ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how chronological understanding and other things set the Chinese experience apart from contemporaneous Western ones. It explores the challenges that the Qing political and intellectual worlds faced between 1800 and 1895. The chapter focuses on the emergence of changing visions of the new and the old from the mid-1890s to early 1900s. It presents a series of meditations on the New Culture Movement that closed China’s Fin De Siècle moment, and its implications for later periods. Dissatisfaction with the new government was expressed as outright resistance, as protests against the establishment spilled into the streets of China’s urban centers. The tensions leading up to this intellectual crisis extended back as the beginning of China’s Fin De Siècle moment. The westward-facing desire to learn the technology and statecraft of a new age, inherited from the Self-Strengthening movement of the nineteenth century, had first inspired much of the intellectual foundation of inquiry and cosmopolitan expectations of this new generation.
