The period from 1917 to 1949 was one of the most turbulent in the modern history of China. Literary and cultural movements sprang up with extraordinary frequency. It was also during these years that China completed its transformation from a traditional to a modern literary culture. This modernization was, in many cases, a westernisation. In 1917, Hu Shi (1891–1962) started and led the Literary Revolution in China and openly proposed to imitate the literature of the West. In 1919, the May Forth Movement broke out. It took Science and Democracy, two core values of the Western civilization, as its slogan, and won victories on all fronts of its struggle against traditional, conservative Chinese culture. Exemplary literary figures across China, such as Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Cao Yu and others, produced countless novels, prose works, and poems in the modern forms adopted by the May Fourth movement, the only forms they deemed suitable to representing the content of modern life, and to opposing traditional customs and culture. These literary figures, together with a rapidly expanding readership, utterly transformed the literary and cultural mentality of China. The Reform and Opening-Up Policy first applied in 1978 led to an era of great prosperity and relative equanimity. In the first period from 1917 to 1949, China made a decisive turn away from its traditional literature and culture; in the second after 1978, it entered into modernity.