The May Fourth Warning

The May Fourth Movement (1919) opened the Chinese doors to modernization, and simultaneously to an unfiltered process of acculturation, which triggered certain responses from intellectuals and a certain resistance. A century later, the Party’s slogan ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristic’ marks a moment when values, consolidated understanding, literature, art, language, music, the amalgam of a whole civilization comes loose. This article aims to reconstruct the cultural relationship between China and the West as an unchanging pattern of imbalance, violence, and complicity.