Volume 3：The Great Surges （1921-1927）

I Love This Land – Patriotism and Revolutionary Cultural Activities in

the 1920s

In 1938, faced with a land of beacon fires and devastated souls, the

poet Ai Qing wrote these lines: “Why are my eyes always brimming with

tears? Because I love this land so deeply….” (Ai Qing: I Love This Land

(17.11.1938). The original poem reads: “If I were a bird,/ I too should sing

with a hoarse throat:/ This storm-battered land,/ This river that forever

rages with our grief,/ This furious wind that blows endlessly,/ And the

incomparably gentle dawn from the forest…/ –then I died, / and even my

feathers rotted inside the earth. / Why are my eyes always brimming with

tears? / Because I love this land so deeply….” This is a bleak echo that

reverberates through the corridors of Chinese history in 20th century. This

is the main tone of Chinese cultural activities in the 1920s. The 1920s is a

historical turning point of Chinese culture in 20th century. Around the central

era axis of saving the country and alleviating the plight of the people, the

Chinese nation in the 1920s explored and groped for various truths to save

the country and the people with pluralism of ideas, diversity of actions and

a hundred schools of thought—the cultural ecological pattern embodied

in the May Fourth Movement they inherited. Proposals and experiments

came out in a kaleidoscope on social transformation. However, the Japanese

imperialist invasion put an end to the historical conditions for the existence

and development of cultural pluralism in China in the 20th century. The

severe crisis of the survival of the nation-state forced nationalist and radical

ideas and their programmes of action to emerge from the diverse cultural

ecologies to be the main theme of the times. The most striking of these

was the newly established CCP of this period, which, after absorbing and

adapting of Sun Yat-sen’s new Three Principles of the People, put forward

a National Revolutionary programme to defeat the imperialism and warlord

rule. In the era of outraged nationalism, this programme gradually became

the dominant trend that led the revolutionary cultural activities in China in

the 1920s. Despite the Waterloo of the “April 12” coup in 1927, the cultural

and political ideas of the democratic revolutionary programme guided the

spirit of the “left-wing” process of Chinese culture in the late 1920s and

early 1930s. They kept merging and fusing into a national, scientific, public

and new democratic cultural trend in the fire of the Resistance Against

Japanese Aggression.

In the main thread that Chinese culture in the 1920s transformed

from an ecological pattern of diversity to radical National Revolution

(Northern Expedition) and nationalism, the book captures the cultural

forms, phenomena, events and trends of the 1920s, such as theatre, cinema,

humanitarian thought, feminist thought, Civil Education, modern Chinese

nationalism and the early women’s movement of the CCP, in an attempt to

place the main thread in the context of the emergence and development of

this serial social and cultural activities.

In a sense, today’s China is a mirror of yesterday’s history.The Chinese

modernity itself is a modern continuation and evolution of tradition. The

questions raised, the efforts made and the results produced in the 1920s are

still working in our thinking and acting silently. Present diverse cultural

landscape, the diverse ways of life, and the various value judgements and

solutions to the fate of the nation in the new era of globalisation are indeed

somewhat similar to those of the 1920s. First, although things have changed

a lot, and the worries of saving the country and relieving the people’s

hardship have been replaced by the great rejuvenation of the Chinese

nation, patriotism and concerns about the country and the people are our

eternal original intentions. Understanding history means understanding the

present. Second, it is still an unaccomplished historical project to construct

democracy, human rights and the rule of law. How to sort out, inherit and

carry forward the rich cultural heritage and resources left to us in the 1920s

is worthy of our serious reflections.