ABSTRACT

From popular music to learned debates, poetry to television, social science research to the fad for qigong breathing exercises, thoughtful citizens of the People's Republic were caught up in a "culture fever"; in the later 1980s, they took up a passionate reexamination of the virtues, failings, and possibilities of Chinese culture. Hou Dejian's "Children of the Dragon" called for them to live up to the obligations of Chinese national identity, complexly evoking both the problematic past and aspirations for the future. The sense of crisis in Chinese culture not only produced arguments among literary critics, it exerted a profound influence on students' identities and ideas, including their understanding of democracy. Facing a similar combination of cultural crisis and corrupt, authoritarian politics in 1915, Chen Duxiu, a classically trained scholar turned vernacular writer, editor, and radical activist, advised intellectuals to turn away from politics to pursue culture.