The Contingency of Culture: Westernization and Cultural Construction in the 1930s.

Since the 1860s, Chinese thinkers have repeatedly sought national salvation in the transformation of culture (wenhua). These arguments reached their culmination in the 1930s as intellectuals debated the possibility and direction of "cultural construction." Prompted by Chiang Kai-Shek's so-called "New Life Movement" and related projects for "National Construction," as well as cultural and educational reforms of the May Fourth period (1915-1927), these debates also echo China's 1898 reform movement in explicitly articulating the whole of Chinese culture as a target of deliberate political remaking. Key intellectuals such as Chen Xujing and Hu Shi urged "totalistic Westernization" to counter influential calls by Wang Xinming and others for "cultural construction on a Chinese base." The paper does not arbitrate between these views, so much as examine the methods by which these Chinese thinkers hope to borrow from alien cultural forms. How does culture come to be seen by both camps as an object of transformation and site of salvation? What kinds of interpretive methods render culture tractable to borrowing, imitation, and construction? The answer to these questions, I argue, lies not only in a historical reconstruction of their work but also in exploring the theoretical credibility of their cultural view. That is, the optimistic reliance on culture to secure total social renewal is grounded at least in part on a compelling and novel assumption about culture as a product of our deliberate present choices, rather than an effluence of our past heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]