| Chapter : | Introduction: Tradition and Modernity in China |
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Figure 2. Lu Xun photographed in 1930 wearing traditional clothes. Postcard 1960s.
in science, particularly in the field of medicine. This is why his characterisation of tradition as a suffocating house is such a compelling one. He was aware of being immersed in it himself and was not immune to some of its charms, as the photograph of him wearing traditional clothes demonstrates (see figure 2).
The Qing Dynasty had collapsed in 1911 after the Xinhai Revolution, and the Republic of China was founded in the following year. The period of political confusion that followed was disappointing for those intellectuals who wished to see China embrace modernity, and the formation of the New Culture Movement was a response to that disenchantment. The movement was grouped around the intellectual Cai Yuanpei, who was chancellor of Beijing University and who advocated a critical scrutiny of ‘old Confucian values and institutions [to] reject what had held China back, and find in China’s past the elements of a new culture’