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The New Culture Movement's drive to a family reform reveals that the primary impetus of the family revolution was the search of young, urban males for a new identity in modernizing and industrializing society. To educate other people with their family reform, it released a founding journal, The Youth, and claimed the Beijing University as its headquarters. The New Culture Movement started organizing and orienting itself into peer associations, in which associations the movement's young participants were able to formulate their radical proposals for a new society. The creation of such associations was one of their most important innovations of the New Culture Movement. In January 1920, one of the peer groups coalesced to offer an explicit challenge to traditional family organization. Yi Jiayue and Lou Dunwei, both Beijing students, called together several comrades to discuss the “cruel circumstances” and “barbaric aggravation” that young people suffered in their families.

Most of the radical ideas that captured the imagination of China's progressive intellectuals during the New Culture Movement began to crystallize after the catastrophic Second Revolution among a loose network of thinkers and political activists, most of whom were outside China. The extraordinary impact of Cai Yuanpei's reform program at Beida derived as much from the timing of his arrival in Beijing as it did from the content of his message. Cai's appointment of Chen Duxiu illustrates that his defense of broad-minded tolerance benefited those who sought to challenge the prevailing culture at Beida. Cai encouraged students to participate in educationally and morally uplifting extracurricular activities. He and the other new leaders of the university provided a crucial opening for professors and students who felt less ambivalent than he did about interpreting Beida's educational mission in an explicitly political fashion.

Taking the infamous “Wang Jingxuan” hoax as its focus, this chapter revisits Lin’s conflicts with younger intellectuals, especially those associated with the journals New Youth (Xin qingnian), Weekly Review (Meizhou pinglun), and New Tides (Xin chao). Through detailed readings of well-known but little-examined materials, this chapter demonstrates how younger writers’ crusade against Lin Shu articulated important new ideas about the relationship between intellectuals, their audiences, and the culture market that remain significant today. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how Lin eventually followed his enemies’ stories about his ossified cultural views. Despite his public shaming and defeat, he continued to serve an important role for the Commercial Press, packaging museum-piece collections of “premodern” Chinese literature.

Stefan Zweig’s works were first introduced in Republican China after the fall of the Qing Empire (1644-1911) during a period of transition, re-orientation, and civil war. This chapter focuses on two cases, Geng Jizhi’s (1899-1947) translation of the novella The Governess of 1927 and Sun Hanbing’s (1902-1940) translation of the novella Letter from an Unknown Woman of 1934. Geng Jizhi served as a diplomat of the Nationalist government at Chinese consulates in the Soviet Union and was one of the most important translators of classical Russian literature. Eager to introduce European notions of psychology and psychoanalysis to a Chinese readership during the New Culture Movement, he translated Zweig’s novella from a Russian source. Sun Hanbing, a professor of economics who had extensively studied in the US, based his translation on an English edition and attached not only an American but also a Soviet review to his translation. Active in Shanghai’s illegal Marxist circles he published the novella as a negative example of decadent bourgeois literature in a Marxist journal that was banned shortly after. This chapter therefore showcases the introduction of Zweig in China as a result of multiple interweaving linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and, in particular, diametrically opposed political systems.

This chapter examines how the First World War devastated the missionary work of both the SVD and the BMS. The war humbled both missionary societies, and this chapter narrates how missionaries tried to reorient themselves in a dramatically altered global missionary landscape. Confessional differences shaped the responses of the missionary societies to their respective international missionary communities. After the war, German Protestants became increasingly nationalist and refused to work with their American and British rivals. The Catholic missionary society, on the other hand, embraced the Vatican and shed its nationalist character.

This chapter serves as the narrative hinge of the book. It examines how the once theologically conservative and vehemently anti-Confucian German missionaries came to grips with Confucianism in the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that the rise of Communism hastened the shift from an anti-Confucian to a pro-Confucian stance. The specter of a global Communist insurrection pushed the two German societies to turn toward Confucianism as an ally. The political situation in Germany was just as important as the one in China: German missionaries embraced Confucianism because they witnessed the threat of Communism in both countries. The chapter compares the German experience with other international missionary organizations and argues that the German embrace of Confucianism was conditioned by their particular experience of failure after World War I. It also examines how missionaries continued to criticize rival religions, such as Buddhism.

This chapter examines and compares the lives of two Chinese Christians, Ling Deyuan and Chen Yuan, who worked with the BMS and the SVD. Their stories illustrate the narrowing political options that Chinese Christians faced between 1945 and 1950. By 1950, both Ling and Chen had to denounce their missionary allies and declare allegiance to the new Communist state. Ling and Chen’s stories attune us to the ironies of history and reveal how the missionary encounter helped lay the foundation for Christianity’s position in postwar China. Their engagement with German missionaries, the chapter contends, prepared and armed them with the anti-imperial, anti-Western rhetoric that the Chinese Communists could accept. Their stories help us understand the monumental and dangerous individual choices that Chinese Christians had to make after the Communist victory in 1949.