The 1919 May Fourth Movement is perhaps the most significant intellectual moment for modern China. Its centennial was this month.
Borne out of a period of weakness and decline in China, the movement not only was important in its time but it has influenced how Taiwan and China became the way they are today. In China, the May Fourth Movement is still referred to as support for all sorts of purposes by the state. Both the history and the interpretation of this event are useful to better understanding Taiwan and China today.
Tumultuous times in 20th Century China
The decline of Imperial China, and the potential brought on by a new republican experiment in China, sparked the May Fourth Movement. In the nineteenth century, China, as governed by the Manchurian Qing Empire, was defeated in the Opium Wars by Great Britain and forced to sign unequal treaties. This was followed by the Taiping Rebellion, a deadly civil war which led to at least twenty million deaths. Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and dynastic rule ended shortly thereafter in 1912. Instability is not viewed well in China and the period which ensued was also volatile. A brief experiment in democracy failed and a period of factional rule followed. The Beiyang government, which claimed to be the legitimate representative of China by the time of its entry into World War I, accepted loans from Japan during the war, which led to special concessions being awarded to Japan in Shandong Province after the war, an arrangement that was approved by the Western allies.
This event directly ignited the May Fourth Movement, which protested the concessions to Japan and advocated for ideals such as anti-imperialism and democracy. The ideals of the May Fourth Movement gained momentum, particularly in intellectual circles, and continued the ideological debates about how to modernize China since the Qing came in contact with the West.
The emergence of modern Chinese nationalism was also a notable result of the May Fourth Movement. The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921 and embraced nationalism to fuel self-determination and promoted proletarian dictatorship to appeal to the peasantry. On the other hand, General Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party and brought key areas of China under his control by 1928, but sought largely to preserve the old order by instituting the New Life Movement in the 1930s.
After fighting the Japanese occupation of China in World War II, Mao Zedong led the Communist Party to victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with his Nationalist Party supporters. Two notable ideals from the May Fourth Movement, Chinese nationalism and democracy, would play an important role in the ensuing decades for Taiwan and China.
Nationalism, tradition, and change in Taiwan and China
A struggle that manifested itself throughout the twentieth century and is still being played out today is how nationalism, tradition, and change can coexist in China. Taiwan, almost an alternative version of what China could have been, followed a notably different path.
A key weakness of the Nationalist Party and Chiang Kai-shek during his rule in pre-1949 China was his inability to formulate an ideology to give foundation to his rule. Before taking power, the Communist Party maintained a desire to do away with aspects of traditional Chinese culture. The Communist Party emphasized direct action and land redistribution which helped them to win control. Once in power, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were efforts by the party to fundamentally reengineer Chinese society. These movements allowed for power to be consolidated domestically and nationalism was used as a tool to accomplish this.
In China, embracing modern nationalism eventually led to less foreign involvement in domestic matters, a substantial change compared with the situation in 1919. While not always widely acknowledged, the May Fourth Movement is an important milestone in this process. Today, nationalism is still the ultimate trump card the Chinese government uses to mobilize its people.
Chinese nationalism also was utilized in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule in Taipei, also as a way to consolidate power and mobilize the people. While initially directed at Beijing, the Free China Journal which was published from 1949-1960 gradually came to promote the other critical ideal from the May Fourth Movement: democracy. The influence this had gradually led to changes over time, which combined with intellectual thought in Taiwan stemming from the 1920s around democracy and self-determination, resulted in reforms and the transformation from one-party rule to a democratic system with multiple political parties.
The fulfillment of this aspiration from the May Fourth Movement took place because the cultural and social environment changed over time from within. In China, while the Communist Party sought to change Chinese traditional culture when it first came to power, after Mao Zedong died in 1976, Chinese traditional culture was brought back to bolster Chinese nationalism. Today it is embraced as a way to enhance development and promote tourism. Such changes were implemented in a top down manner by the government. In a similar fashion, the May Fourth Movement is used as a tool of the state as well. Marking the centennial of the movement, Xi Jinping recalled it as a “great patriotic revolutionary movement.” Clearly, the nationalist roots of the movement are still deemed useful by Beijing today.
The May Fourth Movement is helpful to understanding modern China. In the context of Chinese history, it helps to elucidate the decline of China and also how a new nationalism emerged as a result. Over the last century, changes resulted which led to the embrace of a nationalist form of communist ideology in China and the development of a democracy in Taiwan. The May Fourth Movement signaled the rise of Chinese nationalism which is today used to serve the purposes of the state and led to the implementation of social and cultural changes.
