Contemporary Chinese Visual Culture: Tradition, Modernity, and Gl ...

(Fairbank & Goldman, 1994, p. 266). This also illuminates Lu Xun’s position, and it is clear that there was an attempt to theorise why certain traditions should be left behind and others conserved. Cai had been a relative latecomer to the idea of the constraints of tradition: ‘My youth was devoted to pedantic learning, a scholasticism confined to explaining the classics and annotating historical works. I began to discover its limitations at the age of 30’ (Gao, 1984, p. 139). He left China in 1907 to study philosophy and art in Germany and returned in 1911. Upon his return, he acted as the Republic’s minister of education for a year before becoming rapidly disillusioned with the chaotic environment in which he was working, and he left once again for Europe. He returned once more to Beijing in 1916 to take up his post at the university, where he appointed key figures from the New Culture Movement, like Chen Duxiu (who had founded New Youth in 1915). It was the university’s radicalised students who were largely responsible for the 1919 Beijing demonstrations that protested against the European Allies’ bequest of Germany’s colonial territories in Shandong to the Japanese in the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded World War One. There was a deep sense of unease about the way in which the U.S. and European colonisers were still able to control the destiny of China. These demonstrations politicised working class, bourgeois, and intellectual communities across Chinese society and became known as the May Fourth Movement. This movement may be seen as the point at which the pendulum swung away from traditional values as solutions to social and cultural problems as well as the point at which the intellectual struggle for autonomy from feudal values became, if not normative, then at least familiar (Schwarz, 1990).

The struggles for power between the nationalists and communists after the founding of the Communist Party in 1921 (their brief alliance to fight the Japanese until the close of the Second World War) and the subsequent success of the Communist Revolution in 1949 are too complex a tale for such a brief introduction to unravel. For the purposes of the debates that follow in this book, however, it is not too far reaching to observe that the nationalists used Confucianism to legitimise their position (Lee, 2006), whereas the communists promoted Western