ABSTRACT
Chinese intellectuals continued the argument about national health and national strength with the emphasis on science in the New Culture and the May Fourth Movements. The ascendance of science as the unquestionable truth and the touchstone of everything made scientism the ideology of Chinese intellectuals in their search for solutions to China’s problems—social, political, economic, and medical. 1 Peter Buck argued that science was an “ideological entity” for Chinese in the Republican era with profound iconoclastic implications, for science was understood as capable of providing standards by which Chinese traditions could be judged and found wanting. Science was seen as a “substitute religion” or a new “ideology” with which to replace a discredited Confucianism. 2 Science even gained the “cultural authority” to replace China’s cultural traditions, as traditions were considered the cause of Chinese problems and science the panacea. Gyan Prakash’s analysis of science and modernity in India is equally applicable to China in the revolutionary transition from traditional culture to the national renaissance of science. 3 To “save China with science” (kexue jiuguo, 科学救国) was the slogan and driving force of patriotic Chinese intellectuals. The New Culture Movement encouraged the use of plain colloquial language—vernacular (baihua, 白话)—as the medium of writing so that the masses would understand the written just as they did the spoken. Vernacular writing aimed to make science and new cultural concepts accessible to the masses. Hu Shi (胡适, 1891–1962), a leading figure of the New Culture Movement, championed the movement of vernacular writing and dissemination of science.
