The May Fourth Movement

"A long time ago, in a country, not that far away... There came a time of revolution, when rebels united to challenge a tyrannical culture." 

Long before May the Fourth was coopted by movie fans as Star Wars Day, that date was significant for marking the beginning of the historical May Fourth Movement in China in 1919.  

The May Fourth Movement began with 4,000 university students gathering at Tiananmen in protest against the Treaty of Versailles. China was an ally of Britain and the US in WW1 against Germany, but when the war was over, Britain and others decided that the territories Germany had taken from China would be handed, not back to China, but to Japan (which in WW1 allied itself with Britain). This led to outrage in China, and many felt that their government was being humiliated despite all the Chinese lives that had been sacrificed in fighting the Germans (not just in China but in Europe too). Soon the disillusionment went deeper and the young generation in particular felt that the old stagnant Confucian culture had left China weak and incapable of progressive development.

There were three particular messages to emerge from the May Fourth challenge. First of all, those in charge of society cannot refuse to examine flaws or explore improvements in the name of ‘preserving tradition’. The protest was not about the abstract sanctity or obsoleteness of every traditional practice. It was about the actual problems that people could experience themselves – military threats, hunger, technological deficiency, lack of capability in finding practical solutions – and why they were being held back compared with other countries that had made notable progress. Traditions must be adapted if people are not to suffer from social and intellectual stagnation.

Secondly, national pride and internationalist openness are not incompatible. The Chinese students did not want their country to be treated as a weakling, and their response was not to press for China to be closed off and reflect on its own past glory, but to look outwards to see what they could learn from others, work with them, and make improvements in the light of how other countries such as Britain, the US, Japan had increased in strength and prosperity.

Thirdly, blind adherence to traditional (Confucian or otherwise) rules and practices should give way to careful learning from two teachers – Science and Democracy [Note 1], which had proven to be major factors in enabling the winners in WW1 to advance substantially in economic, political, cultural and technological terms [Note 2]. Instead of top-down edicts dictating what was to be read or not, what was to be explored or not, how new expressions and experiments were to be tried out, the people themselves should innovate and test what improvements could be achieved in diverse aspects of life.

These messages from the May Fourth Movement remain relevant today – for all countries. The openness, objectivity, and responsiveness at the heart of scientific investigation and democratic governance are vital for any society to adapt to changing circumstances and strengthen its capacity for peace and prosperity. Alas, in the years that followed the May Fourth Movement, China became increasingly torn by the autocratic Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and the authoritarian leadership of Mao Zedong. A major figure of May Fourth, Hu Shi, criticised both sides for their rejection of democratic inclusion, and the tendency to impose their own ideas without allowing open examination of what solution would most likely work better. For him, we should always be steadfast in striving to be scientific in establishing what to believe, and democratic in reaching decisions that affect everyone.

If May Fourth should have a connection with popular culture, it is not with Star Wars’ mystical Jedi force, but with Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets, boldly advancing science and democracy across the final frontier.

Live long and prosper.

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Note 1: The students frequently spoke of the need for new teachers for their country in terms of bringing in ‘Mr. Science’ and ‘Mr. Democracy’. 

Note 2: For the students, the key allies China joined in defeating Germany in WW1 – Britain, France and the US, were all democracies that took scientific research seriously. Japan, which also joined the alliance in defeating Germany, Austria and Turkey, was in the 1910s also developing as a parliamentary democracy with extensive engagement with the development of science and technology.