The May Fourth Warning

Abstract The May Fourth Movement (1919) opened the Chinese doors to modernization, and simultaneously to an unfiltered process of acculturation, which triggered certain responses from intellectuals and a certain resistance. A century later, the Party’s slogan ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristic’ marks a moment when values, consolidated understanding, literature, art, language, music, the amalgam of a whole civilization comes loose. This article aims to reconstruct the cultural relationship between China and the West as an unchanging pattern of imbalance, violence, and complicity.