The May Fourth Movement, the Nationalists and the Communists

Nationalist demonstrations in May of 1919 (especially on the fourth), partly at the unfair treatment of China at Versailles and Paris and mainly involving students, were important. Germany had lost the war and so its concession and sphere of influence, rather than being given to China, an ally if a weak one of the Western Allies during the war, were given to Japan.

The movement sought self-rule and opposed the continuation of all foreign rule but especially sought the strong and assertive self-rule clearly not then in evidence from the local republican government that had begun in 1911 following the overthrow of the monarchy.

After the initial protests, the cause was taken up especially by intellectuals and students typically either educated overseas or in the new ‘western-style’ schools and the movement came to be called the May Fourth Movement.

The CCP itself sees its origins as being in this movement. The movement was strongly anti-tradition and anti-Confucian as Chinese tradition and Confucianism were seen as the primary causes of China’s current weakness before its adversaries. It promoted modernisation (and even Westernisation – the West was seen as strong) especially in the forms of science, democracy, nationalism, women’s rights and language reform (a welcomed written form of the vernacular language was replacing the opaque Classical Chinese as a literary vehicle). A publishing revolution accompanied the movement: new newspapers and journals popularised new ideas and many works of various kinds were translated from other languages following on from the protests.

The movement was at least partly inspired by the recent success of the revolutions in Russia – a new period of revolutions seemed called for as it had in earlier periods such as in 1848 and later periods such as in 1968 and the last and first two decades of the 20^th and 21^st centuries respectively but it was not especially coherent. It contained everything from Marxists to liberals and anarchists.

The first notable person to popularise Marxism in China (beginning in 1918 when he completed his translations of the works of Marx) was Li Dazhou (李大釗). The two central May fourth themes, though, were nationalism and the sense of a need for (and the possibility of) bold, progressive and substantial reform.

Sun Yat-sen was emerging as the head of the Guo Min Dang (the Nationalist Party – GMD or sometimes KMT because of the Wade-Giles Romanisation then popular) that was much later the final rival of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 and exiled to Taiwan. Sun sought support from abroad in his battle to unite and strengthen China and interested only the newly formed USSR. He agreed as a condition to work with the then fledgling CCP. With Soviet help he set up the Whampoa Military Academy at Canton (Guangzhou) for GMD and CCP members placing it under the command of Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou En-lai was at the academy. Together these two parties prepared a united push north to the heartland of China to unite the land under the GMD. Both parties sought national unity but it never seemed likely that the CCP would accept the role of junior partner, however, and eventual disunity thus must have seemed inevitable to most members of both parties even then.