In this article I provide a short overview of the discourse surroundingthe First World War in modern Chinese intellectual history and phi-losophy.Often rather straightforwardly identified as an event whichserved as a catalyst for a renewed sense of cultural nationalism,I ex-plore some of the complexity of the way in which different Chinesethinkers responded to the Great War.This event played a crucial rolein their attempts to think through the consequences of global moderni-ty and the introduction of new epistemic categories such as “science”(kexue)and “philosophy”(zhexue)in modern China.