10 May 2017.
“Read the following passages from Chen Duxiu’s “Call To Youth” written in 1915. Who are the “slaves” that the author is referring to? What is Chen Duxiu’s criticism of China in the 1910s?”
“Read the following passages from Chen Duxiu’s “Call To Youth” written in 1915. Who are the “slaves” that the author is referring to? What is Chen Duxiu’s criticism of China in the 1910s?”
| Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 陳獨秀 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chen in the First Nanjing Prison in the spring of the 26th year of the Republic [1937] | |
| Secretary of the Central Bureau of the Communist Party of China | |
| In office July 1921 – July 1922 | |
| Chairman of the Central Executive Committee | |
| In office July 1922 – January 1925 | |
| General Secretary of the Central Committee | |
| In office January 1925 – July 1928 | |
| Succeeded by | Xiang Zhongfa |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 8 October 1879 Anqing, Anhui, Qing Dynasty |
| Died | 27 May 1942 (aged 62) Sichuan, Republic of China |
| Nationality | Chinese |
| Political party | Communist Party of China |
| Alma mater | Waseda University |
| Chen Duxiu | |||
| Simplified Chinese | 陈独秀 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 陳獨秀 | ||
| |||
| Original name: Qingtong | |||
| Simplified Chinese | 庆同 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 慶同 | ||
| |||
| Courtesy name: Zhongfu | |
| Chinese | 仲甫 |
|---|---|
Document C: “Call to Youth” (Original)
The Chinese compliment others by saying, “He acts like an old man although still young.” Englishmen and Americans encourage one another by saying, “Keep young while growing old.” Such is one respect in which the different ways of thought of the East and West are manifested. Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. …
Alas! Do these words really fit the youth of our country? I have seen that, out of every ten youths who are young in age, five are old in physique; and out of every ten who are young in both age and physique, nine are old in mentality. … I carefully propose the following six principles, and hope you will give them your calm consideration.
1. Be independent, not servile. … The history of modern Europe is commonly referred to as a “history of emancipation”: the destruction of monarchical power aimed at political emancipation; the denial of Church authority aimed at religious emancipation; the rise of the theory of equal property aimed at economic emancipation; and the suffragist movement aimed at emancipation from male authority. …
2. Be progressive, not conservative. … it is plain that those races that cling to antiquated ways are declining, or disappearing, day by day, and the peoples who seek progress and advancement are just beginning to ascend in power and strength. … All our traditional ethics, law, scholarship, rites and customs are survivals of feudalism. When compared with the achievement of the white race, there is a difference of a thousand years in thought, although we live in the same period.
3. Be aggressive, not retiring. … Stated in kindly terms, retirement is an action of the superior man in order to get away from the vulgar world. Stated in hostile terms, it is a phenomenon of the weak who are unable to struggle for survival. … Alas! The war steeds of Europe are intruding into your house. Where can you quietly repose under a white cloud?
4. Be cosmopolitan, not isolationist. … When a nation is thrown into the currents of the world, traditionalists will certainly hasten the day of its fall, but those capable of change will take this opportunity to compete and progress. … When its citizens lack knowledge of the world, how can a nation expect to survive in it?
5. Be utilitarian, not formalistic. … That which brings no benefit to the practical life of an individual or of society is all empty formalism and the stuff of cheats. And even though it were bequeathed to us by our ancestors, taught by the sages, advocated by the government and worshiped by society, the stuff of cheats is still not worth one cent.
6. Be scientific, not imaginative. … The contribution of the growth of science to the supremacy of modern Europe over other races is not less than that of the theory of the rights of man. … Our scholars do not know science, therefore they borrow the yin-yang school’s notions of auspicious signs and of the five elements to confuse the world and cheat the people, and the idea of feng shui to beg for miracles from dry skeletons (spirits).
Source: Chen Duxiu, founder and editor of New Youth magazine, faculty member of Beijing University, and a founder of the Chinese Communist Party. Originally published inNew Youth magazine in 1915.
Chen Duxiu, the New Youth, and The New Culture Movement:
The New Culture Movement in China started around 1915, with the publication of the journal New Youth in Shanghai. Chen Duxiu(October 8, 1879 – May 27, 1942), the Chinese revolutionary socialist, educator, philosopher and author, who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (with Li Dazhao) in 1921, was the founding editor of the New Youth (Xin Qingnian) magazine (which he subtitled La Jeunesse in French), and later in 1920, the founder also of the New Youth Society. He was stumped and angry against then-President Yuan Shi-kai’s capitulation and appeasement in signing major portions of Japan’s 21 Demands.
Japan’s 21 Demands:
Japan, under Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu and Foreign Minister Katō Takaaki, drafted the initial list of Twenty-One Demands, which were reviewed by the genrō and Emperor Taishō, and approved by the Diet. This list was presented to Yuan Shikai on January 18, 1915, with warnings of dire consequences if China were to reject them.
The Twenty One Demands were grouped into five groups:[2]
- Group 1 confirmed Japan's recent seizure of German ports and operations in Shandong Province, and expanded Japan's sphere of influence over the railways, coasts and major cities of the province.
- Group 2 pertained to Japan's South Manchuria Railway Zone, extending the leasehold over the territory for 99 years, and expanding Japan's sphere of influence in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, to include rights of settlement and extraterritoriality, appointment of financial and administrative officials to the government and priority for Japanese investments in those areas. Japan demanded access to Inner Mongolia for raw materials, as a manufacturing site, and as a strategic buffer against Russian encroachment in Korea.[3]
- Group 3 gave Japan control of the Hanyeping mining and metallurgical complex in central China; it was deep in debt to Japan.
- Group 4 barred China from giving any further coastal or island concessions to foreign powers except for Japan.
- Group 5 was the most aggressive. China was to hire Japanese advisors who could take effective control of China's finance and police. Japan would be empowered to build three major railways, and also Buddhist temples and schools. Japan would gain effective control of Fujian, opposite the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan).
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Knowing the negative reaction "Group 5" would cause, Japan initially tried to keep its contents secret. The Chinese government attempted to stall for as long as possible and leaked the full contents of the Twenty-One Demands to the European powers in the hope that due to a perceived threat to their own political and economic spheres of interest, they would help contain Japan.
Japanese ultimatum
After China rejected Japan's revised proposal on April 26, 1915, the genrō intervened and deleted ‘Group 5’ from the document, as these had proved to be the most objectionable to the Chinese government. A reduced set of "Thirteen Demands" was transmitted on May 7 in the form of an ultimatum, with a two-day deadline for response. Yuan Shikai, competing with other local warlords to become the ruler of all China, was not in a position to risk war with Japan, and accepted appeasement, a tactic followed by his successors. The final form of the treaty was signed by both parties on May 25, 1915.
Katō Takaaki publicly admitted that the ultimatum was invited by Yuan to save face with the Chinese people in conceding to the Demands. American Minister Paul Reinsch reported to the US State Department that the Chinese were surprised at the leniency of the ultimatum, as it demanded much less than they had already committed themselves to concede.
On January 18, 1915, Japan presented to President Yuan Shi-kai its 21 Demands with requests that would have turned China into a de facto Japanese protectorate.
- Yuan Shikai was a Chinese general, politician and "emperor", famous for his influence during the late Qing Dynasty, his role in the events leading up to the abdication of the last Qing Emperor, his ...Wikipedia
- Born: September 16, 1859, Xiangcheng County, Henan
- Died: June 6, 1916, Beijing, China
- Presidential term: March 10, 1912 – December 22, 1915
The Japanese requests included five groups of secret demands that became known as the 21 Demands, and these were:
· Groups One and Two were designed to confirm Japan’s dominant position in Shandong, southern Manchuria, and eastern Inner Mongolia.
· Group Three would acknowledge Japan’s special interests in an industrial complex in central China. Group Four forbade China from giving any further coastal or island concessions to foreign powers except for Japan.
· Group Five – the most outrageous – required China to install Japanese advisers who could take effective control of the Chinese government, economy, and military!
These demands, if accepted, would have had a similar impact to that of what the Japan-Korea annexation Treaty had on Korea in 1910. These notorious demands were issued at a time of shifting balance of power in East Asia. With the Qing dynasty’s humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), regional dominance for the first time, had now moved from China to Japan. Japan’s ambitions were further emboldened by its decisive victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which affirmed the Japanese presence in south Manchuria and Korea.
The 1911 Revolution in China brought an end to the Qing dynasty and ushered in the Republican era of Dr Sun Yat-sen in China, but China remained a pushover from Western powers. Furthermore, Yuan’s ruling status itself was shaky, due to constant threats from competing local warlords.
- Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary, first president and founding father of the Republic of China, and medical practitioner. Wikipedia
- Died: March 12, 1925, Beijing, China
- Spouse: Soong Ching-ling (m. 1915–1925), Kaoru Otsuki (m. 1903–1906), Lu Muzhen (m. 1885–1915)
World War I granted Japan a perfect opportunity to push the envelope even more with China. As the war was underway in Europe, the Japanese hoped that other major powers would show little interest in countering Japanese expansion in China. For these reasons, Japanese Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki was convinced that the filing of this 21 Demands ultimatum, buttressed by its war threats, would force China to accept all its demands.
Not surprising, Yuan, who had no intention of risking war with Japan, accepted the ultimatum on May 9, 1915. The final form of the treaty was signed on May 25, 1915. Even with the removal of the most odious provision, however, the new treaty gave Japan no more than what it already had in China. Yuan, whose credibility and popularity as a leader was further weakened as a result of his appeasement policy, viewed accepting the treaty as a “terrible shame” (qichi daru), and made May 9 as China’s National Humiliation Day. The 21 Demands gave rise to a considerable amount of public ill-will towards Japan, and the upsurge in nationalism is still deeply felt today in China’s handling of Sino-Japanese relations.
The 1919 Paris Peace Conference and The Treaty of Versailles:
The Paris Peace Conference (January 18 to June 28, 1919) triggered off in China a nationwide call for an injection of new culture into old China. China had then dreamt of ridding themselves of all symbols of their semi-colonial status, and they thought and were particularly interested to regain control of Qingdao and Shandong province - then ceded to Germany.
However, at The Treaty of Versailles signed in Paris on June 28, 1919 with the Allied Powers, signifying the end of World War I, Germany was forced to give up Shandong Province, but the Chinese delegates were asked to sign this Treaty and cede the Shandong Province instead to Japan! Over 6,000 Chinese college and professional school students marched in Beijing to protest the possible signing of this Treaty, and Chinese students besieged the Chinese embassy in Paris to persuade the Western signatories not to sign – but to no avail! President Wilson of the U.S., at this Conference, acquiesced to the Japanese position, as, to him, Japan was much stronger, and more important than China, and his appeasement policy did not go down well in China and even in his United States. Chinese nationalism proved to be too heavy a pressure to the U.S., France and Britain, and Shandong province was eventually returned to China – in 1922!
| Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany[1] | |
|---|---|
Cover of the English version
| |
| Signed | 28 June 1919[2] |
| Location | Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, Paris, France[3] |
| Effective | 10 January 1920[4] |
| Condition | Ratification by Germany and four Principal Allied Powers.[1] |
| Signatories |
Central Powers
 Germany[1] |
| Depositary | French Government[5] |
| Languages | French and English[5] |
Administered by the League of Nations
Annexed or transferred to neighboring countries by the treaty, or later via plebiscite and League of Nation action
Map of Shandong province showing the areas annexed by Germany and Britain prior to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles 1919.
Images of Shandong Province:
What is Chen Duxiu’s criticism of China in the 1910s?
Chen Duxiu and his “Call to Youth” Magazine:
It was in these terrible and humiliating contexts that Chen Duxiu wrote his “Call To Youth” manifesto in 1915, berating Chinese citizens for being spineless and mere “slaves” to Japanese and Western power hegemony, and that it was time for them to rise up and changed their way of thinking.
He was also aware that despite Chinese political changes from empire to republic, China still remained weak and could not protect its own sovereignty. Now that they had no Manchu government to blame, Chen and his cohorts began to search from within the Han culture for areas to work on, and their attention fell on the various aspects of Confucian culture, including Confucian subordination of women to men, children to parents, extended family where elderly male members reigned.
Chen was born to a wealthy family, but, like most, he received traditional Chinese education (his own grandfather tutored him in Chinese classics, such as the Four Books) early on, but he did not have much luck with China’s imperial exams. So he turned to pursue a more modern education first in China, then in Japan, where he soon embraced ideas of Western democracy, equality and science.
From these education, what China needed to save itself, Chen Duxiu came to believe, was not the “old and rotten” relics of Confucianism, but de xiansheng (Mr. Democracy) and sai xiansheng (Mr. Science), as he later wrote for the New Youth magazine:
“We are convinced that only those two gentlemen can cure the dark maladies in Chinese politics, morality, learning, and thought.”
In 1915, not long after he returned to China, Chen Duxiu issued his famous “Call To Youth” article, published in the inaugural issue of the New Youth magazine, which he framed in the by-now familiar evolutionary concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
Besides this passage we are asked to comment on – where Chen talked of emancipation of the self, and be free, and not be treated as ‘slaves” blindly following others, and attacking the Confucian thinking of “loyalty, filial piety, chastity and righteousness….as a slavish morality” and that such persons with no independent thoughts were spineless and unworthy – Chen lamented the fact that the Chinese admired the old, whereas the Westerners admired the young, and here, in this same article, he went on to expound what youth, as opposed to age, meant to the (Chinese) society:
Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life…….in the process of metabolism, the old and rotten are incessantly eliminated to be replaced by the fresh and living……..if metabolism functions properly in a society, it will flourish; if old and rotten elements fill the society, then it will cease to exist.”
Chen then went on in this same article and called on the young people in China to be:
· “independent not servile”;
· “progressive, not conservative”;
· “aggressive not retiring”;
· cosmopolitan, not isolationist”;
· “scientific, not fanciful.”
Among his many grand beliefs and ideals that Chen proclaimed in this manifesto for the inaugural issue of the radically new literary journal were the necessity of destroying the old, in order to create the new, and a utopian vision of a future “ideal new era and a new society” which “are to be honest, progressive, positive, free, creative, beautiful, kind, peaceful, full of universal love and mutual assistance………in short, happiness for the whole society.”
Chen’s manifesto here also called on the Chinese people “to give up the useless and irrelevant elements of traditional literature and ethics, because we want to create those needed for the progress of the new era and the new society.”
Chen’s manifesto here also called on the Chinese people “to give up the useless and irrelevant elements of traditional literature and ethics, because we want to create those needed for the progress of the new era and the new society.”
The New Youth magazine, which Chen Duxiu ran in the foreign concessions in Shanghai, became one of the earliest and most important platforms for the translation of Western literature, and it became the leading voice of the New Culture Movement. Traditional Chinese literature, some of Chen Duxiu’s writers argued in their New Youth articles, did not play any positive role in Chinese society. To them, Western literature was about human life, whereas Chinese literature talked little about such life; Western literature aroused human sympathy, whereas Chinese literature, they argued, were so self-absorbing; Western literature, they claimed, nurtured the development of human individuality, whereas Chinese literature favored breathing through the noses of the ancestors”!
Such unreserved adulation of Western literature at the expense of traditional thousands-of-years Chinese literature may sound naïve and simplistic today, yet back then, it was argued, that such unmitigated zeal was needed to push forward the literary revolution deemed a critical and central part of the New Culture Movement.
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