LibGuides: Modern China Studies: 1919 May Fourth Movement

May Fourth Movement

The May Fourth Movement, 五四运动 (Wǔsì Yùndòng).

On May 4, 1919 more than 3,000 students from 13 colleges in Beijing held a mass demonstration against the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference, which drew up the treaty officially ending World War I. The former German concessions in Shandong province should be transferred to Japan. Students burned the house of the minister of communications and assaulted China’s minister to Japan, both pro-Japanese officials. Strikes and boycotts against Japanese goods lasted more than two months. Students were supported by merchants and workers in shanghai, the strikes went on for another week. The government gave in, three pro-Japanese officials were dismissed, the cabinet resigned, and China refused to sign the peace treaty with Germany.

Parallel to the political events a sociopolitical reform movement in connection with an intellectual revolution took place between 1917 and 1921. The movement's leaders challenged traditional Confucian ideas and exalted Western ideas, particularly science and democracy, and criticized traditional Chinese ethics, philosophy, religion, and social and political institutions. Important names related to the May Fourth Movement are:

Hu Shi 胡适 (Hu Shih, 1891-1962)

Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (Chen Qingtong,1879-1942)

Li Dazhao 李大釗 (1888-1927)

Lu Xun 鲁迅 (Zhou Shouren, 1881-1936)

Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868-1940)

(biographies can be found here: https://www.britannica.com/biography)

The most important newspaper was Xinqingnian 新青年 "New Youth"

Materials on the May Fourth Movement held by ANU:

The Chinese Enlightenment by Vera Schwarcz
Call Number: View online [ANU staff and students only]
Publication Date: 1986
Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study provides China scholars and historians with an analysis of what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and political life of twentieth-century China.
Touches of History by Pingyuan Chen; Michel Hockx (Translator)
Call Number: MENZIES DS777.43 .C4313 2011 and online [ANU staff and students only]
Publication Date: 2011
The May Fourth Movement of 1919 is generally seen as the central event in China s transformation from the traditional to the modern.Favouring smaller stories over grand narratives, concentrating on unknown, marginal materials rather than familiar key documents, and highlighting May Fourth s indebtedness to the cultural debates of the preceding late Qing period, Chen Pingyuan reconstructs part of the actual historical scenery, demonstrating the great variety of ideas expressed during those tumultuous decades.
Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm by Tze-ki Hon (Editor)
Call Number: MENZIES: DS775.2 B49 2008
Publication Date: 2008
When did China make the decisive turn from tradition to modernity? For decades, the received wisdom would have pointed to the May Fourth movement, with its titanic battles between the champions of iconoclasm and the traditionalists and its shift to more populist forms of politics. A growing body of recent research, however, has called into question how decisive the turn was, when it happened, and what relation the resulting modernity bore to the agendas of people who participated. Having thus explicitly or implicitly "decentered" the May Fourth, such research (augmented by contributions in the present volume) leaves us with the task of accounting for the shape Chinese modernity took, as the product of dialogues and debates between, and the interplay of, a variety of actors and trends, both within and without the May Fourth camp. Book jacket.