ABSTRACT
The May Fourth Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s 1 aimed to create a "new citizen" in order to build the foundations for a new nation-state. Before Chinese could concentrate their energies on public affairs, they had to be freed from their prior loyalties to parents and family; their intellectual horizons had to be raised from the local and personal realm to that of the nation. Preaching in favor of "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy," the New Culture activists denounced Confucianism, traditional religious beliefs, China's family system, and the subordination of women. The iconoclastic thrust of the movement was supplemented by a response to the new social tensions accompanying the emergence of an industrial working class in cities like Shanghai. New interest in mass mobilization spurred language reforms to enlarge communication with Chinese of different social classes, attempts to organize and educate workers, and experiments in rural reconstruction. The leaders of this first cultural revolution were to be youth, an inversion of the traditional Chinese age hierarchy.
