May Fourth Movement

On 4 May 1919 several thousand students marched to Tiananmen in Beijing in anger at the peace settlement after the First World War, which left former German rights in Shandong province in Japanese hands. The protest grew into a nationwide wave of strikes and boycotts and gave its name to a broader intellectual awakening. The May Fourth Movement fused nationalism with a rejection of Confucian tradition and helped shape the leaders, including the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, who would dominate China for decades.

The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911, but the new Republic of China was weak. After President Yuan Shikai died in 1916, warlords with private armies dominated politics, and the government in Beijing could do little against foreign pressure. In 1915 the Twenty-One Demands presented by Japan, which sought wider Japanese interests in Manchuria, Mongolia and Shandong, caused a storm of anti-Japanese feeling. A secret Sino-Japanese defence agreement signed by Premier Duan Qirui in 1918 provoked further anger when it leaked.

Meanwhile the New Culture Movement, from about 1915, blamed Confucian values for China's weakness and called for "Mr Science" and "Mr Democracy" in their place.

China had joined the war on the Allied side in 1917, and some 140,000 Chinese labourers worked behind the Western Front. Chinese diplomats at Paris asked for the end of foreign privileges, the cancellation of the Twenty-One Demands and the return of Shandong. The great powers paid little attention, and the Treaty of Versailles confirmed Japan's hold on the former German territories. Many Chinese had placed their hopes in Woodrow Wilson's talk of self-determination and felt betrayed.

On the morning of 4 May, delegates from thirteen Beijing colleges agreed to hold a demonstration that afternoon. More than 4,000 students from Peking University, Yenching University and other schools gathered at Tiananmen, demanding the return of Qingdao and the rejection of the treaty and calling for a boycott of Japanese goods. They denounced three officials they regarded as collaborators with Japan, burned one of their homes and beat servants; many students were arrested and beaten.

Students across China went on strike the next day. When Beijing police arrested large numbers of students in early June, merchants and workers in Shanghai joined in, and the centre of the movement shifted there. A general strike threatened to paralyse the economy. On 12 June the government dismissed the three officials, and the Chinese delegation in Paris refused to sign the treaty, though Japan kept control of Shandong for the time being.

The movement became a watershed in Chinese literature, as writers turned from classical Chinese to the everyday vernacular. Hu Shih had argued for this in 1917, and Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman became one of its best-known works. Participants called the period a "Chinese Renaissance". Critics in the Kuomintang later complained that the movement had damaged valuable traditions and encouraged radicalism.

Disillusion with Western liberal democracy after Versailles, together with the example of the Russian Revolution, pushed many intellectuals to the left. Two leaders of the movement, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, went on to help found the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and Mao Zedong later described May Fourth as a stage on the road to the communist revolution. Both the Communist Party and its critics continue to claim the movement's legacy, while interpreting it differently.

Our 1920 map shows the Republic of China and Japan shortly after the protests.