In this changed context of the 1990s, one could only look at the May Fourth in an "academic" light, and there is certainly no shortage of books and articles which continue to reassess May Fourth authors and ideas, particularly in my own field of modern Chinese literature. In other words, as mentioned before, those who are still obsessed with May Fourth are mostly scholars and students. While this is not the place to delve into details of scholarly reinterpretations, a few observations may be in order.

In this limited sense, the present intellectual scene in China is livelier than ever. At least four intellectual positions can be discerned with their respective spokesmen now locked in fierce intellectual combat with one another. First, a trendy postmodernism attempts to theorize about the current scene of cultural production and consumption. Second, a return to "national learning" (guoxue) advocates vaguely anti-Western, if not xenophobic, sentiments. Third, a semi-official brand of liberalism, with its power-base around some influential Party cadres, seeks to establish their own hegemony among intellectuals. Finally, a loose grouping of what the liberal officials call the "new left" finds dissatisfaction with all of the above three trends. Whether any of these has anything to do with the May Fourth tenets of "science" and "democracy" is a moot question. The two terms have themselves become institutionalized and turned into official slogans. Still, the very fact that these intellectual positions are passionately argued in print and zealously read by a sizable number of readers is a phenomenon worthy of attention.

Unlike Hong Kong or Taiwan, where serious intellectual journals are scarce, the number of scholarly books and journals in China remains large, which seems to indicate that there also exists a fairly large readership. In fact, the publishing scene in China is thriving in spite of the increasing popularity of television and Hollywood movies. This serious readership consists, so I was told, mostly of university students who still buy books in large quantities not for entertainment but for intellectual curiosity and the desire for new knowledge. This was a surprising finding from my informal interviews with book publishers in Shanghai last year, who promptly signed me up for (re)publishing several volumes of my previous writings. This personal experience has led me to a truism about the May Fourth Movement which has received insufficient attention because it is taken for granted: namely that the students who demonstrated were not only activists but also avid readers. They acquired new ideas and "new knowledge" not only from the classroom but from the numerous books and journals they had bought or borrowed. The formation of this new reading public was the precondition for the May Fourth movement.

I also began to rethink Li Zehou's well known formulation of the May Fourth legacy some years ago ­ that its "enlightenment" project remains unfinished because it has been subsequently subsumed under the patriotic need for "national salvation." True, but not exactly so. "National salvation" (jiuwang) was an ideological imperative arising out of nationalism and war, whereas "enlightenment" was an intellectual and educational enterprise. The two are conceptually not compatible with each other because they belong to different categories. Thus, in theory at least, the one does not necessarily rule out the other. Although Li deplores to some extent such a substitution, he also recognizes the necessity of national salvation for obvious reasons. In my view, the problem lies with the May Fourth formulation of "enlightenment" itself, particularly on the part of its leaders who took upon themselves the task to "enlighten" the people and succeeded perhaps only in converting some of their students. This highly elitist attitude has done more harm than good. If we read through some of the manifestos of the "study societies" (xueshe), which mushroomed in the May Fourth era and were organized mostly by students and other followers of the May Fourth causes, we can feel the poignancy of their plight. Having been "enlightened" by their teachers, they wished to do something about their nation and society for which they were singularly unequipped by their idealistic rhetoric. Without sufficient knowledge and the capacity for self-reflection, they easily succumbed to the clarion-call for "national salvation." In other words, the task of enlightenment ­ as manifested not so much in the elitist penchant of the teachers as in the students' continued quest for new knowledge ­ had barely begun in the May Fourth era and remains unfinished. Ironically, it is only now that intellectual life has finally achieved some degree of normalcy in the universities so that at least for some students the educational system and the publishing industry have provided enough incentive for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. How long will this last before the global wave of consumer culture takes over books and learning, no one can tell.

As a final reflection, when we reread the works of May Fourth leaders at century's end, it is no longer possible to share their naive faith in progress and rationality and in an utopianism based on a teleological conception of time and history ­ that the future must be better than the present and the past. The following effusive paeans by Chen Duxiu to a new century in the pages of the New Youth could only have been uttered at the beginning of this century (1916):

The epoch in which we are living, which epoch is this? It is the beginning of the sixteenth year of the twentieth century. The changes of the world are evolutionary, different from month to month, year to year. The shining history is unfolding, faster and fasterTo live in the present world, you must raise your head and proudly call yourself a person of the twentieth century; you must create a new civilization of the twentieth century and not confine yourself to following that of the nineteenth. For the evolution of human civilization consists of replacing the old with the new, like a river flowing on, an arrow darting forth, constantly continuing and constantly changing.

His statement was well put but also alarming for those of us still living at the end of the twentieth century. Part of Chen's statement proves prophetic: things are indeed constantly changing, faster and faster, but not necessarily for the good of "human civilization." Chen and his generation of May Fourth intellectuals clearly did not share Max Weber's deep-seated ambivalence concerning the Western process of modernization. The few conservatives of the time who raised some serious concern about the progress of Western civilization after the First World War elicited nothing but scathing criticism from the May Fourth radicals. Ironically, eighty years later, the most eagerly discussed book among Chinese intellectuals is a biography of the last years of Chen Yinque, a scholar of traditional Chinese culture and certainly not a radical Westernizer. This may have been a reaction against the radical excesses under the Maoist regime. In fact, Chen Yinque is now seen as one of the few who dared to defy Mao. Some would regard it as marking a return to Chinese tradition. In my view, the Chen Yinque phenomenon bespeaks a peculiar nostalgia about a bygone era in which scholarship, not politics, was the sole criterion that defined the identity of a Chinese intellectual. Chen was one of the very few scholarly masters eminently qualified for this definition ­ a rarity amidst a century of ideological polemics. If some Chinese intellectuals now find themselves in a scholarly and even pedantic mood, it is because they have paid too much for the glory of "national salvation," a stance which led directly to their victimization under Mao. Their nostalgia for Chen Yinque may signify their own "withdrawal syndrome" or perhaps a belated dedication to intellectual enlightenment without any ulterior purpose. If so, the academicization of Chinese intellectuals may have done something good. Now that the May Fourth project of enlightenment itself is subject to scholarly scrutiny and criticism, it is no wonder that May Fourth has indeed become an official date ­ a historic symbol somewhat shorn of its intellectual substance.

Perhaps this somber view may prove to be a sober antidote to the festive and self-congratulatory mood which usually accompanied past May Fourth anniversaries. I would like to suggest that we all forget about May Fourth for the next nineteen years and then gather again for a final summation of its legacy at its 100th anniversary ­ in the year 2019. At that time, I may or may not be around to write another commemorative article.