said to be not gently sinological nor quaintly traditional nor harmoniously uniting, but rather entirely rotten, toxic even. Cultural rot became an explanation for all manner of vice and ill and social problem—from the high-level corruption of officials through to the everyday gendered practices that sacrificed women’s individuality (renge / ) and men’s freedom (ziyou / ) to family honor on the altar of marriage. Indeed, the proliferation of what were identified as “social problems” (shehui wenti / ) went hand in hand with what were understood to be the devolutionary properties of Chinese culture, where the insufficiencies of the latter were now said to subtend all failures of China’s modern historical passage. This radical critique and condemnation of culture and of China not only characterized but animated the New Culture / May Fourth movement, an extended period of existential crisis in “Chinese-ness” that constituted the first of several cultural revolutions in China’s twentieth century.

      The New Culture / May Fourth movement has been called China’s “Renaissance.” Or, more frequently, its “Enlightenment.” In these designations, the period is defined as the exclusive historical possession of intellectuals. This is a paradigm of modernity that reinforces an elitist ideological bias, rooted in a version of historical narrative where popular mass movements are understood to be radically disruptive of