May Fourth and the legacy of the revolution in China

On May 4, 1919, 3,000 Beijing university students walked out of their dormitories and classrooms, gathered in front of the Tiananmen Gate and unleashed the most famous protest movement in Chinese history. Angered by the Chinese government’s weakness in the face of colonial invasion by Japan and the great Western powers, students, workers and other opponents of imperialism took over most of China’s major cities the next day in a defiant display of patriotism. resistance and mass consciousness.

The galvanizing question was the future of a Territory of 213 square miles on the Shandong Peninsula and the surrounding sphere of influence, which Germany had confiscated from China in 1898. China agreed to support the Allies in World War I on the condition that the territory be returned to its rightful owner, but a series of concessions imposed on its leaders by Japan was destined to fall into the hands of the latter. The shotgun deal, accepted by the Western Allies, saddled China with yet another national humiliation after eighty years of coercion, extortion, and military defeat at the hands of foreign powers, and the people blamed the powerless Beiyang Government and the fight warlord cliques who ran across much of the country for letting this happen.

With the negotiations on the Treaty of Versailles threatening to ratify Japanese control of Shandong, students distributed copies of a “Manifesto of All Students in Beijing” who urged the nation to “guarantee our sovereignty in foreign relations and to rid ourselves of domestic traitors.”

“The Chinese people may be massacred, but they will not surrender,” the manifesto declared. “Our country is about to be annihilated. Get up, brothers!”

As 3,000 students marched through Beijing, spectators were recorded as crying or applauding. They first tried to present a petition to foreign representatives in the Legação District, but the police blocked their path. The demonstration soon turned violent. Protesters broke into the home of a pro-Japanese official and beat him, while police attacked protesters in the streets, injuring several and causing one to die in hospital. Another 32 protesters were arrested.

If the Beiyang government had hoped to contain unrest within Beijing, it had, unsurprisingly, failed miserably. Inspired by national fervor, provoked by harsh repression, and furious with political elites that many considered more concerned with maintaining power than acting for the good of the country, a broad protest movement swept China, demanding opposition to Japanese imperialism, a boycott of Japanese goods and modernization of internal reform. Repression also increased, with the government characterizing students–who defined themselves as “citizens” first and foremost–like reckless and immature young people who needed to be put back in their place. The police arrested them by the thousands, so much so that they had to turn university buildings into makeshift prisons when the usual facilities became overcrowded. Many students, expecting to be arrested, carried food and bedding on their backs to be used during detention.

While the students led the revolt, the crowds of urban workers who joined them struck the hammer blow against the government’s will to resist. Workers were already resentful of their exploitation by foreign companies and their employees; now was an opportunity to make common cause against a hated oppressor. On June 5, a strike by 90,000 workers in the textile, printing, metallurgical and other industries paralyzed Shanghai, the country’s main economic center, in full view of European, Japanese and American residents living in the foreign concession. More strikes soon followed in other cities as well as along strategic railway lines. Merchants, industrialists and shopkeepers, perhaps hoping to ward off Japanese competition, also supported the protests, ceasing trade and threatening to withhold their taxes until their demands were met.

Faced with a population united in outrage and a potential economic crisis, the government released some of the detained students, fired three pro-Japanese cabinet members and offered to negotiate terms. The demonstrations continued until, on June 28, Beijing instructed its representatives not to sign the Treaty of Versailles unless Shandong was returned to China. The other powers ignored Chinese objections and signed the treaty anyway, and so the territory remained in Japanese hands until the end of World War II. But the so-called May Fourth Movement represented a stunning victory for the people who, through mass mobilization, forced their government to its knees and also unleashed forces that far exceeded the limits of 1919 politics.

Many historians characterize the May Fourth Movement (MFM) as the cumulative expression of the so-called New Culture Movement (NCM), an older intellectual campaign that sought to supplant traditional Confucian culture with “modernizing” Western ideas such as democratic politics, vernacular literatureand the scientific method. By doing so, NCM proponents argued, China could awaken to its full potential, free itself from foreign subjugation, and emerge from the deplorable social, economic, and political conditions of the past and present. The MNC’s rejection of the Confucian hierarchy, which demanded strict obedience from subordinates to authority, resonated strongly with the May 4 protesters and, in particular, with rising Marxist voices within the MFM, who saw struggles against foreign oppression by the Japanese and internal oppression by feudals. and capitalist elites as one and the same thing.

“We need to break the old prejudices, the old way of believing in things as they are, before we can begin to hope for social progress,” wrote Chen Duxiu, editor-in-chief of New Youth literary magazine and future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. “We must discard our old habits. We must merge the ideas of history’s great thinkers, old and new, with our own experience, construct new ideas in politics, morality and in economic life.”

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If the MNC was primarily a thought-oriented movement that created intellectual ferment among China’s youth, the MFM put these ideas of national revival into action by harnessing the power of the organized mass. This, in turn, expanded political thinking to include awareness of the decrepit working and living conditions suffered by the Chinese proletariat, who after marching alongside the students on May 4 were increasingly seen as revolutionary partners rather than as people who needed to be led. Workers, encouraged by their recent show of strength, have created organizations and unions across China as a basis for organizing more strikes. There were 25 strikes in China in 1918. In 1922, there were more than 100.

China’s educated elite and the general population, previously disconnected from each other, now realize that by joining forces in a time of crisis, they can effect transformative change. As ill will from the Allied betrayal at Versailles grew, activists turned away from Western liberal democracies and looked instead to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as a source of inspiration for the future.

Reflecting on the events of 1919, Mao Zedong postulated that the MFM marked a fundamental step in the transition from a predominantly bourgeois movement to a movement led by the proletariat, the beginning of a revolution that would bring communists to power in 1949.

“Before the MFM, the struggle on China’s cultural front was a struggle between the new culture of the bourgeoisie and the old culture of the feudal class,” he wrote. “After the MFM, an entirely new cultural force was born in China: the cultural thought of communism under the leadership of the Chinese communists. The new Western knowledge of natural and social sciences, useful only to the bourgeois class, thus came to be replaced by the vision communist world and the communist theory of social revolution.”

The Chinese government continues to commemorate May 4, 1919, as the moment of China’s awakening and an important link with the current ruling party. But as the modern CCP has chosen to focus on its role in leading China’s rapid economic growth and restoration as a world-class global power, its lip service to the events of 1919 has largely extolled nationalist fervor rather than challenge to authority. The pro-democracy student protesters of 1989 were also inspired by the Fourth of May, using its memory to legitimize their cause. Tanks and gunfire drove them out of Tiananmen Square. More than a hundred years later, the legacy of the Fourth of May is still disputed.