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

the liberal over the revolutionary momentums behind the period’s upheavals and has guided much research on the period in Euro-American and Chinese Nationalist (Taiwan) scholarship.⁴ An alternative paradigm of the New Culture / May Fourth—purveyed until very recently in PRC scholarship—holds that this period led teleologically to the introduction of Marxism and the formation of the Communist Party (1921), which is the true revolutionary successor to this (petty) bourgeois phase of culture critique. Highlighting the role of the Communist Party in organizing and leading progressive historical initiatives, this PRC narrative turns the New Culture / May Fourth into a mere transmission belt for Marxism; it thus forecloses the more radical aspects of the culture critique (its anarchistic tendencies, for example), consigns to historical oblivion the competing liberal contribution (slated for inevitable historical obsolescence), and emphasizes to the exclusion of much else the coming-into-being of the Bolshevik-Communist nexus of political-cultural social relations and knowledge production. In this party-centered narrative, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 propels history into motion in a linear unbroken line traced from Russia to China to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.⁵ Each of these narratives contains elements of truth. But none of them covers the complexity of the historical questions raised (and never answered) at the time about modernity, Chinese-ness, and China’s modern revolutionary histories.

      In 1917, Chen Duxiu, later one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but at this point still just a professor at Beijing University with a reputation for radicalism, wrote a rallying call to the youth of China to cast off the old and create something new. The youth—a category of Chinese social life just emerging into relevance, as elders had hitherto been venerated to the exclusion of others—were, according to Chen, still relatively unsullied by blind adherence to tradition and thus the only ones capable of challenging commitments to hierarchy so as to produce new social values. Chen’s argument proceeded as a call for a literary revolution, where revolution is named—as cited at the opening of this chapter—the tide of modern times. His exhortation is comprised of three positions. The first is encapsulated in the slogan “Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people!”: a wholesale attack on what he considered the formulaic, dead classical mode of writing characteristic of ancient Chinese texts, with a concomitant call for a writing style and system closer to the everyday lives of living human beings. The former type of writing, in his estimation, perpetuated the reproduction of a social hierarchy of the classically educated and the elders, whereas the latter would be productive of new values ideally rooted in “the people.” Second and relatedly, Chen called for an end to “the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism!” Realism, at that time in China and Japan, as well as in Euro-American literature, was understood to be an advanced form of literary expression: it was unadorned, clean, socially useful, and devoid of the show-offy and imitative flourishes required of “good” classical writing. Realism was imbued not with timelessness but with the timeliness and dynamism of rapidly changing social life itself. Chen’s third position was expressed as: “Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!” In juxtaposing the recluse to popular society, Chen indicated that literature could not be created by and for individuals insulated from society, but rather had to be a politically and socially democratic creative act.⁶

      Chen’s focus on the literary/cultural sphere signaled a retreat from politics in its state form. However, in its invocation of “the people” and its totalistic critique of the hitherto-accepted intertwined reproductive relation of textual practice and social hierarchy, Chen’s call exhibits the elements of the conjunctural moment of New Culture in China, when the arrival of the working class and social division, along with the emergence of the intelligentsia, became a potential social and political alliance that could transform China.⁷ This is when socialism—as well as anarchism, syndicalism, feminism, nationalism, and patriotism, among others—became visibly and viscerally relevant to social life, as well as an urgent matter of intellectual investigation and practice. The realm of the cultural, from this time forward, became a primary sphere in which many “isms” were battled into shape and debated into everyday parlance.

      In a less radical mode than Chen Duxiu, the philosopher and literary scholar Hu Shi—educated at Cornell and then under John Dewey at Columbia University, and newly returned to China in the mid 1910s—wrote of his own “modest” sense that literature should be reformed. In an early 1917 essay on the topic, Hu’s proposals revolved around linguistic matters: What language should be used for literary writing? For him, the problem was shaped by the extreme imitative formalism characterizing Chinese writing, an imitative ideal inimical to a creative style or timely content. For Hu, the turn to the vernacular—a written language that in one way or the other would reflect, create, and give literary form to a spoken language—was necessary and yet also fraught with the threat of vulgarity. Neither politically revolutionary nor imbued with any sentimental notion of the “the people,” Hu understood that the trend toward vernacularization, begun already in the late Qing and now gaining traction with the growth of urban literacy and the increase in popular writing for profit-seeking journals and publishing houses, required careful management by elite intellectuals, lest such writing become so debased that the vernacular itself would have to be abandoned as a “high” literary proposition. In Hu’s proposal, safeguarding the vernacular for the literary required it to be properly regulated and channeled, by and through the intellectual elite. In pursuit of this endeavor, Hu chose to praise earlier vernacular writers, such as the authors of the Dream of the Red Chamber or Water Margin, who “faithfully write about the contemporary situation,” thus entering the halls of “true literature”⁸ rather than the far bawdier (and actually more popular) narratives of the Ming-Qing marketplace, such as Jin Ping Mei (The Golden Lotus). Hu’s call for the vernacular as a literary language sparked enormous backlash, with conservatives, including the prolific translator Lin Shu, accusing the foreign-educated Hu of having lost his Chinese-ness and been enslaved by foreign thinking, and with radicals accusing him of snobbish elitism. (No one at this point culturally defended the wildly popular and profitable “lowbrow” novels classified as “mandarin duck and butterfly” literature.)

      Ever since, the battle over what constitutes “the vernacular” (baihua / ) has been continuously waged. As China has a huge number of spoken languages, often corresponding to very specific locations, the question of which of the major languages was to constitute the “standard” spoken vernacular to be reflected and refined in “high” literary form was a cause for much debate. The issue is still not completely solved, although the imposition by strong states after 1949 of a “national language”—in Taiwan called guoyu (, language of the state), and in the PRC called putong hua (, common speech)—foreclosed some possibilities, while leaving the door open for others. In post-1949 Nationalist-ruled Taiwan and Communist-ruled PRC alike, the national language ultimately was modeled on the Northern Chinese dialect that had become the spoken language of the dynastic bureaucracy (“Mandarin”); and yet, most people in China did/do not speak this language as a matter of daily life, or at all. Thus, while various geographical-linguistic forms were offered as possible contenders for literariness (Cantonese, Fujianese, Shanghainese, etc.), until recently, they were excluded a priori. With the rise of regional media empires, however, these languages have staged somewhat of a comeback. The problem of language in today’s China is still part of a struggle over how to be Chinese. The question was systematically raised for the first time in the mid 1910s.

      The most ambitious of the language revolutionaries of the New Culture / May Fourth period, Qu Qiubai, advocated not the endorsement of a particular regional language but rather the creation of an entirely new language, to be pieced together from the ongoing and contemporary comingling of the multilingual, rural-derived proletariats working in urban factories.⁹ Instead of what he called the “mule language” (neither horse nor donkey) of a Europeanized Chinese / Mandarin vernacular that conformed