May Fourth Movement

The Great Leap Forward, the famine, the violence of the Cultural Revolution.

And they look back at the period that we've been discussing, right? Before the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Nationalists, and they reflected that at the time there was a debate about how do we save China? And that's what people really deeply cared about because they came from what is legitimately an ancient civilization, and they saw how far it had fallen, and this-- th-they debated, right? And so we-- if we think about, for example, the May Fourth Movement, right? And that's not familiar, I'm sure, to many of your listeners, but it was in the, the, the, the 1910s, right? And many people said that it was science and democracy, enlightenment essentially, that was the way out.

That all of these feudal traditions had clouded, um, the minds of Chinese people and that it was, uh, moving in a direction that was more similar towards, uh, the West, but in a, um, a more liberal sense, a constitutionalist sense.

Um, and then, uh, by the 1980s, after having experienced, uh, the implications of a different answer, which was what class struggle, violence, transformation, order, discipline.

Lenin had just taken Russia with a handful of conspirators.

Why not them? The May Fourth Movement exploded like a bomb the following spring.

Students in Beijing protested the Treaty of Versailles, which handed German concessions in China to Japan instead of returning them to Chinese control.

The protests spread like wildfire.

And it goes into the early Republican era, which means my new project does take me into the 20th century, because we have a, a revitalization of new collections of this Qing Dynasty collection of ghost stories and, um, in the 1920s and the 1930s.

And it's a conservative response to sort of the, uh, May Fourth Movement and to kind of the beginnings of the Nationalist Movement, and this is saying, "Let's go back to Qing values.

This is the core of society.

We will use this 10-installment collection of ghost stories in the 1920s and '30s to really teach people what true Chinese culture was about." And so if I'm not writing a biography of a literati, can I write a biography of a book? That's kinda where I'm going with this project and thinking about why we share stories.

But, um, well, you, you probably know all this.

You get the f- sort of the May Fourth Movement in China that calls for democracy, uh, science and democracy.

It actually begins in Korea.

You have mass protests, uh, and the, the Japanese there, uh, suppress it.

So I think that's a very interesting legacy, uh, and that should be given due regard in understanding these mass political movements that break out in the 1920s.

So once these global ideas from Wilson's self-determination to the Russian Revolution reached Asia, how did local intellectuals and leaders actually turn those concepts into real political power on the streets?

It's kind of like a light bulb went on, right? So you have suddenly the May Fourth movement or May Fourth movements across Asia, these type of movements.

Um, they, they sort of suggest, "Well, you can actually get power from mass political protests in the streets." Then the question becomes, "Well, how do you get power from that? How do you organize it? What do we say is our political identity? Who do we mobilize? What is our constituency? How do we actually get power out of..." Well, it is very powerful and very, you know, that's clear, uh, from ...

Then the 4th of May arrived.

The immediate cause of the May Fourth Movement was the Treaty of Versailles.

China had contributed labor battalions to the Allied war effort during the First World War, over one hundred thousand men sent to France and Mesopotamia for non-combat work.

The expectation, widely held and loudly expressed by the Chinese government at the peace conference, was that this contribution would be rewarded with the return of Shandong Province, which had been under German control since the 1890s.

Workers in Shanghai went on strike.

For several weeks, the country experienced something that looked like a genuine popular movement, cutting across class lines, held together by shared anger at a foreign policy establishment that had failed the country once again.

The May Fourth Movement meant different things to different people.

To some, it was fundamentally a patriotic uprising against foreign domination.