Chinese intellectuals from the 1920s through the 1940s torn between antiimperialist nationalism and cultural critique, between the external imperatives of jiuwang and the internal prerequisites of qimeng. When full-scale war with Japan broke out in 1937, they felt compelled to support jiuwang first, accepting that to be patriotic was not to attack China's “greatness,” its culture and civilization. Vera Schwarcz has written of the early war period: “For a brief interval, there was a common cause between intellectuals who were convinced that China must pursue internal self-emancipation simultaneously with resistance to external aggression and activists whose top priority was national salvation.” She draws attention to a New Enlightenment movement (1936–1937) led by May Fourth veterans and young communist theoreticians who departed from the “old” enlightenment path of cultural critique to call for a more systematic and rational synthesis of Chinese and Western cultures. As China suffered defeat after defeat in the first two years of the war, pressures mounted on May Fourth veterans to cease attacking Chinese traditions while the fight for national survival was so perilous. Overwhelmed by a sense of nationalism, some attempted to redefine the Chinese national identity that diminished the appeal of cultural iconoclasm.

But both May Fourth veterans and the liberal intellectuals of a younger generation soon reasserted the priority of qimeng in the midst of the pressure to concentrate on jiuwang. For the prodemocracy activists, the most important thing about qimeng was not cultural critique and iconoclasm.