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Revisiting the Dissemination of Marxism in May Fourth China: A Perspective of Cultural Field
- Twentieth-Century China
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 44, Number 2, May 2019
- pp. 190-205
- 10.1353/tcc.2019.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
The dissemination of Marxism in May Fourth China has always been a heated topic among Chinese historians, and the perspective of social history has influenced this issue over the last 20 years. Current opinion tends to regard the spread of Marxism as a rebellion of marginalized intellectuals against the whole establishment while the cultural elite tried to return to the center of society. Nevertheless, I argue that the dissemination of Marxism in the May Fourth period relied heavily on the existing cultural hierarchy and that a three-tiered configuration began to form among intellectuals that was dominated by top-down rather than bottom-up flow of knowledge of Marxism. The farewell to existing authority had to wait until these intellectuals gradually transformed themselves into revolutionaries after 1922.