May_Fourth

=May Fourth Movement= The May 4th Movement ( 五四运动 // Wǔsì Yùndòng //) was a collection of political protests, literary. The movement started with a sporadically violent student demonstration in Beijing on May 4th, 1919. The students were protesting the decision made at the Versailles Conference to allow Japan to hold Shandong Province after it invaded it during World War I, which lead to student unions in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Tianjin, and other cities, eventually forming into the Student Union of the Republic of China in June 1919. These students' nationalistic and anti-imperial, anti-Japanese passion ignited a movement among businessmen, merchants, and writers, an on June 5, laborers in Shanghai started a strike to provoke the Chinese government to refuse to sign the treaty at Versailles. The Republic of China's economy was already weak at that point, and the strike effectively coerced the government into refusing to sign. This decision by the Chinese government reinforced the demonstrators' beliefs that political action from the people could have an effect on the way the country is run. Chen Duxui led a faction of revolutionaries that held the belief that the citizens of China could change their country into a modern nation through direct political action. Hu Shi led a competing faction, which believed that political change must be brought about by slow cultural change, involving no all-encompassing or systematic programs for change but instead individual solutions for individual problems. The May 4th Movement's anti-feudal and anti-traditionalism principles promoted the rise of Marxism in China, and in 1921 the Communist Party of China was formed with the help of New Culture Movement intellectuals Li Dazhao and Chen Duxui, members of the Shanghai Marxist Study Society.

Work Cited
Schoppa, R. Keith. // The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History //. New York: Columbia UP, 2000: 67-71.