The May Fourth Movement: Origins, Goals, and Influences
Spark of the May Fourth Movement
China entered World War I on the Allied side in 1917, partly hoping to reclaim German-held territories in Shandong Province. When the Paris Peace Conference convened in 1919, Chinese delegates expected the Allies to return Shandong to China. Instead, the conference awarded those concessions to Japan, honoring secret wartime agreements Japan had secured with Britain, France, and Italy.
On May 4, 1919, over 3,000 students from Peking University and other Beijing institutions marched to Tiananmen Gate in protest. Their immediate demands were concrete:
- China's delegates must refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles
- The government must dismiss three officials known for making concessions to Japan (Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu)
- Chinese citizens should boycott Japanese goods to apply economic pressure
The protests spread rapidly from Beijing to Shanghai, Wuhan, and other cities. Workers launched sympathy strikes and merchants joined the boycotts. The Beijing government arrested hundreds of students, which only fueled wider public anger. Under this pressure, the Chinese delegation at Paris ultimately refused to sign the treaty.
Students' Role in the Movement
Students and intellectuals were the driving force behind May Fourth. Peking University (Beida) served as the movement's intellectual center, where faculty and students had already been debating radical ideas about China's future for several years.
Two figures stand out among the intellectual leaders:
- Chen Duxiu, dean of Peking University's College of Letters, founded the influential journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in 1915. He used it to attack Confucian hierarchy and call for a society built on "Mr. Democracy" and "Mr. Science," as he famously put it.
- Hu Shi, a Columbia-educated philosopher, championed replacing classical literary Chinese with baihua (vernacular Chinese) so that ordinary people could access written knowledge. His 1917 essay in New Youth on literary reform became a landmark of the movement.
Students did more than write essays. They organized reading groups, published pamphlets, gave street-corner speeches to workers and shopkeepers, and coordinated boycotts across cities. This was one of the first times in modern Chinese history that student activism mobilized broad segments of urban society.
Demands of May Fourth Activists
The movement's goals went well beyond the immediate Shandong crisis. Activists pushed for change on two fronts:
Political demands:
- End the "unequal treaties" that had given foreign powers extraterritorial rights, treaty ports, and territorial concessions in China since the Opium Wars
- Establish a democratic constitutional government to replace warlord rule
- Restore full Chinese sovereignty over its own territory
Social and cultural demands:
- Replace classical Chinese with baihua in education, government, and literature, making literacy accessible to far more people
- Challenge Confucian social hierarchies, especially the authority of elders over youth and men over women
- Promote women's rights, including access to education, freedom to choose marriage partners, and an end to foot-binding
- Embrace scientific reasoning and critical inquiry over tradition and superstition
These cultural goals reflected a conviction shared by many May Fourth intellectuals: China's political weakness was rooted in its cultural system. To build a strong, modern nation, they believed Chinese society itself had to be transformed.
Western Influences on the Movement
The New Culture Movement (roughly 1915–1921) overlapped with and fed directly into May Fourth. Centered around New Youth magazine, it introduced Western philosophical and political ideas to a generation of Chinese students.
Two Western concepts dominated the movement's rhetoric:
- Democracy ("Mr. Democracy"): Activists called for representative government, individual rights, and an end to authoritarian rule. They pointed to Western democracies as models, though they debated which version of democracy fit China's situation.
- Science ("Mr. Science"): Intellectuals argued that scientific method and empirical evidence should replace Confucian orthodoxy as the basis for understanding the world and solving China's problems.
Beyond these two pillars, the movement drew on a wider range of Western ideologies:
- Liberalism: Hu Shi promoted pragmatism (influenced by his teacher John Dewey, who actually lectured in China from 1919 to 1921), individual liberty, and gradual reform.
- Marxism: Li Dazhao, a Peking University librarian and professor, became one of China's first serious Marxist thinkers. The Russian Revolution of 1917 offered an alternative model of rapid transformation that appealed to activists frustrated with Western liberal democracies, which had just betrayed China at Paris.
This ideological split between liberal reformers and Marxist radicals would shape Chinese politics for decades. Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu went on to co-found the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, a direct outgrowth of May Fourth radicalism.