Cultural Transition and Village Discourse in Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

The transformation of political culture in twentieth-century China has been one of the central issues in past studies of Chinese politics, most of which have focused on intellectual trends and ideological confrontations at the national levels—ranging from the enlightenment movement during the May Fourth period to “bourgeois liberalization” in the 1980s and the dispute between neoliberalism and neoleftism in the 1990s and early 2000s.¹ By and large, two grand narratives have shaped the literature, both of which have assumed the failure of state making in the late Qing and early Republican periods as a taken-for-granted fact. The modernization narrative, prevailing in the writings of liberal intellectuals, interprets the first three decades of the twentieth century as a series of China’s frustrations in borrowing democracy and science from the West and a dark age in which warlordism and imperialism inflicted unprecedented agonies and distress upon the Chinese nation. The revolutionary narrative, embraced by Marxist intellectuals in their interpretation of modern China, sees those failures as the cause behind the rise and triumph of the Communist revolutions.²