What is the nature and significance of the New Culture Movement?

The New Culture Movement was an ideological and cultural innovation and literary revolution against tradition, Confucianism and literature. It dealt a heavy blow to the traditional rituals that had ruled China for more than 2,000 years, inspired people to realize democracy, promoted the development of modern science in China, and laid the ideological foundation for the spread of Marxism in China and the outbreak of the May Fourth Patriotic Movement.

The early New Culture Movement played an important role in the May Fourth Movement and had a significant impact. Some scholars believe that, firstly, the early New Culture Movement publicized the ideas of democracy and science, and made ideological preparations for the May Fourth Patriotic Movement;? Secondly, the development of the early New Culture Movement gradually formed a trend of thought to transform national character, and this new trend of thought inspired nationalism and promoted the outbreak of the May Fourth Patriotic Movement.

Finally, the early New Culture Movement promoted the reform of Chinese education, created favorable social conditions for the May Fourth Patriotic Movement, and trained a group of leaders and backbone elements.

The New Culture Movement played a very important role in the reconstruction of values in modern China. Some scholars believe that "democracy," "science," "equality," "socialism" and other new values propagated by the New Culture Movement have become the core values for the contemporary construction of socialism. Some scholars believe that the new values propagated by the New Culture Movement, such as "democracy," "science," "equality," and "socialism," have become important ideological resources for the construction of socialist core values in contemporary times.

Expanded:

The New Culture Movement was started by bourgeois radical democrats. It had great merits and serious shortcomings.

(1) They gave priority to the transformation of national character. However, without the revolutionary practice of transforming the social environment that gave rise to the feudal ideology, it is impossible to fundamentally transform the ideology, the national character created by this social environment, by relying only on the cries of a few people and on limited means of propaganda. They did not combine the New Culture Movement with the labor and peasant movement, and confined the cultural movement to the circle of intellectuals.

(2) They also avoided the actual struggle against the warlord government at that time and did not put forward the task of anti-imperialism positively.

(3) As for the literary revolution at that time, although they proposed to build a "national literature", the literary activities at that time were only limited to a part of the intelligentsia, and it was not yet possible to popularize it among the workers and peasants. The one-sidedness of the criticism of classical Chinese literature and the total affirmation of Western literature ultimately led to the incompleteness of Western literature and the negation of Eastern literature, and was the beginning of the decline of classical Chinese culture.

(4) The advocates of the New Culture Movement criticized Confucianism in order to clear the way for the development of capitalism in China. However, since the program of bourgeois **** and state does not work in China, fundamentally, the promotion of bourgeois democratism does not provide people with an ideological weapon to understand China and to effectively transform Chinese society.

(5) Many leading figures at that time did not yet have the critical spirit of Marxism, and the methods they used were, in general, still bourgeois methods. Some of them looked at things very one-sidedly, with bad being absolutely bad and good being absolutely good. This formalistic way of looking at things influenced the later development of the movement.

Baidu Encyclopedia - New Culture Movement