The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community, 1913-1917

late 1910s and early 1920s, but surprisingly little has been said about the way that movement came into being. Indeed, it is customary to date the beginning of the New Culture Movement from Chen Duxiu's September 1915 founding of Youth Magazine (Qingnian zazhi) and then to pass quickly to that periodical's more mature phase several years later without paying serious attention to its journalistic antecedents or the way its personnel came together (Chow, 1978: 42-48; Grieder, 1981: 203-7; Schwarcz, 1986: 34-38). This disproportionate focus on the high point of the New Culture Movement as opposed to its origins and development has resulted in a body of scholarship rich with insights on the culturally and intellectually iconoclastic aspects of the movement but poor with regard to its political roots. As I will argue below, however, the two cannot be separated; the focus on culture that characterized the New Culture Movement at its height was arrived at through and fundamentally informed by a serious engagement with politics in the last decade of the Quing dynasty and during the period between the second revolution of 1913 and the beginning stages of Cai Yuanpei's tenure as chancellor of Beijing University. In this article, I focus on the process by which many of the most important future leaders of the New Culture Movement came together as a community of like-minded thinkers in the mid-1910s, as well as