May Fourth in three keys: revolutionary, pluralistic, and scientific

If any topic in modern Chinese history has been “well done,” to the point of being possibly “overcooked,” it is the May Fourth Movement – by which I refer both to the demonstrations of 1919 and to the broader “New Culture” context in which they unfolded. I would suggest that one reason for May Fourth’s being so “well done,” if not in fact “overcooked,” is because intellectuals love to talk about themselves. The May Fourth-era intellectuals talked about themselves a great deal over the decades after 1919, and we intellectuals belonging to the generations that have followed can relate to those historical figures quite easily. And so we (especially contemporary Chinese intellectuals) have interpreted and narrated them at exhaustive length. Deeply attuned to diachronic process as historians are, it is axiomatic among us that the meaning of the past is always changing in light of the constantly unfolding present. Indeed, we might even say that this phenomenon is what keeps historians “in business.” We know well that the past forever needs remodeling and that somebody has got to do that work. The broad array of commemorative and academic events that have taken place in China and the West in honor of May Fourth’s centennial anniversary, not to mention the outpouring of articles and special issues of journals on the subject, make abundantly clear that, “well done” or “overcooked” though it may be, May Fourth’s value has not been exhausted. How then might we think about May Fourth’s ongoing and ever-replenishing meaningfulness? In pondering that question on the occasion of the centennial anniversary I find myself thinking about a book I assign to my college students in order to teach them about the concept of historiography. That book is Paul Cohen’s study of the Boxer Uprising, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth. Cohen masterfully lays out the variety of kinds voices that write history – those of professional historians, of participants, and of mythologizers, the latter of whom are less interested in rigorous historical research than they are in the value of the past as a contemporary ideological and political resource. Cohen’s work on the “career” of the Boxer Uprising as a historical subject suggests ways that we may think about May Fourth’s post-1919 “career” as a historical subject. Cohen discusses the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s as a key phase in the history of the different narrations of the Boxer Uprising that unfolded during the twentieth century. With regard to the New Culture Movement,