Prof. Li Zehou made a famous claim in the 1980s that the national salvation overtook the historical trend of enlightenment after the May Fourth Movement in China, and Chinese intellectuals lost their enlightenment spirit in the trends of national-state ideology. This binary opposition framework narrows the meaning of the enlightenment because it does not only refer to liberalism and individualism, and the salvation does not only refer to building national-state either. The main meaning of enlightenment and its complexity can only be revealed through tracing back to the history event itself. The enlightenment and the salvation were not incompatible before the May Fourth Movement, and consequences of the enlightenment were highly complicated-sometimes the anti-enlightenment even took efforts via wearing a mask of enlightenment, but the enlightenment was not and cannot be overtook by the national salvation movement.