May Fourth Movement As A Democratic Revolution example essay topic

Born on May Fourth: The New Culture Movement and its Influence on Early Communist Rhetoric by Vincent Galvin History 131 Professor Lee 18 December 2001'As long as there shall be stones, he seeds of fire will not die. ' Lu Xun, December 1935 On May Fourth 1919 over three thousand Beijing intellectuals met in Tiananmen Square to protest the results of the Paris Peace Treaty. The protesters disagreed with the Beijing government's decision to accept the lot given China in the post-war world. Over the next month students and workers from across China marched, held strikes, and boycott Japanese and western products, eventually causing the Chinese government to capitulate to their demands and make a stand on the world stage. This was the first mass protest in 20th century Chinese history and would serve as an example and inspiration for the next century of communist politics. By 1914, when the First World War began, the Chinese government was still extremely unstable.

Only three years earlier, in 1911, Sun Yat-Sen and his Nationalist Party had toppled the Qing Dynasty and formed a new government. At the outbreak of World War One the government had dissolved into various warlord factions and was, in general, only operating in the larger cities and urban areas. By the time the war broke out various countries had taken advantage of China's weak government. In 1915, when Japan invaded Shandong, the German occupied area of China, they handed the Chinese government a list of twenty-one demands. Among these demands was the stationing of Japanese troops within China and the placement of Japanese officials in the Chinese government. These measures would have in effect made China a Japanese colony.

When China joined the First World War in 1917 its main goal was to regain Shandong and have the Twenty-One Demands repealed. Yet despite China's donation of over nine hundred workers to the fronts of France, Africa, and Turkey, by the end of the war in 1918, China was given only a tertiary seat at the Versailles peace conference. During the peace talks at Versailles, China's demands were all but ignored. When the telegraph arrived bringing the news that the Paris Peace Treaty hadn't taken into account either of China's concerns, the people were understandably bothered. The German control of Shandong had been transferred to Japan, who was, in the eyes of the West, a more stable ally than China's fictionalized post-revolution government. The issue of the Twenty-One Demands was not even addressed and so still applied.

This disappointing and embarrassing news infuriated the Beijing intellectuals who, on the morning on May Fourth, staged enormous protests against Japan. Several thousand students and intellectuals from across Beijing's intellectual infrastructure gathered in Tiananmen Square and marched through the city. One group of students vented their anger on three of the better-known pro-Japanese politicians; setting fire to the house of one and beating another. In the following days the Beijing Students' Union was founded to spread the movement. The press and workers from around China all publicly supported the students and within the next weeks the protests spread across the country where boycotts continued and workers went on strike, effectively bringing the economy to a stand still.

In June the Chinese government was forced to release the jailed protesters and refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles, therein making its first major stand on the world front. The success May Fourth Movement was the political expression of a much broader cultural change that had been taking place in China since 1917. This movement, later named the New Culture Movement, was led primarily by intellectuals from Beijing University, notably the writers Lu Xun, Hu Shih, and Chen Duxiu. These men were united by their feelings of bitterness and shame; they believed the Chinese government was so entrenched in its pride and history that it had been left behind the quickly modernizing world. They believed that China had allowed Japan and the West to take advantage of it during the World War.

There were mass criticisms of China's stubborn pride and inability to accept the advice of the west. China's traditional Confucian government was labeled as the cause of much weakness and should be removed from within. Perhaps the most famous spokesman of the New Culture Movement was the Beijing writer Lu Xun. While in Japan studying medicine Lu Xun saw a reel of Japanese troops in China during the Russo-Japanese war. They were beheading a Chinese man in a crowd, Lu Xun said, 'Many others of my country men stood around him. They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic...

The one with his hands bound... was to have his head cut off... as a warning to others, while the Chinese beside him had come to enjoy the spectacle. ' Not long after the end of the Russo-Japanese War Lu Xun left medical school and traveled back to China. He had come to believe that the people of China needed to 'change their spirit. ' Xun took a post at Beijing University where he began publishing essays and stories satirizing the old Chinese regime. His writing stressed the failure of the traditional society whose 'benevolence' and 'virtue' were simply excuses for the oppression and exploitation of the lower classes who did not have the education to stand up for themselves. Lu Xun's famous character Ah Q was a symbol of all that was wrong with China: its pride in Confucian tradition that led to blindness and ignorance in modern ways.

Ah Q expressed the ignorance of China to the modern world, and the inability of the west to treat China as anything more than a child. During the time Lu Xun was writing China had become more and more impoverished and ignored on the world stage; Lu Xun blamed this on the out of date hypocritical values of the Confucian 'scholar-gentry. ' China was weak and humiliated by the west and Japan, the members of the New Culture Movement blamed not the west for colonialism, but China, for its own stubborn hold on Confucianism. Chen Duxiu, another major proponent of the New Culture Movement, also blamed China's decline on Confucianism. He edited the student magazine New Youth which called on China to be 'independent, not servile... progressive, not conservative. ' Chen was at Beijing University when he made the famous comment about what he felt China needed to become a major force in the world, China was 'gravely ill and should take the advice of the two gentlemen from the distant West, Mr. Sai (Science) and Mr. De (Democracy).

Only these two gentlemen can cure the dark maladies in Chinese politics, moral ity, learning and thought. ' Chen took the critique of Lu Xun one step farther by actively suggesting steps the Chinese government could take to modernize and stabilize. These were, mainly, western style education in science, and western style representative government. Another famous figure of the May Fourth movement was Hu Shih who studied the Confucian classics at university in China but, feeling jaded about the political climate, moved to America where he studied philosophy at Cornell and Columbia. Shih returned to China just before the May Fourth Movement where he became the major proponent of the Bai hua or 'vernacular' movement which stressed that literature should be directed at the masses and not saved for an intellectual minority. Unfortunately the majority of the Chinese population was illiterate and the movement effected them little, a point which Mao would later criticize.

These writers in Beijing University were referred to as the 'Chinese Renaissance' and were quickly joined by many intellectuals from around China, perhaps most importantly Ch " en Tu His who went on to found the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. These early leaders, Ch " en Tu-hsi u and Li Ta-chao, had realized what the May Fourth Movement said about politics and considered themselves to be carrying on the spirit of the movement. Tu-hsi u regarded the may Fourth Movement as a 'democratic revolution whose main problem had been that it had been organized by the urban intelligentsia rather than the working masses. ' (Tse-tung 347) It isn't particularly notable to that so many of the major Communist Party figures took part in, or were hugely influenced by, the May Fourth Movement. Mao himself was a great supporter of New Youth, he even published some critiques of the Nationalist Revolution and soon he began to organize the New People's Study Society. In a speech given in Yen an in 1920 he said, 'Most of these societies were organized more or less under the influence of the New Youth, the famous magazine of the Literary Renaissance edited by Ch " en Tu-hsi u.

I began to read this magazine while I was a student in the normal college and admired the articles of Hu Shih and Ch " en Tu-hsi u very much. They became for a while my models. ' In relation to how the movement influenced him Mao said, 'The May Fourth Movement of twenty years ago laid bare the fact that the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal bourgeois-democratic revolution of China had developed into a new stage. Because of the growth and expansion of the new social forces of that time, a strong front came into existence in this revolution, that is, the united front composed of the Chinese worker class, students, and the newly rising national bourgeoisie...

This means that the May Fourth Movement advanced one step further than the 1911 Revolution. ' This and other articles written in the following months made clear Mao's feeling that the May Fourth Movement was a jumping off point for the 'anti-imperialist and anti-feudal bourgeois-democratic revolution' and led to a new period, whether it went far enough was in question. If the purpose of the movement was to establish a democratic society over the semi-feudal society of 1911, the job of the communists was to help the democratic society form and then once it was stable, build communism over it. The achievement depended on the unity of workers, peasants, intelligentsia and progressive bourgeoisie. Mao said, 'In the Chinese democratic revolution, the intelligentsia are the first awakened element. The 1911 Revolution and the May Fourth Movement both clearly manifested this point...

The intelligentsia will achieve nothing if they do not unite with workers and peasants. The only dividing line between revolutionary and non-revolutionary or counterrevolutionary intellectual elements lies in whether or not they are willing to and do unite with workers and peasants. ' (Tse-tsung 350) Mao went so far as to say that the attack on old ethics and old literature was the first main feature of his great Chinese Cultural Revolution (Tse-tsung 352) The only difference was that 'The cultural movement of the time was not broad enough to reach down to the masses of workers and peasants' (Tse-tsung 362) Mao's other large critique of the May Fourth Movement was that it was too capitalistically influenced, 'The method they employed was, in general, still the method of the capitalist classes... it was quite correct for them to oppose the old formalism and the old dogmas, and to promote science and democracy; but they did not apply the critical spirit of dialectical materialism and historical materialism to the contemporary situation, history, or things foreign. ' (Tse-tsung 362) Like the other communists of the time Mao was inherently suspicious of those, like the intellectual leadership of the May Fourth Movement, who gave cultural enlightenment greater precedence than national salvation. Mao was a military man who believed in swift action. (Schwarcz, 247) Mao's primarily concern was China's national regeneration so he was naturally skeptical of those who put thought before the central task of patriotic action.

It would be impossible to argue that the May Fourth Revolution did not greatly influence the early rhetoric of Mao's communist party. Mao took the emotion and basic tenets of the New Culture writers and thinkers and infused them with his own studies on Marxism and philosophy. He believed that more important than mental emancipation and enlightenment was the future of the nation as a whole. Mao gave the movement credit, but didn't hold it as supreme, he believed it was 'historically necessary... yet incomplete' and had a 'lack of determination to merge with the masses.

' Mao took many approaches of the movement, the vernacularism, the anti feudalism and anticolonialism, and he gave them his own spin. Truly in this sense, the Chinese Communist Party is a child of the May Fourth and New Culture movements.

Bibliography

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Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
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Tse-Tsung, Chow. The May 4th Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1992.