Crisis Of The Vernacular Movement

Since Tang-Song period, the vemacular form of writing had been a significantsupplement to the classical form in such areas as fiction, drama, and quotations but as ofone hundred years ago, classical Chinese was still the dominant form of writing and thevernacular form of writing had not achieved the due respect in Chinese society. In theearly years of the 20^th century came the Vernacular Movement which was a stylisticrevolution aimed at reforming and reconstructing the Chinese written language. Thismovement was pioneered by Hu Shi and saw its highest achievements in Lu Xun's andZhou Zuoren's vernacular writings. With unifying spoken language and written languageas its basic objective, the movement inevitably developed toward the popularization ofthe Chinese language and even promoted the tendency to abolish Chinese characters infavor of the alphabetic script. But the classical Chinese making its exit means thecomplete breakdown of traditional values just as the appearance of the vernacular signalsthe emergence of new knowledge and new values, thus causing all kinds of conflicts andcontradictions in social life and affecting all aspects of the modernization of Chinesesociety in the last hundred years that it involves all ranks of the Chinese population fromthe leaders to ordinary people. This paper, keeping track of the rise and fall of classicaland vernacular Chinese in the last hundred years, makes an all-around study of theachievements and lessons in written language reformation and stylistic innovations, withthe aim to reintroduce rhetorical thinking and to reconsider ethical issues in the Chinesewritten language. The author of this paper concludes that the crisis of the VernacularMovement exposes the dilemma of the written Chinese language and modern China inquestons of cultural identity.