After the Qing fell and was replaced by a Republican government, Liu opposed Hu Shih's call for a "literary revolution" that consisted in replacing classical Chinese with more vernacular forms of writing, a kind of reform advocated by the intellectuals of the New Culture Movement. Refusing to ascribe China's recent difficulties to Confucianism or traditional Chinese culture, Liu attributed them to the Manchurian domination, the Opium War, corrupt government, warlords, and all kinds of social problems which, he argued, is not the consequence of practice but the absence of practice of Confucianism.