"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