I have a new column up at The Global Times on, appropriate for the day, the legacy of May Fourth. It’s based, in part, on some earlier posts on the same topic, and the main theme — that the spirit of intellectual dynamism which characterized the New Culture Era is something to be celebrated, now more than ever — has appeared in various posts in this space and others over the years:
Today is the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Demonstrations, the capstone event in a decade marked with intellectual vitality and ideological debate. It was a time when teachers, students, writers, scholars, men and women drew on a panoply of ideas to make sense of their world, their nation, and how best to build a strong and vital society.
It is a legacy of which China can be justifiably proud. Not only was this a glorious time in the nation’s own intellectual history, it was one of the greatest periods of intellectual dynamism the world has ever seen.
Interestingly, there’s also another op-ed in today’s paper on the same theme:
Nearly a century later, China once again is at a critical stage in its development. Modernization is still