Episode 5: The May 4th Movement

On May 4th 1919 around 3,000 students from Beijing University and some 12 other universities in the capital gathered in Tiananmen square to voice their opposition to the events taking place at the Paris Peace Conference. What started as a peaceful march erupted into a violent protest, and then into a nationwide cultural and intellectual movement that was to last for three years. This movement is now known as the May 4th Movement, and is commonly cited as a decisive moment in China’s intellectual history, a short burst of vigor that is still examined, praised, and held up as a guiding example in China till this day.

On the surface, it seems as if this movement emerged primarily as a response to current events, particularly the injustice China suffered at the hands of the Japanese and West in the aftermath of the First World War. However, most historians see the May 4th movement less as a new, standalone campaign, and more as a continuation of the New Culture Movement that we began discussing in the previous episode. In fact, the May fourth movement has been described by many as simply a continuation of the reformist movement of 1898, which we talked about in episode 2. It’s sometimes called China’s ‘enlightenment’, though there are many that disagree with this statement. Whether the movement was able to usher in a new era or not will be explored in the rest of this episode, but what you should know is that May 4th is significant enough to warrant an episode entirely of its own. If it wasn’t the breaking point with China’s past, then it was certainly the ‘awakening’ point, the critical juncture at which a new intellectual class emerged to wake the Chinese people up and demand that they move with the times or risk remaining a backward global pariah.