the chinese renaissance.doc

III. THE CHINESE RENAISSANCE THE RENAISSANCE was the name given by a group of Peking University students to a new monthly magazine which they published in 1918. They were mature students well trained in the old cultural tradition of the country, and they readily recognized in the new movement then led by some of their professors a striking similarity to the Renaissance in Europe. Three prominent features in the movement reminded them of the European Renaissance. First, it was a conscious movement to promote a new literature in the living language of the people to take the place of the classical literature of old. Second, it was a movement of conscious protest against many of the ideas and institutions in the traditional culture, and of conscious emancipation of the individual man and woman from the bondage of the forces of tradition. It was a movement of reason versus tradition, freedom versus authority, and glorification of life and human values versus their suppression. And lastly, strange enough, this new movement was led by men who knew their cultural heritage and tried to study it with the new methodology of modern historical criticism and research. In that sense it was also a humanist movement. In all these directions the new movement which began in 1917 and which was sometimes called the New Culture Movement, the New Thought movement or The New Tide was capturing the imagination and sympathy of the youth of the nation as something which promised and pointed to the new birth of an old people and an old civilization. Historically, there had been many periods of Chinese Renaissance. The rise of the great poets in the Tang Dynasty, the simultaneous movement for a new prose literature modeled after the style of the Classical period, and the development of Zen Buddhism as a Chinese reformation of that Indian religion-these represented the First Chinese Renaissance. The great reform movements in the eleventh century, the subsequent development of a powerful secula