Another factor in his founding of the magazine was his desire to enlighten the youth; he considered them as the future of the nation, and he therefore wanted to foster in them a sense of patriotism and social responsibility.

Chen Duxiu also aimed to critique feudal traditions and promote individual freedom and equality, driving social reform and progress.

The YMCA's focus on youth work and publications aimed at educating and influencing young people underscored the term's adoption in Chinese society.

In Volume 3 of the magazine, senior scholars such as Zhang Shizhao, Cai Yuanpei, and Qian Xuantong were added to the group of authors; however, there were also contributions from young students such as Yun Daiying, Mao Zedong, Chang Naide, and Huang Lingshuang.

Volume 6 was edited by Chen Duxiu, Qian Xuantong, Gao Yihan, Hu Shih, Li Dazhao, Shen Yinmo, all of whom were professors at Peking University.

After that, Chen bounced back and forth between Japan and China as the Qing Dynasty crumbled to wait for an opportunity to engage in Chinese politics.

[16] Chen Hengzhe published her short story “Raindrops" (Chinese: 小雨点) in September 1920, making her the first female writer to use the new vernacular style.

He urged authors to write in the vernacular in order to describe life as it is, reasoning that Chinese literature had a limited range of subject matter because it used a dead language.

Other fiction by Lu Xun published in La Jeunesse includes "Kong Yiji" (Chinese: 孔乙己) and "Medicine" (Chinese: 药).The madness in Lu Xun’s Diary of Madman not only indicates a self-consciousness that is radically modern in breaking with a tradition, but also demarcates an oppositional and new symbolic practice and order.

[20] Li Dazhao was the magazine's chief collaborator in the Chinese Communist Party,[21] and published, among other things, an introduction to Marxist theory in the May 1919 issue of New Youth.

[22] In it, he also argued that China, while not possessing a significant urban proletariat, could be viewed as an entire nation that had been exploited by capitalist imperialist countries.

Mao Zedong, the founding father of the People's Republic of China, contributed articles against the oppression of women under Confucianism and on the importance of physical fitness to the magazine in his youth.

[2][21] "The well-known quotation of Mao Zedong (1893–1976), cited above, which compares young people to the morning sun, claimed for youth the authority to define the nation’s future and endowed it with all the power to make changes that would revolutionize society.

Initially, it was the pamphlets from Zhong Wen'ao, a secretary at Tsinghua University's student supervision office, that sparked his thoughts on Chinese script reform.

Hu Shih's letter briefly mentions his proposed literary revolution, which "must begin with eight things," which are, in order, not to use diction, not to use stereotyped phrases, not to speak of counterpoints, not to avoid vulgar words and phrases, and to emphasize the structure of grammar, not to make a sickly speech, and not to be excessively sentimental, not to use classical expressions, and to be meaningful".

[28] In addition to his slight doubts about the fifth and eighth items, Chen Duxiu said, "The rest of the six things, they all join hands in admiration".

Lu Xun's works in New Youth are mainly a critique of nationalism, a loving compassion for distorted life, and a sense of self-torture and self-sacrifice.

[29] A Madman's Diary aesthetically creates a rhetoric of freedom contrary to the eight-legged literary style, introducing elements of modernity into the expression of the mother tongue in strangeness and tearing.

In this article, Chen Duxiu expresses his earnest hopes for the youth, emphasizing their crucial role in the nation's survival and urging them to be conscious and courageous in their endeavors.

He advocates for the equal importance of science and human rights, marking the beginning of the New Culture Movement and sounding its clarion call.

Chen Duxiu's propositions aim to dismantle traditional beliefs, establish independent and autonomous character, and drive social progress.

A closer look at Chen's argument suggests that support for Mr. De and Mr. Sai was the basic position of the New Youth, and that opposition to old ethics, old politics, old art, old religion, old literature, and other specific ideas were all based on this principle.

Published in the March 1919 issue (Volume 6 Number 3), this one-act play highlights the problems of traditional marriages arranged by parents.

This mainly included the struggle against the feudal revivalist forces of the "Wenxuan School" (Chinese: 文选派) and the "Tongcheng School" (Chinese: 桐城派) represented by Liu Shipei and Lin Qinnan, who opposed the vernacular language and defended the literary language, and opposed the new morality and defended the old morality.

[33] Chen Duxiu wrote "Zui an zhi da bian shu", in which he frankly admitted that the world's accusation that the New Youth had "undermined propriety and religion," among other things, was true.

[34] On behalf of the magazine, Chen Duxiu swore, "If I support these two gentlemen, I will not shirk all government oppression, social attacks and ridicule, or even the breaking of my head and the shedding of blood".

The social trends after the May Fourth Movement and the increasing radicalization of the academic world made it difficult for the leading newspaper New Youth to be confined to university campuses.

"[39] New Youth had a huge appeal to the young Mao Zedong, primarily due to the fact that it promoted and advocated democratic science.

Bei jing Xin bao reported that: "Recently, Peking University faculty members Chen Duxiu, Hu Shizhi, Liu Bannong and Qian Xuantong advocated a new Chinese literature, advocating a change to the vernacular style, and for China's 2,000 years of obstacles to the cultural shackles of the most thought of Confucianism and Mencius, and the parallelism of the Pianwen prose style.

From then on, commenting on New Youth from the perspective of the history of ideas became the mainstream discourse in the academic world while the literary revolution, which was the most popular concern and the one with the most actual achievements, gradually faded out of the historians' view.