China: history, geography, and contemporary society

¶ … May Fourth Movement and the Rise of the Chinese Communist Party

as a Reaction to Foreign Imperialism

The May Fourth Movement was one of the most famous anti-foreign movements in China and the first mass movement in modern Chinese history. Some scholars have called it "the Chinese Enlightenment," with the purpose of unifying patriotic Chinese of all classes. On May 4, about 3,000 university students in Beijing protested the Versailles Conference (April 28, 1919), which had awarded Japan the former German leasehold of Jiaozhou, Shantung province. Demonstrations and strikes spread to Shanghai, and a nationwide boycott of Japanese goods followed. The May Fourth Movement began a patriotic outburst of new urban intellectuals against foreign imperialists and warlords. Intellectuals identified the political establishment with China's failure in the modern era, and hundreds of new periodicals published attacks on Chinese traditions, turning to foreign ideas and ideologies. The movement split into leftist and liberal wings, with the latter advocated gradual cultural reform as exemplified by Hu Shih who interpreted the pragmatism of John Dewey, while leftists like Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao introduced Marxism and advocated political action. Dewey, visiting China in 1919 said, "there seems to be no country in the world where students are so unanimously and eagerly interested as in China in what is modern and new in thought, especially about social and economic matters, nor where the arguments which can be brought in favor of the established order and then status quo have so little weight -- indeed are so unuttered."

The movement also popularized vernacular literature, promoted political participation by women, and championed educational reforms.

There is little doubt that this seminal event in the history of China had far reaching effects. There is also little doubt that the May Fourth Movement led to the birth of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). "The Party was founded two years after the outbreak of the May Fourth movement, and official historiography still traces the intellectual origins of the CCP to the May Fourth movement."

Historians now mark the May Fourth Movement as the beginning of modern China. Originally a demonstration against Japanese expansionism into China, the protest rapidly coalesced into a political, social, and cultural movement that gave birth to China's Communist Party. Interestingly, Chinese contact with the Russian Bolsheviks first occurred a year before the May Fourth Movement. The Chinese government of Sun Zhongshan received a letter from the Bolshevik Foreign Minister during the summer of 1918, proposing an alliance. Although initially skeptical, when "Bolshevik representatives suggested that allying with Moscow could provide Sun with funding, military advisors, and arms, therefore, did Sun agree to establish a formal alliance."

During World War I, Japan and the United States seized the opportunity to speed up their occupation of lands in China. "The overthrow of the Qing Dynasty represented a watershed in Chinese history, but the 1911 revolution did little tot strengthen China's hand against foreign imperialism or change Chinese society. On the contrary, foreign powers took advantage of Chinese weakness in the fall of 1911 to advance their ambitions in China."

Japan, in particular, was at the fore-front of such activities. "Japan's seizure of the German position in Shantung in 1914 and her Twenty-one Demands of 1915 were fresh in memory. National concern had been mounting that the Versailles peace conference might let Japan stay in Shantung."

As a result, increasing anti-imperialist feeling was aroused in the Chinese people, and the victory of the October Revolution in Russia encouraged many Chinese in their quest for liberation from foreign control. Protests were coming in to Paris from Chinese all over the world, and passions increased when it was discovered, "Japan's claim based not only on secret wartime agreements with Britain, France, and Italy in 1917 but also on a similar secret deal by the Japan with the corrupt Anfu government in Peking in 1918."

Even the United States, in the Lansing-Ishii Agreements of November 1917, in which the United States "recognized that 'geographical propinquity creates special relations between nations' -- i.e. Japan had a special position in China -- while Japan paid lip service to the Open Door Policy."

On one hand, the government of the Northern Warlords yielded to the pressure exerted by the imperialist foreign powers and failed to act in the general interests of the Chinese people. It greatly increased its control of land, industry and mining, resulting in large increases in taxation. This, together with the tangled warfare among warlords which was still continuing led to great suffering among the population. The domestic class contradictions, which were deepening day by day, became the fundamental cause of the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement. On the other hand, during World War I, the national industries developed, the working class rapidly grew in strength, and the workers struggled by frequently going on strike. The development of the New Cultural Movement promoted the emancipation of the mind, and spurred the advanced elements, especially young students, to actively participate in patriotic activities. This prepared the class and ideological foundation for the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement.

In early 1919, the victorious nations of World War I convened a peace conference in Paris. The representatives of the Chinese government put forth the following requests: do away with the privileges of the imperialist countries in China; cancel the "Twenty-One Demands" of the Japanese; and take back the privileges in Shantung that Japan had taken from Germany during World War I. Britain and the United States dominated the meeting and rejected the Chinese representatives' demands. The failure in diplomacy of China at the Paris Peace Conference became the incident that touched off the May Fourth Movement.

The Twenty-One Demands were a set of demands which the Japanese government of Okuma Shigenobu sent to the Chinese government in 1915. Seizing the opportunity brought about by the onset of war in 1914, and by its status as an Allied power, Japan presented China with a secret ultimatum in January 1915 designed to give Japan regional ascendancy over China. The ultimatum was backed up by the threat of war. The Twenty-One Demands - comprising five groupings - required that China immediately cease leasing its territory to foreign powers, and to ascent to Japanese control over Manchuria and Shantung. The Japanese government, following revision of the demands on April 26, 1915, sent a final demand requiring agreement of the demands on May 7, 1915. The following day the Chinese government, aware of its inability to wage war against Japan, reluctantly agreed to Japan's demands, although the intervention of both Britain and the U.S. annulled demands by Japan that China accept government policy "advisors." The result was a boyctt of Japanese goods in Japan and the return home by groups of Chinese students in Japan. "The Twenty-One Demands had the unexpected effect of precipitating a fear of imminent extinction and a consequent outburst of nationalism."

The U.S. In particular was wary of Japanese intentions in the Pacific. The Twenty-One Demands were subsequently annulled by the Washington Conference of 1921-22 when Japan agreed to withdraw its troops from Shantung and to restore sovereignty to China:

1. China must recognize all German rights, interests, and concessions related to the province of Shantung.

2. China must not cede or lease any property on Shantung, or along its coast, to any power.

3. China must allow Japan to build a railway connecting Chefoo or Lungkow with the Kiaochou Tsinanfu Railway.

4. China must open up cities in Shantung for foreign residence and trade.

5. China must extend the lease of Port Arthur, Dairen, the South Manchuria Railway, and the Antung-Mukden Railway for an additional 99 years.

6. China must allow Japanese to lease or own land in South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia.

7. China must allow Japanese freedom of movement in those regions.

8. China must allow Japanese to mine in these regions.

9. China must obtain Japanese permission before constructing (or permitting) a railway in these regions, and before loaning tax revenue from these regions to foreign powers.

10. China must consult Japan when it needs political, financial, or military advisors.

11. China must relinquish control of the Kirin-Chungchun Railway to Japan for a term of 99 years.

12. China must make the Han-Yeh-Ping Company a joint concern of China and Japan.

13. China must protect the rights of Han-Yeh-Ping to mine in the areas adjacent to its existing mines.

14. China must not cede or lease any harbor or bay on its coast to any other power.

15. China must utilize Japanese political, financial, and military advisers.

16. China must allow Japanese hospitals, temples, and schools to own land.

17. China must place its police under joint Japanese and Chinese administration, or employ Japanese policemen.

18. China must obtain from Japan a supply of a certain quantity of arms, or establish an arsenal in China under joint Japanese and Chinese management, and must use experts and materials from Japan.

19. China must allow Japan to build a railway to connect Wuchang with the Kiukiang-Nanchang and Hangchou, and between Nanchang and Chaochou.

20. China must consult Japan whenever foreign capital is needed in improving the infrastructure of Fukien Province.

21. China must give Japanese the right to preach in China.

On May Fourth, some 3,000 students from Peking University and other schools gathered together in front of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace that fronts the Forbidden City complex in the center of Beijing, and held a demonstration. They were furious at the news that had just come from the Paris Peace Conference. They shouted out such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home," "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'," "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty." They demanded punishment of such figures as Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu, who held important posts as diplomats. Despite the fact that China had sent nearly 100,000 soldiers to the Western front to assist the Allies, the country's delegates were told that the former German colonial territories would not be returned to Chinese sovereignty, but would be handed over to Japan. This news reached China by telegraph, and people in the capital received it quickly, among them students at Peking University. By mid-afternoon, the outraged students were on the march, protesting against imperialism and their own weak government. Finally, they arrived at the house of Cao Rulin, a prominent pro-Japanese minister in the Chinese government -- "and then," in the words of a western reporter of the time, "went mad." The students broke into the house, smashing the furniture and ornaments. The enraged students even burnt the house. The minister himself nimbly climbed over the back wall before the students could catch him, but a guest was not so lucky, and was beaten with an iron bed-leg until he was, in one observer's report, "covered in scars that looked like fish-scales all over his body." He was left for dead, though he did in fact survive. Having set the house on fire, the mob dispersed. The government of the Northern Warlords suppressed the demonstration and arrested many of the students. The next day, many more students in Beijing went on strike, and students in other parts of the country responded one after another.

In early June, to support the students' struggle, workers and businessmen in Shanghai also went on strike. So did workers in other places across the country. The center of the movement moved from Beijing to Shanghai. When Chinese laborers, merchants, and others began supporting the student protest, the movement grew into a national crisis. The working class emerged on the political stage and brought great pressure to bear on the government of the Northern Warlords, but the movement remained an intellectual one. "Far from having set China on the irreversible, glorious path of enlightenment, the event of 1919 marked the first of a series of incomplete efforts to uproot feudalism while pusuing the cause of a nationalist revolution. Intellectuals were at the forefront of this effort."

The six-week standoff between the students and the Chinese government forced the Chinese delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference to reject the peace treaty. As a result, the Chinese representatives in Paris didn't sign on the peace treaty. The May Fourth Movement won the initial victory.

The May Fourth Movement was thoroughly an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal revolutionary movement in Chinese modern history. Young students acted as pioneers in the movement. The Chinese working class went up on the political stage, and functioned as the main force in the later period of the movement. Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu and other intellectuals directed and promoted the development of the movement, and played leading roles in it.

The May Fourth Movement covered more than 20 provinces and over 100 cities of the country. It had a broader popular foundation than the Revolution of 1911. Its great contribution lay in arousing the people's consciousness and preparing for the unity of the revolutionary forces.

The May Fourth Movement promoted the spreading of Marxism in China, and prepared the ideological foundation for the establishment of the Communist Party of China. The October Revolution pointed out the direction for the Chinese revolution.

The May Fourth Movement marked the beginning of the New Democratic Revolution in China. It also served as an intellectual turning point. It was the seminal event that radicalized Chinese intellectual thought. Previously Western style liberal democracy had a degree of traction among Chinese intellectuals, however the Versailles Treaty was viewed as a betrayal. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, cloaked as they were by moralism, were specifically, and Western centrist thought more generally, seen as hypocritical and were jettisoned by the Chinese intellectual community.

The adoption of Marxist/Leninism began to take hold on the left. It was during this time that communism was studied seriously by some Chinese intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. "By late 1919 he had become not obly supportive of its aims, but had become something of a true believer in its main doctrines ... In Bejing, Li established the Society for the Study of Maxism at whose meeting he and other faculty lectured on Maxism."

The most radical figures of the era declared that the time had come for a "New Culture" that would utterly reject the old Confucian past which they felt had weakened China. Instead, they should look to the outside world for ways to save China. Among these radicals was the young Mao Tse-tung, who took part in founding the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. After Li befriended him, by finding him a job at Beijing University, Mao returned to his home to found a similar study group.

Mao also founded a journal of discussion called Hsiang River Review, in which he called for the masses to band together in order to get the upper hand, just as the imperialist powers had done. "In a similar fashion the nations of the West had defined themselves by their interaction; now it was time for China, which had been isolated, to do the same."

Correspondingly the right turned to fascism. Ultimately the Kuomintang would prove to be the dominant power on the right and would employ German military advisors through much of the 1930's. Its leader Chiang Kai-shek would even send one of his sons to serve in the German Wehrmacht during the 1938 Anschluss with Austria. While both the left and the right would initially co-operate for reasons of expediency, the irreconcilable philosophical conflict between these two sides, which would dominate the rest of Chinese history in the 20th century, was in many ways caused by the discrediting of moderate political thought.

By 1922, however, the Comintern, which supervised the activities of the CCP, began to press the Communists to cooperate with the Kuomintang in order to facilitate the rise of a Chinese republic. Under the influence of Lenin, and later Stalin, the Comintern argued that China wasn't ready for communism, for it needed to undergo a period of modernization and republicanism. The standing order, then, was for the CCP to ally itself with the KMT despite the rabid anti-communism of the latter.

The marriage was not exactly made in heaven. The Nationalists repeatedly used the CCP in order to mobilize strikes during the Northern Expedition, but then betrayed the communists when they gained control of major cities. The communists themselves began to operate independently as a party after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925; in particular, Mao Tse-tung began a party recruitment campaign among peasants that was phenomenally successful.

The relationship between the KMT and CCP eventually broke down completely despite Stalin's wishes. On August 1, 1927, a peasant army numbering 15,000 men attacked and seized the city of Nanchang in Kiangsi in southern China. Although the attack eventually failed, this brought the CCP in direct military confrontation with the KMT.

The Communist Party itself split into two factions. On the one hand were the members directly under the control of the Comintern and Josef Stalin; on the other were the rural agitators that had been raising peasant armies for the communist struggle. Principle among these rural leaders was Mao Tse-tung who had been phenomenally successful at raising a peasant army in Hunan province. Mao began a series of uprisings, but the Comintern severely rebuked him. The Comintern believed that a real communist revolution would be a revolution of workers rather than peasants, so it began sponsoring a series of urban uprisings. When these failed, it became evident that Mao and his peasant army was the real player in communist politics.

The fact remains that in China communism had to adapt itself to very special conditions -- those of a large rural country, deprived of its economic independence and the victim of terrible exploitation, those of a semi-colonized China where the industrial proletariat was too weak and too wretched to play any decisive role; and those of an armed conflict which was to on continuously from 1927 until the final victory of 1949 -- against the Nationalist armies before and after the Japanese invasion, and against the forces of the occupying power. If Chinese communism looks primarily peasant, military, and patriotic, it is thanks to these special conditions.

In January, 1928, Mao formed the Fourth Red Army with Chu Teh as the military leader and Mao as the party representative. They then established a Soviet regime in Kiangsi.

By this point, Mao and Chu had become independent operatives largely untouched by party squabbles or by influence from the Comintern and Soviet Russia. They aggressively organized the peasantry and set up one soviet government after another throughout Hunan and Kiangsi. They began seizing land and redistributing it to the peasantry. Mao's movement in the south contrasted completely with the state of the CCP party, which had started to fall apart under weak leadership and internal bickering. The Soviet Union tolerated Mao's and Chu's activities, even though they were in direct violation of Comintern orders, because they were, after all, the only successful communist activities in China.

Utterly sure of himself, Mao then called the First All-China Congress of the Soviets on November 7, 1931, to be held in his capital city of Juichin. The Bolshevik members of the Chinese Politburo agreed to this congress but only with the intention of chastising Mao. They attacked him at the Congress for his guerilla tactics, his recruitment of peasants over workers, and his overall "ideological poverty." Mao, however, had stacked the congress with Maoists. The Congress elected Mao chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-China Soviet Government and made him Chief Political Commissar of the Red Army. However, Mao was unable to gain admission into the Chinese politburo, which remained in the hands of the Bolsheviks.