On May 4, 1919, 3,000 Beijing university students emerged from their dormitories and lecture halls, gathered in front of the Tiananmen Gate and sparked the most famous protest movement in Chinese history. Outraged by the Chinese government’s weakness in the face of colonial invasion by Japan and the Western powers, students, workers, and other opponents of imperialism had taken control of most of China’s major cities the next day in a defiant display of patriotic display. resistance and mass consciousness.
The tantalizing issue was the future of an area of 213 square kilometers on the Shandong Peninsula and its surrounding sphere of influence, which Germany had conquered from China in 1898. China had agreed to support the Allies in World War I on the condition that the territory be conquered. returned to its rightful owner, but a series of concessions Japan imposed on its leaders saw it fall into the latter’s hands instead. The shotgun treaty accepted by the Western Allies burdened China with yet another national humiliation after eighty years of coercion, extortion and military defeat by foreign powers. of the country for allowing this to happen.
As negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles threatened to ratify Japan’s control of Shandong, students distributed copies of a “Manifesto of All Students in Beijing,” which urged the nation to “secure our sovereignty in foreign affairs and get rid of the traitors in the land’. At home.”
“The Chinese people may be slaughtered, but they will not surrender,” the manifesto said. “Our country is on the verge of destruction. Up, brothers!”
As 3,000 students marched through Beijing, spectators were reported to have cried or cheered them. They first tried to petition foreign representatives in the Legation Quarter, but the police blocked their way. The demonstration quickly turned violent. Protesters broke into the home of a pro-Japanese official and beat him, while police attacked demonstrators in the streets, injuring several and leaving one who later died in a hospital. Another 32 protesters were arrested.
If the Beiyang government had hoped to curb unrest in Beijing, it would have failed miserably, as it should. Inspired by national enthusiasm, provoked by harsh repression, and enraged by political elites who many saw as more concerned with maintaining power than acting in the country’s interests, a broad protest movement spread across China, demanding opposition to Japanese imperialism, a boycott of Japanese goods and modernization of domestic reforms. The crackdown also escalated, with the government characterizing the students—who defined themselves primarily as ‘citizens’—as reckless and immature youths who needed to be put back in their place. Police arrested them by the thousands, forcing them to turn university buildings into makeshift prisons when the usual facilities became overcrowded. Many students, expecting arrest, carried food and bedding on their backs for use during detention.
While the students took the lead in the uprising, the large numbers of urban workers who joined them gave the hammer blow to the government’s will to resist. The workers were already outraged by their exploitation by foreign companies and their collaborators; this was an opportunity to make common cause against a hated oppressor. On June 5, a strike by 90,000 workers from textile, printing, metal and other industries paralyzed Shanghai, the country’s main economic center, in full view of European, Japanese and American residents living abroad. concession lived. More strikes soon followed in other cities and along strategic railway lines. Merchants, industrialists, and shopkeepers, perhaps hoping to stave off Japanese competition, also supported the protests, halting 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 arrested 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 reassigned to China. The other powers overruled Chinese objections and signed the treaty anyway, and the area 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, had brought 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 aimed to replace traditional Confucian culture with Western, “modernizing” ideas such as democratic politics, vernacular. literature and the scientific method. By doing so, advocates of the NCM argued, China could awaken its full potential, free itself from foreign subjugation, and emerge from the deplorable social, economic, and political conditions of the past and present. The NCM’s rejection of the Confucian hierarchy, which demanded strict obedience from subordinates to authority, resonated strongly with the May 4 demonstrators and especially with the emerging Marxist voices within the MFM, who were concerned with the struggle against the foreign oppression by the Japanese and the domestic oppression by the feudal oppression. and capitalist elites as one and the same.
“We must break down 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, the paper’s editor-in-chief. New youth literary magazine and a future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. “We must put aside our old ways. We must merge the ideas of history’s great thinkers, old and new, with our own experience, and new ideas in politics, morality and economic life.”
Want a daily digest of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Sign up for our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
While the NCM was primarily a thought-oriented movement that created intellectual unrest among China’s youth, the MFM put such thoughts of national revival into practice by harnessing the power of the organized masses. This in turn expanded political thinking to include awareness of the poor working and living conditions of the Chinese proletariat, which after its march with the students on May 4 came increasingly to be seen as revolutionary partners rather than as people who led had to be. Workers, emboldened by their recent show of force, formed organizations and unions across China as a basis for organizing more strikes. In 1918 there were 25 strikes in China. In 1922 there were more than 100.
China’s educated elite and the population at large, previously separate, now realized that by joining forces in times of crisis they could bring about transformative change. As ill will continued to fester over the Allies’ betrayal at Versailles, activists turned away from Western liberal democracies and looked instead to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as a source of inspiration for the future.
Looking back on the events of 1919, Mao Zedong argued that the MFM marked an important step in the transition from a largely bourgeois movement to one led by the proletariat, the beginning of a revolution that would bring the 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, a completely new cultural force was born in China: the cultural thinking of communism led by the Chinese communists. The new Western knowledge from the natural and social sciences, which was only useful to the bourgeois class, came about in this way. be replaced by the communist worldview 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 recovery as a world power of the first rank, its lip service to the events of 1919 has largely praised nationalist fervor rather than resistance to the authority. The pro-democracy student demonstrators of 1989 were also inspired by May 4 and used its memory to legitimize their cause. Tanks and gunfire drove them from Tiananmen Square. More than a hundred years later, the legacy of May 4 is still being fought over.
