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returned to Europe for further study in Germany and France. With
Yuan's death in 1916, however, he returned once again to China and
was soon appointed chancellor of Beida. Cai's chancellorship trans-
formed Beida into a modern, first-class institution of higher learning.
Beida had formerly been more or less a training college for
government hacks, and its standards of commitment and scholarship
for both students and faculty members were abysmal. Cai changed all
of this and insisted that Beida become a committed and energetic
place where study and absolute academic freedom would be taken
seriously. Beida would no longer be a place where students simply
partied their educational careers away and made interpersonal
contacts that would last them through a lifetime of service to the
government. Furthermore, there would be no party line to toe; Beida
would be an intellectually alive place where the expression of all vari-
eties of thought would be allowed and even encouraged. The new
intellectual atmosphere, openness, and commitment fostered by Cai
Yuanpei were enormously attractive to China's rising generation of
young and energetic intellectuals, and many of them flocked to Beida.
In 1916 Cai had set the stage for the intellectual renaissance that
would follow.
Chen Duxiu, who had earned a Shengyuan degree in 1896, studied in
Japan and France. He returned to China in 1915 to protest Japan's infa-
mous Twenty-one Demands, and in Shanghai he published a monthly
magazine called New Youth, in which he relentlessly slammed what he
considered the intellectual sources of China's backwardness. He regu-
larly skewered Confucianism and the traditional Chinese family in the
pages of New Youth and urged China's young people to reject much of
their traditional heritage, including traditional attitudes toward
women. (Chen was recognizably feminist in some of his thought.) He
was antitraditional but not anti-Chinese. Like all intellectuals of his
era, he deeply loved his country and was passionately committed to
creating a better future for an imperiled China. In 1917 Chen was
made a professor of literature at Beida, and there he continued to influ-
ence young Chinese intellectuals. Chen himself also underwent a
transformation at Beida. He began studying Marxism-Leninism along
with Li Dazhao, the newly appointed head librarian at Beida. (In Li
Dazhao's employ at Beida was a young library assistant named Mao
Zedong.) Chen and Li Dazhao would, a few years later, emerge as
the cofounders of the Chinese Communist party.
Hu Shi was America's man in China. Hu, like the other key mem-
bers of the May Fourth period, had a dual intellectual heritage: he
had pursued traditional Chinese learning in his youth and then
