About Crescent Moon

Crescent Moon

Crescent Moon (Chinese: 新月月報; pinyin: Xīnyuè Yuèbào, also rendered Crescent Moon Monthly) was a Chinese-language literary monthly published in Shanghai from 1928 to 1933. It was the journal of the Crescent Moon Society circle — the poets, essayists and liberal scholars gathered around Xu Zhimo, Hu Shi, Wen Yiduo and Liang Shiqiu — and it was issued by the Crescent Moon Book Company that the group established in Shanghai. In its first years the monthly published much of modern China's best-known poetry and many of its finest essays, introduced Western literature to Chinese readers and argued for the aesthetic independence of literature. In its later years it added liberal political commentary, including the human rights essays of Hu Shi and Luo Longji, and it closed in 1933 under the political pressure that commentary attracted. Xu Zhimo, Wen Yiduo and Rao Mengkan were its founding editors.

A society named after Tagore

The Crescent Moon Society began not in Shanghai but in Beijing, and not as a publishing enterprise at all. In 1923 Xu Zhimo founded a poetry society in Beijing and named it, out of his interest in the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's collection of prose poems, Crescent Moon. The society at first was a social and artistic circle rather than a group with a literary platform; scholarly listings date the Crescent Moon Society as running from 1923 to 1931 but note that it did not become a society with a literary platform until 1928, the year the monthly appeared. Its members included Liang Shiqiu, Wen Yiduo, Shen Congwen, Rao Mengkan, Hu Shi and Xu Zhimo himself, many of them scholars educated in Britain or the United States.

Before it had a journal of its own, the circle wrote through other people's pages. Its members exerted influence over the Morning Post supplement in Beijing from 1924 and were associated with the journal Xiandai Pinglun, Contemporary Review. Xu edited the poetry supplement of the Morning Post from April to June 1926. Those apprenticeships gave the group editorial experience and a recognisable collective voice well before the monthly was launched.

From Beijing to Shanghai, and a book company of their own

Politics moved the group south. When the Northern Expedition forces reached the Yangtze in 1927, Xu Zhimo left Beijing for Shanghai, where he taught English at Guanghua University, at Soochow University Law School and later at Daxia University. In the spring of 1928 Xu, Hu Shi and Shao Xunmei organised the Crescent Moon Book Company in Shanghai. The following year, one biographical account records, that company began publishing the Crescent Moon Monthly, the literary journal of the society, which became influential in introducing Western literature to Chinese readers and in promoting an appreciation of the aesthetic aspects of literature. Other accounts, including the National Taiwan Normal University's record of Liang Shiqiu's career, date the co-founding of the monthly in Shanghai to 1928 itself; the monthly is conventionally dated 1928 to 1933.

Owning the publisher mattered. A book company of their own freed the editors from dependence on commercial houses and newspaper proprietors, and it let the monthly appear alongside books by the same circle — the poetry collections and critical works through which the Crescent Moon writers built their reputations.

The editors and the contributors

Xu Zhimo was one of three editors of the monthly, the other two being Wen Yiduo and Rao Mengkan. Around them stood the wider circle: Hu Shi, the philosopher and former ambassador of the New Culture Movement to the reading public; Liang Shiqiu, the critic and essayist who had returned from Harvard in 1926; Chen Xiying; the novelist Shen Congwen; the writer and painter Ling Shuhua; and the political commentator Luo Longji. The quartet of Hu Shi, Xu Zhimo, Liang Shiqiu and Ling Shuhua have been described by scholars as epitomising the East-West exchanges that followed the May Fourth Movement, and the society itself was designed, its members said, as a counterpart of England's Bloomsbury Group.

Xu's death cut the editorial story short. On the morning of 19 November 1931, flying from Shanghai towards Beijing, his aircraft crashed near Jinan in Shandong province, and he and the two pilots were killed. He was thirty-four. The monthly continued for some two years after his death, but the society is generally treated as having ended with him, even though the journal bearing its name survived until 1933.

Poetry: form, music and the three beauties

Poetry was the Crescent Moon group's primary concern and its most notable practice. Against the formless free verse into which much early modern Chinese poetry had fallen, the Crescent Moon poets argued that new poetry needed form — not the old classical rules, but newly made patterns of metre, rhyme and stanza. Wen Yiduo's doctrine of the three beauties of poetry — the beauty of music, the beauty of painting and the beauty of architecture — supplied the theory: a poem should sound ordered, should present vivid images, and should be built, stanza by stanza, like a structure. Xu Zhimo advocated new rhyme schemes for poetry, in the words of the Academy of Chinese Studies, and made important contributions to the development of modern Chinese poetry.

The monthly's most famous single poem embodied that theory. Xu Zhimo wrote Second Farewell to Cambridge on 6 November 1928, after revisiting Cambridge on a tour, and it was first published on 10 December 1928 in volume one, number ten of Crescent Moon. The poem — with its rhymed, patterned lines about leaving the River Cam quietly, taking away not a single cloud — became perhaps the most widely known modern Chinese poem of all, later entering school curricula in China and being carved on a memorial stone at King's College, Cambridge. That it appeared in the society's own monthly, in the journal's first year, fixed the association between Crescent Moon and the mature achievement of the new poetry.

Essays, criticism and Western literature

The monthly was never only a poetry journal. It published essays, fiction, drama and criticism, and it worked systematically to introduce Western literature to Chinese readers. Liang Shiqiu, its leading critic, argued that literature ought to pay heed to universal human nature, and promoted a rational literary criticism and life-affirming literary works that would preserve rationality and ethical norms. His position drew on the New Humanism he had absorbed at Harvard from Irving Babbitt, and scholars have treated the Crescent Moon school as the Chinese home of that doctrine: one study concludes that the closure of Crescent Moon Monthly in 1933 marked the end of Chinese New Humanism.

Liang's criticism made enemies as readily as the poetry made admirers. His essay critical of the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in China embroiled him in a long-running controversy with the leftist writer Lu Xun, which lasted many years and turned on whether literature should express universal human nature or the character of social classes. Lu Xun's attacks on the Crescent Moon critics were sustained and famous, including his 1929 essay on the function of the critics of the Crescent Moon Society and his 1930 essays on hard translation and the class character of literature. The monthly's defence of literary quality, restraint and independence was thus argued out, issue by issue, against the rising literary left.

The Crescent Moon attitude

The group stated its position in a manifesto remembered as the Crescent Moon Attitude, which scholars of the school treat as its defining declaration. In the summary of one study of the society, the Crescent Moon's true and lasting contributions to modern Chinese literature were its stand for literary quality, its struggle for literary independence from external control, its stress on restraint, balance and reason, and the many excellent poems written by its members. Placing artistic values above political ones, the Crescent writers were, in that judgement, the vanguard of the struggle for creative independence and freedom in modern Chinese writing.

That stance was liberal as well as aesthetic. The members were bilingual intellectuals formed by Anglo-American education, and their interests and concerns extended, as one scholar noted, from literature to freedom of speech. It was that extension that carried the monthly, in its last phase, from the literary pages into direct political controversy.

The political turn: human rights and the government

In 1929 the monthly became the platform for a brief but celebrated human rights movement. In March 1929 Hu Shi learned of the case of a man threatened with punishment as an anti-revolutionary without due process, and in the pages of Xinyue he launched detailed criticisms of the practices of the Nationalist government together with theoretical discussions of human rights, to which Luo Longji also contributed. Hu criticised and rejected Sun Yat-sen's claim that the people were incapable of self-rule, argued that democracy was itself a form of political education, and contended that genuine protection of human rights required a legal foundation — a provisional constitution — applying impartially to all, including members of the military and the government.

Publishing such arguments in Nanjing's China carried a cost. The political commentary exposed the monthly and its book company to official pressure, and the journal's later history was shaped by the friction between its liberal editors and a government that regarded organised criticism as disloyalty. The monthly that had begun as a home for lyric poetry ended the decade as one of the very few Chinese periodicals willing to argue, in public, for constitutional limits on the ruling party.

Closure in 1933

Crescent Moon ceased publication in 1933. Xu Zhimo had been dead for two years; the society around the monthly had dispersed to universities in Shanghai, Nanjing, Qingdao and Beijing; and the political space in which its human rights essays had appeared had narrowed. Liang Shiqiu had gone to National Qingdao University in 1930 as head of its foreign languages department and in 1932 to Tianjin to edit a literary supplement; Wen Yiduo was likewise absorbed in university teaching. The group is dated by scholars as active until 1934, but without its founder, its Shanghai base and its monthly, it no longer existed as a collective force. The journal closed, as its own publishing history had begun, as the expression of a circle that had come apart.

Legacy

Crescent Moon left a double legacy. As a literary monthly, it was the showcase of the Crescent Moon school, the group that gave modern Chinese poetry durable form: Xu Zhimo's lyrics, Wen Yiduo's patterned verse and theory of the three beauties, and the criticism of Liang Shiqiu all reached their public through it, and Second Farewell to Cambridge, first printed in its tenth issue, outlived the journal to become a fixture of Chinese education. As a political monthly, its 1929 human rights essays by Hu Shi and Luo Longji remained a landmark in the history of Chinese liberal thought, studied long afterwards as an early, reasoned demand for constitutional government and the rule of law. Few Chinese magazines of the Republican era managed to be both a major literary journal and a significant political one; Crescent Moon, in five years, was each in turn.