The basic task, proclaimed Chen Duxiu, one of the movement’s intellectual leaders, ‘is to import the foundation of Western society, that is, the new belief in equality and human rights.’ For people like Chen, the real enemy was not the West, but China’s own Confucianism: ‘We must be thoroughly aware’, he reminded his readers in 1916, ‘of the incompatibility between Confucianism and the new belief, the new society and the new state.’
