On May 4, 1919, 3,000 university students in Beijing walked out of their dormitories and lecture halls, gathered in front of the Tiananmen Gate, and sparked the most famous protest movement in Chinese history. Angered by the Chinese government’s weakness in the face of the colonial encroachments of Japan and the major Western powers, students, workers and other opponents of imperialism had taken over most of China’s major cities the next day in a defiant show of patriotic resistance and mass consciousness.
The exciting question was the future of a 213 square mile territory on the Shandong Peninsula and the surrounding sphere of influence that Germany had taken over from China in 1898. China had agreed to support the Allies in World War I on the condition that the territory would return to its rightful owner, but a series of concessions imposed by Japan on its leaders resulted in it falling into the latter’s hands instead. The shotgun deal accepted by the Western allies burdened China with another national humiliation after eighty years of coercion, extortion and military defeat by foreign powers, and the people blamed the powerless Beiyang government and the feuding warlord cliques that ruled much of the country for making it happen.
As negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles threatened to ratify Japanese control of Shandong, students handed out copies of a “Manifesto of All Students in Beijing” that exhorted the nation to “secure our sovereignty in foreign affairs and get rid of the traitors.” ”
“The Chinese people may be massacred, 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 said to have cried or cheered them on. They first tried to submit a petition to foreign representatives in the legation district, but the police blocked their way. The demonstration soon turned violent. Protesters broke into the home of a pro-Japanese official and beat him while police attacked protesters in the street, injuring several and one later dying in a hospital. Another 32 protesters were arrested.
If the Beiyang government had hoped to contain unrest in Beijing, it had, as usual, failed miserably. Inspired by national fervor, provoked by harsh repression and angry at political elites, many of whom were more concerned with maintaining power than with the well-being of the country, a broad protest movement, opposition to Japanese imperialism, a boycott, spread across China of Japan, called for Japanese goods and modernizing reforms at home. 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 convert university buildings into makeshift prisons when the usual facilities were overcrowded. Many students awaiting arrest carried food and bedding on their backs to be used during detention.
While the students led the uprising, the numerous city workers who joined them delivered the hammer blow to the government’s will to resist. Workers were already angry about their exploitation by foreign companies and their collaborators; Now was the opportunity to join forces 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 the European, Japanese and American residents living in the foreign concession. Further strikes soon followed in other cities and along strategically important railway lines. Merchants, industrialists, and shopkeepers also supported the protests, perhaps hoping to ward off Japanese competition by halting trade and threatening to withhold their taxes until their demands were met.
Facing a population united in outrage and a possible economic crisis, the government released some of the arrested students, fired three pro-Japanese cabinet members and offered to negotiate terms. The demonstrations continued until, on June 28, Beijing ordered 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 the territory remained in Japanese hands until the end of World War II. But the so-called May Fourth Movement represented an overwhelming victory for the people, who through mass mobilization had brought their government to its knees and unleashed forces that went far beyond the limits of 1919 politics.
Many historians characterize the May Fourth Movement (MFM) as a 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 or vernacular to replace literature and the scientific method. In this way, NCM proponents argued, China could realize 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 to authority from the subaltern, resonated widely with the 4th century protestors and capitalist elites as one and the same.
“We must dismantle the old prejudices, the old way of believing things as they are, before we can begin to hope for social progress,” wrote Chen Duxiu, the editor-in-chief of the New youth Literary magazine and future co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921. “We must discard our old ways. We must connect the ideas of the great thinkers of history, old and new, with our own experience and build new ideas in politics, morality and economic life.”
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If the NCM was primarily a thought-oriented movement that created intellectual unrest among China’s youth, the MFM put such ideas of national revitalization into action by harnessing the power of the organized masses. This, in turn, broadened political thought to include awareness of the degraded working and living conditions of the Chinese proletariat, who, after marching alongside students on May 4, were increasingly seen as revolutionary partners rather than people who needed to be led. Workers, emboldened by their recent show of strength, formed organizations and unions across China as a basis for organizing further strikes. In 1918 there were 25 strikes in China. In 1922 there were more than 100.
China’s educated elite and general population, once divided, now realized that they can join forces to bring about transformative change in times of crisis. As resentment grew over the Allied betrayal at Versailles, activists turned away from Western liberal democracies and instead looked to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as a source of inspiration for the future.
Looking back on the events of 1919, Mao Zedong posited that the MFM represented a crucial 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 battle 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 emerged in China: the cultural idea of communism under the leadership of the Chinese communists. This is how the new Western knowledge from the natural and social sciences, which was useful only for the bourgeois class, was replaced by the communist worldview and the communist theory of social revolution.”
The Chinese government continues to commemorate May 4, 1919 as a moment of China’s awakening and an important link to the current ruling party. But as the modern CCP has chosen to focus on its role in leading rapid economic growth and restoring China as a world-class power, its lip service to the events of 1919 has largely extolled nationalist fervor rather than defiance of authority. The pro-democracy student demonstrators of 1989 were also inspired by May 4th and used its memory to legitimize their cause. Tanks and gunfire drove them away from Tiananmen Square. More than a hundred years later, the legacy of May 4th is still controversial.