The Modernity Denied by the Future: The First World War and the Making of the Hybridity of May Fourth New Culture Movement

Scholars have paid much attention to the influence that the May Fourth Movement rather than the First World War, has exerted on the New culture Movement. Since the Late Qing and early Republican period, most Chinese saw the West society as the new/the future of their own country, which is the aim of the New Culture Movement at its first phase. However, the outbreak of the First World War partly changed this trend, and Chinese elites considered the civilization of the brand new future in place of the Western civilization which they once took as exemplar has recently gone to the bankruptcy. And they considered their time as the contemporary. The future is almost complex and unknown to them, however, the future is considered as transcendence, even as a denial to the modern civilization. Following this trend, a new tendency, that took the modernity whole as negative symbol in the circle of thinkers, was formed. As a result, the contemporary partly denied the legitimacy of modernity in the name of future. At the same time, to some degree, this rescued the Chinese tradition which was once thought as the opposite of modernity and also other being depressed intellectual resources. The Western modern civilization, the Chinese traditional civilization and the future civilization in mind, which existed, competed, interrelated and eventually fought with each other in the milieu of the intellectual circle in May Fourth Movement, and then formed the hybridity of New Culture Movement.