context & assumptions

be careful with both

Today is May 4th which seems you’ll think just another date leading to the Kentucky Derby or the coronation of King Charles III or the onset of graduation season. Each of those is a valid connexction to the date if you’re in the United States or United Kingdom. In Ukraine it’s another bloody day as in Sudan. In Mexico, it’s a day for more people to gather along the northern border hoping to cross into a more hopeful and prosperous life. I imagine other states have noteworthy events I don’t know.

May 4th is meaningful in China for the student movement launched 104 years ago. The Qing Dynasty collapsed in October of 1911, setting off a period of war lords, division, optimism that Sun Yat-sen could provide the intellectual birth of a new future; his vision became the basis to the Guomindang party. That political entity under Sun’s borhter-inl-law Chiang Kai-shek nominally governed as the Republic of China for much of the period between the mid-1920s and 1949. Interspersed with Guomindang rule were warlords in some areas, Chinese Communist Party growth, and the Japanese invasion and occupation of China from 1931 to 1945. The Communist Party and the Guomindang warred through the latter’s move to Taiwan in 1949.

The May 4th Movement transcended those other events; it was and remains a genuine Chinese anti-colonial, anti-foreign movement. Its intellectual prowess predates by two years the founding of the Communist Party of China, an organisation less likely founded without the May 4th ideals.

In 1919 as the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations sought to punish Germany for World War I in every conceivable manner, the Chinese government participated expectating its contribution to the war efforts would receive appropriate reward. Thousands of Chinese provided labour for Europe en lieu of the men serving in the meat grinder of World War I. CCP revolutionary Deng Xioaping and Zhou Enlai worked in various capacities in France, though the latter probably more as expediter for the Party’s expansion rather than a menial labourer. Without the Chinese, Vietnamese (although Ho Chi Minh went to New York during this period), and the other formally or informally colonialised populations in Asia, the conflict might have dragged out even further or ended much sooner.

China supported the Triple Entente of France, Russia and the United Kingdom. One reason was that Germany held concessions around Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, an area China fervently sought to return to its sovereign control. In retrospect, Chinese demands were striking only the first blow against the other states disrespecting its sovereignty. Chinese saw Britain and France as profoundly violating Chinese sovereignty over extended time they had been ‘humiliating’ China. Going to Britain to help end the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s was further evidence of the weakness the Chinese confronted.

World War I, however, was a conflict focusing on Germany. The educated Chinese claimed the appropriate retribution against the Germans while continuing to press their fundamental complaint that westerners were imposing their values on China while humiliating this proud culture.

The extended negotiations at Versailles came on the heels of a generation seeing countless changes following the Manchu dynasty ouster in 1911. Demands for democracy grew with calls for reform to most aspects of society. Sun Yat-sen was the father of one brand of change but other voices included Yuan Shikai who became the successor to the Qing as paramount ruler until his death in 2016. Yuan’s evolution from Qing official to the primary power in overthrowing the Qing in 1911 to democratic proponent briefly in 1912 to aspiring founder of another dynasty in a few brief years brought further turbulence rather than fundamental reform of the society. Yuan died in 1916, furthering aspirations for the major transformation China needed to make to achieve a far better future.

Ironically, many students and intellectuals sought to import western democratic institutions to put the Middle Kingdom on a completely new path at the same time they pressed their case against those same western leaders. Their fascination with western ideals soured when the prolonged conference denied China had an equal voice.

For the World War I victors, China as Asians had done little. China’s contributions to winning the war amounted to nothing but a facade as if it were equal to the victors. Plus, Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and a few other European nations still held concessions and protected their citizens against Chinese law under extraterritoriality agreements the west forced upon China. These westerners intended to retain those prerogatives.

The final blow for China was that Japan, another Asian nation which China completely dispised after centuries of tension and distrust, received the German spoils of war. In particular, the Japanese received Qingdao.

Anger, bitterness, and betrayal boiled over on 4 May 1919 as students and others marched in Beijing, followed the next day by 100,000 workers on a general strike. China’s rudderless government could do little. The May 4th Movement also demanded that the Ambassador to the conference reject Versailles Treaty which he did on their behalf. This resulted from fury that the westerners continued humiliation of the Middle Kingdom.

As recently as 2019 when I was last (and I do expect it was the final visit) there on this date, Chinese proudly remembered the May 4th Movement. Its centrality to Chinese lore is crucial to the anti-foreigner climate we see today: Chinese stood up against those humiliating the MIddle Kingdom. Foreigners, especially westerners, continued as the proclaimed cause for China suffering so many indignities over so many years.

Western views, not accounting for historical claims nor the size and importance of China, wrongly rejected China’s demands for respect. Bringing Japan into the equation by transferring to it Chinese territory was an insult illustrating the desire to humliate a proud people seeking to replicate western ideals. The May 4th Movement believed it showed that western ideals were not coincident with Chinese ideals.

This movement remains powerful in the national narrative in 2023 but this is where history switches to assumptions. Xi Jinping’s China now has strong nationalist sentiment resulting from the three quarters of a century of Communist rule reinforcing the existing narrative about western humiliation. The May 4th Movement sowed these seeds a century ago, initially with the intelligentsia and the CCP has spread the understanding more broadly.

The error we make is assuming that this view is only held by the Party burning lies into the people’s minds. The CCP certainly lies about countless things regarding China’s role in the world and many other things. But the heart of the argument is an anti-foreign, anti-western view cultivated well before the CCP existed. The Party is capitalising on the foundations laid by the western concessions, extraterritoriality, and Versailles but they are Chinese beliefs rather than Party propaganda alone.

These views are Chinese rather than Communist Chinese. They are going to be extremely difficult to overturn. This is why the May 4th Movement is important. It began before the CCP and its condemnations of the foreigners will survive the Party’s demise whenever that is because it is truly a nationalist perspective.

We need stop thinking that eradicating CCP rule will make our relationship with China an easy one. It might become easier in some ways but there is absolutely no guarantee of that.FIN