Education was secularized.  Great efforts were made to develop modern schools, though the work of development was continually hindered by the incessant political unrest.  Only at the universities, which became foci of republican and progressive opinion, was any positive achievement possible.  Many students and professors were active in politics, organizing demonstrations and strikes.  They pursued a strong national policy, often also socialistic.  At the same time real scientific work was done; many young scholars of outstanding ability were trained at the Chinese universities, often better than the students who went abroad.  There is a permanent disagreement between these two groups of young men with a modern education:  the students who return from abroad claim to be better educated, but in reality they often have only a very superficial knowledge of things modern and none at all of China, her history, and her special circumstances.  The students of the Chinese universities have been much better instructed in all the things that concern China, and most of them are in no way behind the returned students in the modern sciences.  They are therefore a much more serviceable element.

The intellectual modernization of China goes under the name of the “Movement of May Fourth”, because on May 4th, 1919, students of the National University in Peking demonstrated against the government and their pro-Japanese adherents.  When the police attacked the students and jailed some, more demonstrations and student strikes and finally a general boycott of Japanese imports were the consequence.  In these protest actions, professors such as Ts’ai Yuean-p’ei, later president of the Academia Sinica (died 1940), took an active part.  The forces which had now been mobilized, rallied around the journal “New Youth” (Hsin Ch’ing-nien), created in 1915 by Ch’en Tu-hsiu.  The journal was progressive, against the monarchy, Confucius, and the old traditions.  Ch’en Tu-hsiu who put himself strongly behind the students, was more radical than other contributors but at first favoured Western democracy and Western science; he was influenced mainly by John Dewey who was guest professor in Peking in 1919-20.  Similarly tending towards liberalism in politics and Dewey’s ideas in the field of philosophy were others, mainly Hu Shih.  Finally, some reformers criticized conservativism purely on the basis of Chinese thought.  Hu Shih (born 1892) gained greatest acclaim by his proposal for a “literary revolution”, published in the “New Youth” in 1917.  This revolution was the logically necessary application of the political revolution to the field of education.  The new “vernacular” took place of the old “classical” literary language.  The language of the classical works is so remote from the language of daily life that no uneducated person can understand it.  A command of it requires a full knowledge of all the ancient literature, entailing decades of study.  The gentry had elaborated this