The Founding of the Cultural Book Society148 (July
31, 1920)


People of other provinces find it very strange to see the Hunanese propagate the
New Culture in Hunan. Some people with no eyes in their heads have even added the
epithet “impossible”149 to “the Hunanese.” As a matter of fact, the people of Hunan
and the New Culture are poles apart. Strictly speaking, the New Culture has nothing
to do with the people of Hunan as a whole. If you say that this is a baseless assertion,
then let us ask, how many of the 30 million Hunanese have ever had any schooling?
Of the ones who have had some education, how many are functionally literate, and
understand the whys and wherefores of things? And of those who are literate and
understand things, how many know what the New Culture is? We have to understand
that having read or heard a few new terms does not mean that I have mastered a field
of learning, much less the New Culture. It is even more impossible to say that Hunan
already has the New Culture. Indeed, if we really face the facts, not only Hunan, but
the whole of China, still does not have the New Culture. Similarly, the whole world
does not yet have the New Culture. A tiny blossom of New Culture has appeared in
Russia, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. For several years, fierce winds and heavy
rains have been testing it, and we still do not know whether it will develop successfully
or not. Gentlemen, if we know that there is as yet no real New Culture in the whole
world, this fact imposes a responsibility on us. What is that responsibility? “How can
we bring about a New Culture in the world, and how can we launch it from this Hunan
in which we live, where there is no New Culture near at hand?” Is this not the shared
responsibility of all the people of Hunan? We fellow members of the Cultural Book
Society are willing to do our


best to fulfill our small share of this common task. It is for this reason that we have
founded this Cultural Book Society. (Besides the bookstore, we also urgently need
to set up research, editorial, and printing societies.) We are firmly persuaded that the
absence of New Culture stems from the absence of new thought, that the absence of new
thought results from the absence of new research, and that new research is impossible
148 In the regulations as published in Dagongbao on July 28, 1920, this number appears as six, and
the number of business officers is given as two. A name list of the officers of the society, which appeared
in the same issue of the newspaper, makes plain, however, that the correct figures are respectively eight
and one, and the editors of the Wengao have corrected the text of the regulations accordingly. Mao was
one of the two “recording secretaries.”
149 The Cultural Book Society, founded in July 1920, was formally established on August 2, and
the bookstore opened for business on September 9, 1920. By March 1921 a total of seven branch stores
had opened. The Society was closed down in 1927 by the Guomindang. The text of this statement was
written by Mao. When it was first published in the Dagongbao of July 31, 1920, it was preceded by the
following editorial note, which is not by Mao: “Comrades in journalistic and educational circles in the
provincial capital have recently founded a Cultural Book Society as a headquarters for disseminating
new publications. This is indeed an indispensable event for the present New Culture movement. We
hasten to record below the reasons for its emergence.”