Polarities and the May Fourth Polemical Culture: Provenance of the "Conservative" Category

Abstract

This essay argues that conservative/radical polarity by which we classify May Fourth intellectuals originated in Youth group's polemical stratagem of depicting intellectual landscape in terms of a New Culturalists vs. rest divide. In this stratagem, those who later became the conservatives were lumped together for dissenting from Culture movement and largely defined by who they were not. Historiographically, establishment of this polarity scheme sidelined alternative mappings of intellectual scene. Drawing on case of Critical Review (1922–1933)—a journal of cultural conservatism—and its polemics against Culture, this essay explores one such alternative mapping that grouped conservative thinker Liang Shuming (1893–1988) with Culturalists. Taking this paradigm as one of many that existed before mid-1920s, essay discusses juxtaposition of multiple schemes of grouping as a strategy for superseding polarity mode of classification.