Spring 2019 Events

“The Front, Back, and Side of the New Culture Movement: The Gentlemen of Peking University”
​April 29, 2019, Harvard University

​On April 29, 2019, Professor Chen Pingyuan, the Boya Lecturing Professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Peking University, delivered a lecture at Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations on the topic of “The Front, Back and Side of the New Culture Movement: The Gentlemen of Peking University.” The lecture was attending by nearly 30 people, including David Wang (Harvard U.) and Xia Xiaohong (Peking U.), as well as other visiting scholars and graduate students. Taking four modern men of China as his examples—Lin Shu, Gu Hongming, Liu Shipei, and Zhang Jingsheng—Chen returns to the discursive scene of the New Culture Movement and turns it inside out, revealing the breadth of academic discourses concealed by the complexities of history. The various positions of the debates were certainly not diametrically opposed, and there often existed various shades of arguments within the same camp. The question of how to most appropriately treat and discuss the abundance and complexity of the May Fourth and New Culture movements, as well as bring to light the obscured details of those moments, are precisely the questions Professor Chen attempts to answer. Following the talk, there was a lively discussion among faculty and students regarding how to situate their own research regarding the May Fourth movement with respect to Professor Chen’s remarks, as well as what kinds of methods are best to achieve these results.