May Fourth Movement
On 4 May 1919 some three thousand students from thirteen Beijing universities gathered at Tiananmen and marched on the legation quarter, protesting against the terms agreed at the Paris Peace Conference. They burned the house of a pro-Japanese minister and beat another official; one student later died of injuries. The grievance was Shandong. China had entered the First World War on the Allied side and sent nearly 140,000 labourers to France, expecting the return of the German concession in Shandong province. The conference awarded it to Japan instead, on the strength of secret treaties and of agreements Chinese officials had themselves signed. The protest spread within weeks to strikes by merchants and workers in Shanghai and other cities, the first time an urban movement of that breadth had appeared in China. The government released the arrested students, dismissed the ministers, and the Chinese delegation refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The wider significance is intellectual. The demonstration gave its name to a movement already under way — the New Culture Movement, centred on Peking University and the journal New Youth — which attacked Confucianism, the classical written language, arranged marriage and the family system, and called instead for science and democracy, personified as Mr Sai and Mr De. Vernacular Chinese replaced classical in publishing within a decade. The disillusionment with the Western powers turned many participants towards Marxism. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 by men who had been in that crowd. Mao Zedong, then a library assistant at Peking University, was among those the movement radicalised. Both the Communist Party and the Nationalists have claimed its legacy ever since, which is why the anniversary is still officially observed and carefully managed.
- Category: Social
