What are the reasons for China's change to western culture in the 20th century

It is undeniable that without the influence of modern Western thinking, Chinese literature in the 20th century would have been a different mold, and the literature of the new period would have been completely different. The influence and penetration of modern Western thought on Chinese literature, especially on contemporary literature, is all-round, multi-layered and ubiquitous.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the transformation of Chinese society from traditional to modern, traditional literature, which had been nurtured and developed by traditional culture, could no longer satisfy and adapt to the needs of the people in the new type of society in terms of their spirituality, emotions, and senses, and was on the way to extinction. The times demanded that Chinese literature seek newness and change. Against this background, all kinds of modern Western thinking, with its economic, political, scientific and technological might, entered China in force, and traditional Chinese literature was overwhelmed and quickly disintegrated under the impact of these thoughts. Taking this as a starting point, Chinese literature in the twentieth century began to open up from the closed world to the world, from the local to the global. The works of the writers in this period were all influenced by the Western modern trend: Lu Xun's The Scream drew on symbolism, romanticism and other techniques in addition to the basic spirit and techniques of realism, laying down the basic character of modern Chinese novels; Guo Moruo's The Goddess was influenced by the diversity of Rabindranath Tagore, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Whitman, Shelley and others, and formed the Romanticism; Bingxin's and Zhou Zuoren's prose, too, formed their own styles under the influence of Western prose writers....... By the 1930s, under the influence of Freudianism and Western modernist literary thinking, China also saw the emergence of the New Sensation novels represented by Liu Naou and Mu Shiying. However, the thought of Western modernism on Chinese literature in this period was limited; it mainly acted on the form of Chinese literature, but did not penetrate into the marrow of Chinese literature, and failed to really influence the spirit of Chinese literature. Chinese writers' study of modern Western thought also remained only on the surface, failing to penetrate into the depths of Western cultural thought.

Decades of confinement after the founding of the People's Republic of China kept all modern Western thinking out of the country, and foreign philosophical writings that were occasionally translated as critical materials and counter-teaching materials, such as the "Series of Academic Masterpieces of the World Translated into Chinese" and the "Selected Materials of Modern Foreign Bourgeois Philosophy" published by the Commercial Press and the Shanghai People's Publishing House in the 1960s, were also translated into Chinese, but not into Chinese. Modern Foreign Bourgeois Philosophical Materials" and other series, as well as the writings of Sartre, Heidegger and others, were also met with resistance, skepticism, criticism and indifference, and had little impact.

Toward the end of the 1970s, China adopted a policy of reform and opening up, and the door of the country was reopened to the world, with all kinds of modern Western thinking pouring into China like a tidal wave. Intellectuals who had just emerged from the political nightmare of the decade-long Cultural Revolution had a great thirst for cultural resources from the West. In order to satisfy these urgent needs of the Chinese people, translators began to translate and introduce a large number of modern Western ideas, and publishing houses also published a large number of works by Western thinkers and literary figures. For example, the Sichuan People's Publishing House took the lead in the

early 80's and published more than a hundred books in the "Toward the Future Series", most of which were translations of new scientific and technological works, humanities, social sciences, and political and legal writings in the world today. Shanghai Translation Publishing House followed with "Modern Western Philosophy Translation Series", and then Sanlian Bookstore launched "Culture: China and the World", "Academic Literature Library", "New Knowledge Library", translating and publishing nearly one hundred books. After that, Sanlian Bookstore launched "Culture: China and the World", "Academic Literature Library", "Xinzhi Literature Library" and translated and published nearly 100 modern Western books, which promoted the spread of modern Western thinking in China in the 1980s as never before. People not only came into contact with Kant and neo-Kantianism, Hegel and neo-Hegelianism, but also with phenomenology, hermeneutics, Freudianism, existentialism, Western Marxism, logical-analytic philosophy, as well as modern and contemporary political science, jurisprudence, pedagogy, and history. In the field of literature, Western modernist literature has also been translated and introduced in great numbers. The four-volume, eight-volume Selected Works of Foreign Modernist Literature, edited by Yuan Kejia,*** became a popular bestseller upon its publication. Other publishers also competed to publish foreign literature, such as Beijing Foreign Literature Publishing House and Shanghai Translation Publishing House jointly published the 20th Century Foreign Literature Series, Foreign Literature Masterpieces Series, Guangxi Lijiang Publishing House published the Nobel Prize Winning Writers' Works, as well as a large number of foreign literature published by the publishers of the study of foreign literature by the majority of the readers of the pro-favorable. Accompanied by the fever of Western studies in the intellectual circles, such as Sartre fever, Nietzsche fever, Freudian fever, Heidegger fever, hermeneutic fever, deconstructionist fever, feminist fever, and the fever of New Historicism, contemporary Chinese literature has also continuously produced various literary trends, such as "scar literature", "reflective literature", "search for literature", "literature of the dead", "literature of the dead", "literature of the dead", "literature of the dead", and so on. "Scars Literature", "Reflection Literature", "Roots Literature", "Pioneer Novels", "New Realistic Novels", "New Historicist Novels "New Realistic Novel", "New Historical Novel", "Women's Literature" and so on. Chinese critics, too, have learned various methodologies. For example, 1985 was called the "Year of Methodology", and phenomenological methods, hermeneutic methods, Western Marxism, feminist methods, literary psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian mythological archetypes, and structuralist methods all flooded into the academic world. Critics use these new methods to analyze and dissect the inner elements of contemporary works, to reveal the psychological structure of the Chinese people, to present the deep unconscious of literary works, and to excavate the mode of power operation of ideology.

The face of Chinese literary criticism has never been the same.

Chinese writers, too, drank from the flood of modern Western thought, applying to their creations the various writing techniques and inspirations they learned from it, and the works of well-known writers in the 1980s basically bear traces of imitation and learning. For example, Wang Meng's series of short and medium-sized experimental works in the early 1980s were y influenced by "stream of consciousness" novels; Yu Hua's works were inspired by Kafka, Kawabata Yasunari, and Rob Grier; Sun Ganluo's and Ge Fei's works were inspired by Borges; Mo Yan's works were inspired by magic realism; and Mo Yan's works were inspired by magical realism. Mo Yan's works were y influenced by magical realism, and so on. The influence of foreign literature had made Chinese writers feel deep anxiety in the mid-to-late 1980s. As they matured creatively, these writers gradually emerged from the shadows of foreign writers in the 1990s, and felt great ecstasy after discovering themselves.

Entering the 1990s, China's society and culture continued to undergo a rather complex and volatile "transformation", with the various modern Western trends that were once so popular gradually cooling down, and the society's value orientation undergoing a counter-intuitive change: with the disappearance of literary sensationalism and the collapse of the Enlightenment project, the spirit of the intellectuals returned to its privileged position as leaders. With the disappearance of the sensational effect of literature and the collapse of the Enlightenment project, the superior position of intellectuals as leaders was dissolved, and the intellectuals who were no longer social elites were divided. A considerable part of the intellectuals said goodbye to the idealization of the 80's, and went to the secular world, attacked the sublime, promoted privatization, and escaped from the history and the reality, and the literature in the 90's was gradually moving from the center to the periphery. In the 1990s, a post-modern tendency emerged in Chinese society, and deconstructive discourse became the mainstream of the literary world. Post-modernist thinkers, such as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Roland Barthes, became the spiritual protagonists of the times. Chinese literature, influenced by this trend of thinking, also appeared "post-modern tendency". In the 1990s, other modern trends in the West were feminism and New Historicism, which also contributed to the development of Chinese literature. These two trends also contributed to the Chinese literary world, "new historical novels" and "women's literature" flourished for a while.