An Introductory Study on China's Cultural Transformation in Recent Times

This book examines in detail the basic trajectory of the cultural transformation and brings to light the extrinsic conditions and intrinsic mechanisms involved. It focuses on the period from after the Opium Wars to the New Culture Movement, as the New Culture Movement can be considered a pivotal phase in the cultural transformation of modern-day China. The New Culture Movement was a revolutionary eruption triggered by the accumulation of all the new qualitative cultural factors since the Opium Wars. Superficially, the movement’s goal seemed to be to overthrow the traditional culture. But in essence its true objective was to conduct an overall “screening” of that culture. The book elaborates a broad variety of points in this context, including: the ideological and cultural evolution following the Opium Wars; the pressing challenges faced by “Zhong Ti”; the initial shaping of social, public and cultural spaces and major trends in ideological and cultural transformation at the end of the Qing Dynasty; the political disarray and conflicts between the new and old ideology in the first years of the Republic; the rise of the New Culture Movement; and the role of conservatism in the transition to a modern culture.

Geng Yunzhi, born 1938 in Haicheng, Liaoning Province. Graduated from the Department of Philosophy of Liaoning University in 1964. Currently a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, researcher at the Institute of Modern History and doctoral student supervisor, concurrently director of the Society of Chinese Modern Culture and the Hu Shih Research Association as well as president of the China Modern Thought Research Center. In the past forty or so years, Geng Yuzhi has consistently researched China’s modern political history, ideological history and cultural history and written some twenty books, among which are primarily History of the Republic of China, vol. 1 (co-authored), Hu Shih: Research Drafts, A Chronicle of Hu Shih, Rediscovering Hu Shih, Liang Qichao (co-authored), Western Democracy in Modern China, Collected Writings of Geng Yunzhi, Polygonum Grass Collection and Hu Shih’s Posthumous Writings and Confidential Letters. He has also published more than two hundred theses and articles. The Laboratory of the History of Modern Thought he personally set up is among the first key subjects at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.