These words came from one of the most important television programmes ever to be broadcast. “River Elegy” (Heshang) was transmitted on China Central Television in the summer of 1988. In six episodes, it explored China’s troubled and often turbulent modern history and speculated provocatively about the country’s future. A year later, in June 1989, that immediate future looked immensely bleak as protesting students and workers were shot down near Tiananmen Square. “Industrial civilization,” whatever that might be, seemed a long way off.

Yet the debate about civilization in China has long roots. In the modern era, the notion of what had become of China’s civilization was a resonant one, along with the idea that it might need to be adapted or abandoned. Many of these ideas were shaped by a particular date that remains well-known today. In some ways, to trace the debate over China’s grappling with the idea of its own civilization is to trace the story of the “May Fourth Movement” and its trajectory through the century.

What was “May Fourth”? For any Chinese, the term is one that has an immediate resonance – no need even to mention the year in question. The date was in fact 4 May 1919, and initially it marked one of the most important student demonstrations in modern Chinese history. The Versailles Treaty had been signed just a few days beforehand, and in it, China had been given a very poor deal. Some 96,000 Chinese had provided their labour on the western front during World War I, yet despite this contribution, German colonies on Chinese soil were not handed back to China but instead awarded to Japan. This caused outrage among China’s educated youths, who felt that this was a humiliation for a country that was already suffering from imperialist oppression from outside. Some 3000 students marched through the centre of Beijing and shouted slogans condemning the Japanese. A few of them went to the house of a minister considered too sympathetic to Tokyo and assaulted him. The events of “May Fourth” were over in just a few hours. But they became the symbol of a much wider sense of rejection of the heritage and civilization of China and the embrace of a model of modernity that came from the west.

For a young generation of Chinese embraced the spirit of May Fourth as an invitation to “save China” through “science and democracy.” For them, China’s weakness came from its inability to find indigenous intellectual resources to fight back against the western world which had oppressed them for so long, ever since the Opium Wars of the 1840s. The revolution of 1911 had overthrown the last emperor but the new republic that took his place was weak and quickly riven by warlordism. The young Lu Xun, now regarded as one of China’s greatest writers, believed that there was nothing in the old system of Confucianism worth saving. In his short story “Diary of a Madman,” the title character reads between the lines of the old Confucian classics only to find that they all advocate cannibalism. The idea of a people who eat themselves was a devastating metaphor for the deficiencies of the old system. Perhaps the aptest pupil of this extreme vision was the young Mao Zedong. Leaving his domineering father and his home in Hunan province, Mao moved to Changsha and then to Beijing, embracing ideas of romanticism and social Darwinism that would shape his eventual turn to communism in the 1920s, and his ultimate rise to power. Of course, even in the 1920s there were many thinkers, such as the popular writer Zou Taofen, who advocated adaptation of the old Confucian norms, not abandonment of them. But the most powerful strand of thought would, for a while, be the one that rejected the past most violently.

Yet as the uneasy peace of the 1920s gave way to the darkness of the 1930s, one of the most important arenas in the battle for civilization was the war that broke out between China and Japan in 1937. This war saw the clash of two ideologies: Chinese nationalism and Japanese imperialism. Yet the clash between them was also a “clash of civilizations” in a very particular sense. Both were states grappling profoundly with modernity in the mid-twentieth century. But the model of modernity in each case was very different, shaped by the culture from which it had emerged. China’s modernity drew on a Confucian, bureaucratic-rational tradition. It was civic rather than racial in its vision of what China should be, appropriately enough in a country that had always brought together a variety of different ethnic groups bound together by culturally recognizable norms. Japan, in contrast, emerged into the modern world in the late nineteenth century at the end of hundreds of years of military government. This tradition was combined with a penchant for a German romanticism and embrace of the irrational that was not matched in Chinese intellectual culture. For Japanese intellectuals, ideas of Zen and irrationality came together in the ideology of “pan-Asianism.” Originally drawn from the idea of the philosopher Okakura Tenshin that “Asia is one,” this concept developed into a racist and violent system of thought that drove the Japanese empire toward the invasion and occupation of its neighbours. “Pan-Asian” civilization became code for aggressive imperialist domination.

For the Chinese, the war was not merely a struggle for survival – although it certainly was that; it was also a chance to rethink the notion of what China would be in the postwar era. One of the most interesting visions was the one that was never implemented: that of the Chinese Nationalists (Guomindang) who bore the brunt of the fighting during the war. Under their leader, Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalists regarded the war as a sacred trust, the conflict that would eventually lead to the rebirth of the nation. The idea of fighting a war for civilization was certainly something that the Chinese leaders thought about: Chiang himself published a fiercely nationalist tract entitled China’s Destiny in 1943, in which he condemned the intrusion of the pro-western May Fourth Movement and instead advocated the cultivation of a more traditional Confucian civilization.

However, there was another and very important element of the struggle to create a “civilized” society. Across the globe, societies at war were planning for a new vision of society after the war was over. Nationalist China, like Britain, envisaged a system that would provide a much broader safety net for its people. On a whole variety of issues, from women’s healthcare to clean lavatories, the marks of a healthy and civilized society were supposed to emerge from the cauldron of war. However, corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and sheer exhaustion from eight years of waging war destroyed the Nationalists, and made it impossible for them to fulfil the vision which they had put forward. In fact, it would be the Communists, not the Nationalists, who would reap the benefit of this new turn toward a “civilized” society that recognized that the social contract between the people and the government needed to be strengthened.

There was not much that was civilized about the Cultural Revolution that marked the apogee of Mao Zedong’s rule. The smashing of “old customs” and “old culture” became a central part of the neophiliac tendency that regarded China’s civilizational past as an obstacle to be overcome. But the atmosphere changed greatly under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who launched China on the path of the “Four Modernizations” that would open the era of reform, and provoked a new debate about China’s destiny. The television series “River Elegy” was part of that “new May Fourth” in which the ideals of “science and democracy” as well as the “industrial civilization” that shaped it were brought back into public discussion. The television series contrasted traditional symbols of China’s civilization – the Great Wall, the Yellow River, and the dragon – and argued that they were symbolic of a brutal and inward-looking society. The contrast they made was with the “blue ocean,” a thinly-veiled reference to the west which had been so taboo during the Cultural Revolution. Yet the series was by no means a simple capitulation to western values. The Tang dynasty, widely considered one of China’s finest and most flourishing periods, was praised for its outward-looking values while also being a period of great Chinese cultural pride. The series ended with a call for “democracy” and a turn against the legacy of the “false peasant emperor” (an immensely daring dig at Mao). Yet there was no sense that “democracy” had to be capitulation to western values; democracy did not have to mean democracy as practised in America or Europe. In the May Fourth movement, it had its own indigenous predecessor. Little wonder that the students and workers chose to protest on 4 May 1989 in the centre of Beijing, exactly seventy years after the first epoch-making events.

The result in 1989 was horrific. Even a quarter-century later, China has not come to terms with the bloodshed carried out in the heart of the nation’s capital. Much of the 1990s were a cold decade for China’s place in the world. Yet by the early 2000s, the China story had changed once more. The economy was beginning the massive growth that would mark its eventual emergence as the world’s second largest economy. And as China became richer and more confident, it would also stake new claims to its civilizational values.

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Confucius, in particular, would play a central part in this new image. The sage whose ethical precepts had underpinned Chinese society for some two decades, now became a central part of the Communist regime’s attempt to keep society calm rather than foment revolution as Mao had done several decades earlier. Books of his thought, suitably simplified, have become bestsellers in the bookshops of the new China. The idea of the “harmonious society,” promoted by president Hu Jintao, was drawn from a sanitized version of Confucianism in which disagreement and dissent were considered in some way “un-Chinese.” But as China became a more unstable society, where riches were matched by ever-greater inequality, the idea of a philosophy that downplayed social dissent or violent change became ever-more attractive. At the same time, there was also a greater feeling abroad that a society which was at least reaching its potential economically and geopolitically ought to have an ideology that drew on its own resources rather than from the west. Thinkers such as Zhang Weiwei, whose book The China Wave has become a bestseller, have advocated the idea that China’s politics needs to create a Confucianism for a new world in which China will be much more prominent.

The idea of civilization in China, has never been simple or static. The point of the makers of “River Elegy” was that looking toward the west, as China has had to do for a century and a half, is not the same thing as being absorbed by it, or simplistically copying it. Nor can a rising China create some sanitized idea of “Chineseness” that excludes the rich intellectual and ethnic mixture that has always characterized its society. During the Tang dynasty, Indian and Central Asian influences were crucial in that most glittering of periods for Chinese civilization. As China’s civilization of today seeks to influence the world once again, it will find that its greatest influence comes from longstanding qualities of cosmopolitanism, tolerance, diversity and intellectual enquiry. These qualities are not always visible in the more shrill rhetoric of the present day. But anyone who investigates the reality of China’s civilizational history, rather than a version created for the purposes of politics, will see how much China’s past has to offer to the world’s present and future.