
21. This “culture fever” movement, especially the popular TV series He
Shang (River Elegy) in which the new generation of Chinese intellectuals
demonstrated a profound cultural and historical criticism that is equiva-
lent, if not more, to the May Fourth iconoclasm, has attracted some atten-
tion in the West. See Xiaomei Chen, “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse:
‘He Shang’ in Post-Mao China, Critical Inquiry, 18:4 (Summer 1992),
686–712, and Occidentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Selden Field, “He Shang and the Plateau of Ultrastability,” Edward Gunn,
“The Rhetoric of He Shang: From Cultural Criticism to Social Act,” and Jing
Wang, “He Shang and the Paradoxes of Chinese Enlightenment,” Bulletin
of Concerned Asian Scholars, 23:3 (July 1991), 4–33, and High Culture
Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996). These young scholars also showed enthu-
siasm for Western culture. For their introduction of Western historical
practice, see Qingjia Wang, “Western Historiography in the People’s
Republic of China (1949 to the present),” Storia della Storiografia, 19
(1991), 23–46.
22. Chen Xulu (1918–1988), for example, a prominent historian in
modern Chinese history, wrote a few articles during the 1980s for the Lishi
yanjiu (Historical research), a leading historical journal in the PRC, ana-
lyzing the ti-yong idea and other relevant issues in modern China. See Chen
Xulu xueshu wencun (Chen Xulu’s scholarly essays) (Shanghai: Shanghai
renmin chubanshe, 1990). Li Zehou also discusses similar questions in his
“manshuo xiti zhongyong” (Remarks on Western substance and Chinese
function), Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe
1986), 311–342.
23. I, for example, served on the editorial board for a translation series
entitled “A translation Series of Modern Western Scholarly Trend” (dangdai
xifang xueshu sichao yicong), in the Shanghai Translation Publishing
House (Shanghai yiwen chubanshe). Each of the first ten books in the series
sold between 50,000 and 100,000 copies. Of course, this series was just one
of many translation series that appeared during the period. The most
successful series was (zouxiang weilai) “Toward the Future,” although it
was not an exclusive translation series.
24. Craig Calhoun, a noted social theorist, has noticed the intrinsic
linkage between the May Fourth Movement and the political culture of the
1980s. See his “Science, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity,” Popular
Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, eds. Jeffrey Wasserstrom
and Elizabeth Perry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 93–124.
25. Cf. Xudong Zhang, “The Politics of Hermeneutics: Notes on the
Re-Invention of Tradition in Post-Mao Chinese Cultural Discussions,”
paper presented at the International Conference on Chinese Hermeneutic
Cultures, Rutgers University, October 10–12, 1996, 5–7 and his Chinese
Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and
the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996),
NOTES 273