It is widely accepted, both inside China and in the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.

Vera Schwarcz is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Wesleyan University.

"May Fourth, at once a foreign-inspired intellectual movement and an anti-imperialist political one, is well known by now. This gracefully written and thoughtful book offers a fresh perspective on it by focusing less on the familiar New Culture intellectual leaders . . . than on a group of Beijing University participants who were profoundly affected by their experience of it. . . . The Chinese Enlightenment is handsomely printed and liberally sprinkled with photographs of the May Fourth generation then and now."—David Arkush, Journal of Asian History

"Among the English-language books on the May Fourth movement, Schwarcz's is distinguished both in scope and detail. . . . [Her] study passes beyond the movement itself into its more far-reaching impact."—Ron Jassen, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

"There is much to be learned from this book. . . . The subject and perspective are big, and the scholarship is serious. Students of intellectual history in general and of twentieth-century China in particular cannot afford to ignore this book."—Michael Gasster, The Historian