ABSTRACT
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural producers, writers and artists in China absorbed an increasing variety of foreign influences and ideas. A turning point was China’s opening to the West after the Treaty of Nanjing in 1942. The designated treaty ports of Canton (now Guangzhou) and Shanghai became centres of intellectual fervour, political protest and commercial culture. By the 1920s, the political imperative of nation building led to new understandings of the role of culture. Foreign ideas, notably ideas inherited from Soviet Marxism, were seeded into the field of Chinese traditional culture. The resulting hybrids were productive – in the sense of their rapid dispersal – but for many they were aesthetically less pleasing than the elegant culture of Chinese tradition. However, the utilitarian role of culture superseded aesthetics.
