It’s no coincidence that the last four characters recorded by Lu’s madman, “save the children…,” echoed the title of Chen’s journal. Many of Chen’s readers were young, and in youth he saw the opportunity to transform China’s future. Chen exhorted his readers to fight back against the feudal roots of Chinese traditions, a mantra that would become a tool in the communist party’s standard rhetorical arsenal. Like Liang Qichao before him, Chen preached destruction and replacing the old with the new.

The movement that emerged out of the period became known as the New Culture Movement, bringing together like minded writers, philosophers, artists and outcasts to decry the nascent Chinese republic’s inability to get China’s rejuvenation on track.