The prevailing trend of anti-traditionalism in Chinese academia can be traced back to the New Culture Movement which followed the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of the Republican era. Ever since Yen Fu translated Thomas Henry Huxley's Evolution and Ethics into Chinese at the end of the Ching Dynasty, the theory of evolution, the survival of the fittest being its core concept, had been widely accepted by Chinese intellectuals.
中國學術界的「反傳統思潮」，可以追溯到民國初年在五四運動之後發生的新文化運動，自從清朝末年，嚴復將赫胥利的《天演論》翻譯成中文後，以「物競天擇」、「適者生存」為核心的進化論思想便普遍為中國知識份子所接受。