may 4th movement

Born on May Fourth:

The New Culture Movement and its Influence on Early Communist Rhetoric

"As long as there shall be stones, he seeds of fire will not die."

Lu Xun, December 1935

On May Fourth 1919 over three thousand Beijing intellectuals met in Tiananmen Square to protest the results of the Paris Peace Treaty. The protesters disagreed with the Beijing government's decision to accept the lot given China in the post-war world. Over the next month students and workers from across China marched, held strikes, and boycott Japanese and western products, eventually causing the Chinese government to capitulate to their demands and make a stand on the world stage. This was the first mass protest in 20th century Chinese history and would serve as an example and inspiration for the next century of communist politics.

By 1914, when the First World War began, the Chinese government was still extremely unstable. Only three years earlier, in 1911, Sun Yat-Sen and his Nationalist Party had toppled the Qing Dynasty and formed a new government. At the outbreak of World War One the government had dissolved into various warlord factions and was, in general, only operating in the larger cities and urban areas. By the time the war broke out various countries had taken advantage of China's weak government. In 1915, when Japan invaded Shandong, the German occupied area of China, they handed the Chinese government a list of twenty-one demands. Among these demands was the stationing of Japanese troops within China and the placement of Japanese officials in the Chinese government. These measures would have in effect made China a Japanese colony. When China joined the First World War in 1917 its main goal was to regain Shandong and have the Twenty-One Demands repealed. Yet despite China's donation of over nine hundred workers to the fronts of France, Africa, and Turkey, by the end of the war in 1918, China was given only a tertiary seat at the Versailles peace conference.

During the peace talks at Versailles, China's demands were all but ignored. When the telegraph arrived bringing the news that the Paris Peace Treaty hadn't taken into account either of China's concerns, the people were und...

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...rically necessary ... yet incomplete" and had a "lack of determination to merge with the masses." Mao took many approaches of the movement, the vernacularism, the antifeudalism and anticolonialism, and he gave them his own spin. Truly in this sense, the Chinese Communist Party is a child of the May Fourth and New Culture movements.

Works Cited

Barmé Geremie. Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience.

New York: Hill and Wang. 1988.

Chang, Sylvia. "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Towards a 'Free' Literature"

China Journal. Issues 19/20.

Murphey, Rhodes. A History of Asia. New York: Longman. 2001.

Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1986

Siu, F, Helen. Mao's Harvest: Voices from China's new Generation.

New York: Oxford University Press. 1983.

Tse-Tsung, Chow. The May 4th Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1992.