Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2015

“Three Streams Become One” and the Intermixing and Transcendence in 20th Century Chinese Culture

(Abstract)

Du Yunhui

The most profound change among Chinese intellectuals after the May Fourth Movement lay in the historical evolution of the previous dualistic opposition of Chinese/Western and old/new into a contest among the cultures of traditional China, Western capitalism, and socialism, cultures that were opposed yet intricately interwoven. The 20th century’s integration and transcendence of Chinese culture was epitomized in the issue of the correct handling of the status and interrelations of Chinese, Western, and Marxist cultural resources. Among the cultural movements of the times, the sanest cultural approach was that of a group who advocated an innovative Marxist synthesis pioneering the integration of the three streams of Chinese, Western, and Marxist thought. The founder of the “three streams become one” school, Zhang Shenfu, was the first to recognize and clearly express the spirit of the new age. From the “three streams become one” of the 1930s-1940s to the “innovative cultural synthesis” of the 1980s-1990s, and then, in the new century, to the formulation “Marxism as the spirit, Chinese learning as the substance, Western learning as the function,” the three statements clearly display the developmental laws, correct direction and actual road of Chinese culture in the past hundred years.