Modern Chinese literature came into being in a literary revolution amidst a ferment of radical anti-establishment and anti-traditional thinking. The protagonists of the literary revolution agreed almost unanimously that the new literature had little to learn from China's own literary tradition and should be modelled on Western literature; of all Western literary schools, they were particularly attracted to the school of realism. In his programmatic article 'On the literary revolution' Chen Duxiu, the standard-bearer of the literary revolution, averred that the new literature was to be a literature of realism. 1