Today is the birthday of Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940). A classically-trained scholar who later decided to broaden his education and study in Germany, he was Minister of Education (briefly) under Yuan Shikai and (more famously) the chancellor of Peking University during the New Culture Era. Chancellor Cai took over a campus squalid with the scions of the idle rich and transformed it into a hotbed of intellectual dynamism for a new age. Cai took risks, hiring firebrands such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and luring young scholars such as Hu Shi back from abroad. The dining halls and classrooms of the school brimmed with the kind of debate that forges ideas and ideologies, and the campus became the epicenter of one of the most fertile and exciting times in China’s (or any other country’s) intellectual history.
Hu Shi revitalized the study of China’s past, introduced new ideas of philosophy and learning to the student body, and changed the way Chinese was written and read. Chen Duxiu’s magazine La Jeunesse (New Youth) was snatched up immediately whenever a shipment dropped, young students and intellectuals rushing to buy the few precious copies printed and distributed. In those pages Li Dazhao introduced Marxism,