THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT AND THE ORIGINS

OF CHINESE MARXISM

Lus V. TEOooRo, JR.

THE UPHEAVAL that occupied the People's Republic of China from

1966 onwards -- an upheaval without parallel anywhere else in the
contemporary world because it was an upheaval encouraged and later
directed by its own recognized leader, Mao Tse-tung, and by a party in
power -- was in its early stages depicted in the West as something su
utterly out of the ordinary in the context of Chinese events as to be
the prelude to the disintegration of the regime which, having come
to power on October 1, 1949, had proceeded to embark on the twentieth
century's most remarkable experiment in social engineering. The Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it has come to be officially known,
was generally presented in the West as if Chinese history, particularly
during the twentieth century, had not been marked with even greater
disturbances than the controlled phenomenon that the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution was.

This assumption is of course utterly without basis. It need not be

stated here that the history of China in the twentieth century has been
one of perpetual change, that the great event of October 1, 1949 was
the culmination of more than fifty years of great events. I
would like to suggest in this paper, therefore, as it has been suggested
by other writers, particularly by Mao Tse-tung1 himself and by Han
Suyin, 2 that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is but a continua-
tion of the Chinese cultural revolution against imperialism* and feudal-
ism. The beginnings of this cultural revolution may be found in the
events and developments known as the May Fourth Movement, the

1 Mao Tse.-tung, "The May Fourth Movement," "The Orientation of

the Youth Movement," and "On New Democracy." Selected Works, Vol.
III (London: Lawrence and Wishart Ltd., 1954), pp. 9-11; 12-21; 106-156.
2 Han Suyin, Tfie Morning Deluge: Mao and the Chinese
Revolution, 1893-1953 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 84-101.
* "Imperialism" is here used in the sense that it has been defined in
V. I. Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

1
2 ASIAN STUDIES

effects of which extended to the conversion of many Chinese intellectuals

to Marxism, and, consequently, the establishment of the Chinese
munist Party.
I
The Confucian view of the immutability of the social and political
order was, by the end of the nineteenth century in China, being severely
challenged by events. "The ways of heaven," according to Confucian
doctrine, "do not change." But, unable to cope with an outside world
where tremendous advances in technology and the rise of imperialism
had brought about the growth of forces the Middle Kingdom could
no longer dismiss as cavalierly as she did in the past, the Empire had
suffered its greatest humiliation in 1895, when its armies were defeated
at the hands of a modernized Japanese army, which Japan was to use
as its main weapon in its search for raw materials and new markets in
the Asian continent. This disaster was followed by the near-partition
of China among the foreign powers, by the abortive response to im-
perialism known as the "hundred days' reform" of 1898, and by the
Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1900, which had brought armed intervention
by the foreign powers in the suppression of what was, after all, an in-
ternal Chinese problem.
The twentieth century did not bring relief from domestic difficulties
exacerbated by external pressures. Despite the fall of the Manchu
(Ch'ing) Dynasty in the Revolution of 1911,3 hopes for the establish-
ment of a republican regime floundered on the ambitions of politicians
and the jockeying among the imperialist powers for positions of ad-
vantage in a China without the Manchus.
Yuan Shih-k' ai, who, as Imperial Commissioner in charge of all or
China's armed forces under the Manchus had been given the task o1
saving the dynasty but who had instead collaborated with the rebels
in destroying it, was provisionalPresident of China. From all evidence
available, Yuan was a self-seeking careerist whose essentially conserva-
tive outlook could not be the source of social change in China. The
republic-in-name that he now headed had a treasury that was practically
empty, and he turned to the foreign powers, which were eager to pre-
serve their treaty rights and special privileges, for help. 4
3 0. Edmund Clubb, Twentieth Century China (New York and London:
Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 23-50. Much of the details are
from this source.
4 Ibid., pp. 44-50.
 THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT 3

Though by no means a mass upheaval, the Revolution of 1911 had

nevertheless given expression to the spirit of Chinese nationalism,
which demanded resistance to foreign impositions and the elimination
of domestic autocracy. Yuan's actions revealed very little intention to
pursue the former goal, and, though the Manchus had been overthrown,
domestic autocracy was soon revealed to be far from ended.
Moving swiftly to consolidate his position, Yuan proscribed the
opposition and quickly gained the approval of the foreign powers
scrambling for ascendancy in "Republican" China. By 1914, with the
opposition silenced, Yuan Shih-k'ai ruling by fiat, and fundamental
social reforms nowhere in sight, the impact of the First World War,
which had begun in August, was being felt in China.
As the treaty ally of Great Britain, Japan had entered the war
against Germany in August and had swiftly occupied the German con-
<;ession in Shantung and other parts of China as well. Yuan Shih-k'ai
protested, but not too strongly.
Taking advantage of the confused international situation, Japan,
upon entering the war in August, served an ultimatum on Germany
demanding the transfer to Japan of the entire territory of K.iaochow,
which had been leased to her by China for ninety-nine years in 1898 after
she had seized the area by force, using as pretext the killing of two Ger-
man Jesuits by disbanded Chinese soldiers. Japan promised the eventual
restoration of the area to China, and in the next year, 1915, seized
Kiaochow and the greater part of Shantung province, where Confucius
and Mencius had been born, taught and died. Japan clearly did not
intend to restore the area to China, but had instead used her commit-
ment on the side of the Allies as a lever in a bid to displace Germany
m the foreign looting of China.
On January 18, 1915, Japan therefore served on the Yuan Shih-k'ai
government the notorious twenty-one demands, which, divided into
five groups, sought to subordinate China to Japanese interests. Among
others, the demands provided for the confirmation of Japan's newly-won
gains in Shantung; Japanese control of Mongolia, China's southeast
coast, and the Yangtze Valley; the employment of Japanese advisers
in political, financial and military affairs; the right of ownership of
land for the building of Japanese hospitals, churches and schools; the
participation of Japan in the organization and administration of the
Chinese police forces in certain places; Chinese purchase from Japan
4 ASIAN STUDIES

of fifty per cent or more of the total quantity of her munitions or the
establishment in China of jointly-worked Sino-Japanese arsenals.
Negotiations between the Japanese and Chinese governments dragged
on for almost four months, until Japan, on May 7, 1915, presented
China with an ultimatum. The Yuan Shih-k'ai government accepted
on May 9 the terms set forth in the ultimatum and concluded with
Japan a treaty based upon them on May 25. Chinese public indigna-
tion, which had been at a fever pitch since the demands were first made
known reached its peak upon the Chinese government's acceptance ot
the ultimatum. Though Chinese officialdom would soon abandon the
attempt to regain the territories thus lost and the sovereignty that had
been compromised, this event hardened further the spirit of the new
nationalism which had been gradually developing among China's prog-
ressive intellectuals and other segments of Chinese society, specially the
merchants. The cornerstone of this nationalism was the idea that it was
necessary to resist such instances of foreign aggression if China was
to survive.

Nationalist sentiment was so high that as early as January, 1915,

when the demands were first made known, public meetings were already
being held to oppose them. A boycott of Japanese goods was soon
organized in Shanghai, spreading rapidly to .other cities, gaining the
sup_port even of merchants specializing in Japanese goods. Though
Yuan Shih-k' ai ordered the abandonment of the boycott, it started to
spread to the Yangtze ports and to some of the northern cities by April.
Though the boycott did not lack further support, spreading so rapidly
to the southern cities that a second order for its prohibition had to be
issued by Yuan, the treaty had nevertheless been concluded. Many
Chinese hoped that the Great Powers would restore the Shantung area
to China at the end of the First World War.

II
· When the war ended on November 11, 1918, therefore, there was
a widespread hope that the national disgrace would also be ended. 5
Chinese intellectual leaders as well as the emerging bourgeoisie hoped
that the defeat of Germany had brought about the end of an era of
secret diplomacy, intervention .in Chinese affairs by the foreign powers,
militarism, and dictatorship. They assumed that the territory and in-
5 Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1960), pp. 84-90.
 THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT 5

terests seized from China by Germany since 1898 and now controlled
by Japan would be restored to her and that the treaty with Japan would
be readjusted at the Versailles Peace Conference, which China was at-
tending as one of the victors. China had, after all, supplied the allied
powers with the men they needed in their home countries during the
critical moments of the war; many Chinese believed that, at least, woulJ
be counted in her favor.
Hopes for equitable readjustments were soon dashed to pieces.
News from Paris soon reached China that the conference was going
to award to Japan the German interests that she had seized in China.
During the plenary session of the five Great Powers (the United States,
Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan) on January 27, 1919, the Japan-
ese delegate announced that Great Britain, France and Italy have signed
secret treaties with Japan in February 1917, assuring Japan that after
the war they would support Japanese claims regardmg the disposal ot
Germany's "rights" in China. It turned out also that a year later, on
September 24, 1918, the Chinese warlord government in Peking (Yuan
Shih-k'ai's death in June 6, 1916 has ushered in the division of China
into warring warlord field oms), had negotiated a secret loan from Japan
for the construction of the Tsinan-Shunteh and Kaomi-Hsuchow rail-
roads in Shantung province. On the same day, the Japanese foreign
minister had proposed a seven-point agreement concerning Shantung to
the Chinese ambassador to Tokyo, who had conveyed his government's
acceptance of these proposals, and all arrangements were kept secret
until the morning of the meeting on January 28, 1919 of the Council
of Ten at the Versailles Peace Conference. The loan for the railroads
arid the exchange of notes regarding the Shantung question Japan now
used as added "legal" bases for her claims on Shantung. Consequently,
China lost her case before the Conference, and on April 30, 1919, the
CounCil of Four resolved in secret to transfer all of Germany's "rights''
in China to Japan, without any mention at all of Japan's 1914 promise
to restore these to China.

Developments in the Conference had been closely followed by

China's intellectual leaders and merchants, who were genuinely con-
cerned that the threat and actuality of colonial control should be brought
to an end. 'I'he first Chinese public reaction to the news of the defeat
at the Peace Conference was to demand who was responsible for the
disaster. Because the exchange of notes between Japan and the Peking
warlord government had been cited as a cause for the failure of C4ina
to regain her alienated territories, suspicion grew that it was the Chinese
6 ASIAN STUDIES

representatives themselves, with the knowledge and collusion of key

government officials, who had sold out the nation's cause. The opinion
at home gr.adually crystallized into the belief that once again China
had been victimized, not only by its foreign "friends" but also by the
traitors within the warlord government itself.
China's intellectual leaders and her students - particularly those
who had been exposed to progressive ideas - were therefore severely
disappointed. Many observers6 noted the unrest among students in
Peking, an unrest which clearly indicated that it was only a prelude
to other events. By the beginning of May, this unrest had developed
into a threat of demonstration against the traitors in the Chinese govern-
ment and against the shabby treatment the Chinese had received at
the hands of the Great Powers at the Versailles Peace Conference.

III
Before the onslaught of the combined forces of foreign imperialism
and domestic reaction, Chinese intellectuals, specially those trained ab-
road, had begun to ask where China was heading, and to look around
for the means with which to stave off her march to disaster. 7
By the turn of the century, most Chinese students abroad were
studying in Japan, Europe, or the United States. The ideas these
students had encountered were inevitably reflected in their proposed
solutions to the Chinese dilemma once they had returned home. It is
significant that among the students who had studied abroad, many,; in-
cluding Hu Shih (United States), Lu Hsun and Ch'en Tu-hsiu (Japan)
were later to assume leading roles in the May Fourth Movement and in
subsequent events in China. Though they were to eventually go along
separate paths, there was a general consensus that the country was in a
dangerous situation the foreigners, and that China needed
savmg.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, therefore, a huge
c amor f or " new cu1ture, " "new 1earnmg,
l . " "a 1'1terary revo1ut10n,
. " etc.,
had arisen among the "new intellectuals" -· i.e., those intellectuals who
recognized the inadequacies of China's traditional culture insofar as uni-
fying, strengthening and modernizing her were concerned, and who
turned instead to Western ideas in order to achieve these purposes. This
was aided to no little extent by the return from abroad of numerous
6 1 bid., pp.
7Jbid., pp.
 THE l.VIAY FOURTH MOVEMENT 7

intellectuals. Ch' en Tu-hsiu, who was later to play such a prominent

role in the early years of the Chinese Communist Party, returned from
Japan in 1915. His subsequent establishment of the New Youth maga-
zine, which was to become the vehicle for the new ideas that the new
intellectuals wanted to disseminate, marked the peak of the cultural
reform movement. Hu Shih, \Vho was later to express the American-
trained Chinese intellectuals' reluctance to participate in the revolution-
ary tide sweeping China, also returned from the United States in 1917,
and joined the new intellectual leaders. Li Ta-chao, Marxist pioneer
in China and one of the Communist Party's first martyrs, returned to
China from Japan in 1916.

The situation at home was highly repressive. Specially severe were

the laws governing the press, which were in force throughout the
reign of Yuan Shih-k' ai and nearly throughout the entire period of
the May Fourth Movement (1915-1921). The betrayal of the Republic
of 1911 by Yuan Shih-k'ai had assumed an even more glaring form in
his effort to have himself proclaimed Emperor; after his death the war-
lords revealed themselves to be, except in rare circumstances, no less
tyrants than Yuan had been. These were manifested in the laws that
restricted speech, association and the press, and New Youth, therefore,
avoided direct political criticism, and declared itself to be committed to
the reformation of the thought and behavior of the Chinese youth.
Both Ch' en Tu-shiu and Hu Shih, however, no matter how poles apart
they were later to be in the latter stages of the May Fourth Movement,
believed that the problems of China were rooted in the stagnant tradi-
tions and ideology that were the 2,000-year legacy of Confucianism.
Both held that it was necessary to destroy these traditions and to
awaken their countrymen, specially the youth upon whom they placed
their hopes for the building of a New China. Ch' en particularly held
that it was necessary to destroy the ideological bases of the monarchical
movements, which were using Confucianism in support of their beliefs.
New Youth, therefore, tried to carry out this program until 1917.
To be sure, the intellectual ferment was not limited to the pub-
lication of New Youth. In the great cities of China, the pros and
cons of using the vernacular, of adapting Western science to Chinese
conditions, of the virtues and vices of Confucianism, and other issues,
were being debated. Lu Hsun was already writing the essays and
stories which were later to earn for him the praise of Mao Tse-tung and
the gratitude of the New China. Li Ta-chao by 1918 had expressed his
support of the October Revolution in Russia, and on September of the
8 ASIAN STUDIES

same year had acquired the services of Mao Tse-tung as his assistant at
the Peking University Library, and organized the Marxist Research
Society.8
It was against this background that the May Fourth Incident of
1919 took place.
IV
The demonstration '!f May 4, 1919 has traditionally been marked
off as the beginning of the May Fourth Movement, which term refers
to the series of strikes and other events which followed the demonstra-
tion. In a sense, however, the Incident was only the culmination of
a series of dissatisfactions and disappointments which had beset China's
progressive intellectuals and students. · The roots of the Movement may
be said to have been nurtured during the period of the twenty-one de-
mands, as a reaction to which an anti-Japanese campaign developed
together with a stress on Western ideas of science and democracy, criti-
cisms of tr.aditional Chinese ethics, customs, literature, history, philo-
sophy, religion as well as social and political institutions. Western
political and social ideas, including liberalism, pragmatism, utilitarian-
ism, anarchism, and various types of socialism were put forward as
yardsticks against which to measure China's traditional culture and as
answers to the crisis of Chinese society.
The decision of student organizations in Peking to hold a mass
demonstration on May 7, 1919, the fourth anniversary of Japan's ulti-
matum on the twenty-one demands, indicates that the immediate cause
of the demonstration was not only the disaster at the Versailles Peace
Conference but also the continuing humiliation that many Chinese
felt over the twenty-one demands of 1915.
Events forced the students to advance the date of the demonstra-
tion by three days, and on the morning of May 4, student repre-
sentatives tnet at the Peking College of Law and Political Science to
prepare the demonstration. Representatives from thirteen colleges and
universities, including students from the National University of Peking,
attended. Of the five resolutions adopted during the meeting, two are
of special importance: the decision to undertake efforts to awaken
the people of China to the facts of foreign oppression and dome-stic
treachery, and the decision to create a permanent organization of Peking
students.
8 Maurice Meisner, Li Ta-Chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. xvi-xvii.
 THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT

By 1:30 in the afternoon of the same day, over three-thousand

students had gathered at the Square of Heavenly Peace (T'ien-an men),
representing thirteen colleges and universities in Peking. Though the
Peking government had tried to prevent the mass meeting, sending a re-
presentative of the Ministry of Education to Peking University at about
11 A.M., the students were not convinced. By two o'clock, therefore. the
demonstration had begun moving, with the students distributing leaflets
along the way and carrying placards with slogans in Chinese, English
and French, the main emphasis of which was the excoriation of the three
pro-Japanese officials Ts'ao Ju-lin, Lu Tsung-yu and Chang Tsung-
hsiang, and the expression of resistance to the Great Powers. Upon
reaching Peking's foreign Legation Quarter, the students were re-
fused entry and the entire procession waited for two hours
being finally told that they would not be permitted to go through the
Quarter. The students were attacked by the Quarter police and by
Chinese police and troops. The marchers therefore abandoned the at·
tempt to go through the Quarter and instead veered northward, towards
the residence of Ts'ao Ju-lin, Acting Minister of Finance of the Peking
Government, whom the students considered to be one of the foremost
traitors in the Peking Government. The students rushed the house
and the police intervened, in the course of which some students were
wounded, and some thirty-two arrested. After the arrests, martial law
was at once proclaimed for the area surrounding the Legation Quarter.
Immediately after the incident, the Peking students began to organize
the new intellectuals of the nation in support of their cause. They
tried to win the public over through publicity, mass meetings and
further demonstrations. In the process they began to establish contacts
among the masses of illiterate people and to secure strong support from
merchants eager to stave off Japanese competition, and industrialists
and workers from the weak capitalist sector of the Chinese economy.
The ideas of the student movement therefore spread rapidly through-
out the country. "The Movement's aims," as Harvard's Chow Tse-tung
has put it, "soon won sympathy from the new merchants, industrialists,
and urban workers, and the Peking Government was forced to compro-
mise in its foreign and domestic policies. This victory of the new
coalition facilitated the expansion of the cultural and intellectual reforms
it advocated." 9

9 Chow Tse-tung, op. cit., p. 1. Much of the details in this section

of the paper are from this source.
10 ASIAN S'fUDIES

v
Within two months after the Incident, there followed a series of:
student demonstrations and strikes, during which the alliance among
students, merchants, industrialists and workers was further strengthened.
Though it seemed to be, on the surface, purely a student movement;
the May Fourth Movement was the logical result of the teachings of
the new intellectual leaders, namely the professors, teachers and writers
who had provided the inspiration for the movement by stimulating
student interest in the affairs of China and the world. The students
were enthusiastically supported by the elder intellectual leaders, at the
same time that a de facto alliance developed between the reformist and
revolutionary intellectuals. The new culture movement expanded as a
result of this alliance, drawing those hitherto indifferent to it. There
was also a rapid increase in the number of new publications and old
ones revamped practically overnight along the lines of anti-imperialism
that the Movement espoused. A new wave of iconoclasm engulfed the
intellectual life of the nation, during which any and practically all
ideas which had hitherto been sacred to traditional Chinese culture were
questioned.
Political organizations, including the Communist Party of China,
developed out of the chaotic period of self-examination that the May
Fourth Movement stimulated among the intellectuals. Among those
caught up in the tide of the movement was Mao· Tse-tung, who became
more active in a group calledthe New People's Study Society. He was
editor of the Student Union Publication of Hunan province, which
promoted the students' cause and criticized the Government. This pub•
lication, a weekly, was consequently suppressed by the military governor
of Hunan, which suppression only intensified Mao Tse-tung' s activities
against the Government and hastened his subsequent of
Marxism by the summer of 1920. In Wuchang, in the fall of 1919,
Lin Piao was one of the organizers of the Social Welfare Society and
the Social Benefit Book Store. The Awakening Society was founded
1n Tientsin on September, 1919, and among the most active members
was a student newly-returned from France named Chou En-lai.
These developments began to shatter the Unity manifested by the
diverse forces within the movement. It must be pointed out, however;
that the dominant schools of thought that composed the movement
derived inspiration from Western ideas, since it was obvious that the
traditional ideas that had been held sacred in China for two thousand
years had not prevented her humiliation at the hands of the foreigners;
 THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT 11

The ideas of liberalism, anarchism, utopian socialism and Marxism there-

fore gradually divided the new intellectuals into contending factions.
''The Movement," again to quote Chow Tse-tung, "gradually became
involved in politics, and the united front of new intellectuals collapsed.
The liberals (reformists) lost their zeal or turned away from political
activity, whereas the left wing (the revolutionary intellectuals) of the
Movement took the expedient political step of allying itself with the
nationalists to overthrow the warlord Peking regime . "10

VI
The revolutionary ideology of Marxism was, before the May Fourth
Incident, of little interest to the overwhelming majority of the new
intellectuals. Li Ta-chao, who executed by the warlord Peking
regime in 1927, just a few months before the Incident, was practically
the only partisan of Bolshevism in China. Except for a few of his
students, no significant Chinese intellectual had responded to Li' s view
of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia as the herald of the reconstruction
of world civilization,11 nor to his Marxist view of events. In January,
1919, Li had called on the peoples of Asia to rise against "the European
imperialist robbers," 12 and had written that "only by overthrowing the
capitalist classes of the .whole world" could the oppressed peoples do
away with an international order that permitted the shabby treatment
China had received at the hands of the Great Powers. In February of
the same year, he had anticipated the outcome of the Versailles Peace
Conference, which he called "The European-Division-of-the-Spoils Con-
ference." Throughout all this, many Chinese intellectuals sti!l pinned
their hopes on Versailles. The of the Peace Conference, how-
ever, caused many of them to modify, if .not totally abandon, their ad-
herence to the theories of Mill, Huxley, Spencer or Darwin. A variety
of socialist doctrines, after the May Fourth Incident, began to over-
shadow those ideas. "The utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, the Chris-
tian socialist and agrarian socialist doctrines inspired by Tolstoy, the
anarchist theories of Kropotkin and Bakunin, the guild socialism of
Bertrand Russell and G. D. H. Cole, and the revolutionary socialism of
Marx and Lenin were the ideologies that the new student generation
responded to with enthusiasm." 13
1o Chow Tse-tung, op. cit., pp. 1-2.
11 Meisner, op. cit., pp. 97-98.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., pp. 99-100.
12 ASIAN STUDIES

Why, of all ideas from the West, the theories of socialism should
have gained more adherents, was only logical. For many Chinese in-
tellectuals, the idea of socialism represented the highest ideals of West-
ern democracy. It rejected, however, the existing political and social
order in the West and the exploitative relationship between the Western
powers and imperialist Japan on the one hand and China on the other.
The adherence of many intellectuals to some variety or another of
socialism was therefore a reflection of their affirmation of Western in-
tellectual influence at the same time that it was in harmony with the
powerful currents of nationalism and anti-imperialism which the Chinese
experience at the hands of the Western powers and of Japan had forced
on much of the nation. In a word, socialist doctnnes, rather than those
of Darwinism, liberalism or pragmatism, were the most adequate in
describing the Chinese reality and seemed to offer the most adequate
means for the realization of a strong and unified China. This was
particularly true of revolutionary socialism: it had just brought the
Bolsheviks to power in Russia and had created the first socialist state
in the world out of the chaos and ruin of the last days of tsarism in
that country.
VII
On the heels of the May Fourth Movement followed the establish-
ment in 1921 of the Communist Party of China and the revitalization
of the Kuomintang - the political organizations which were later to
battle for supremacy in China for nearly three decades. In 1919, how-
ever, the long and bloody civil war that was to come later was still
both parties' leaders - or those individuals who were to be-
come its leaders - sprang from the common soil of nationalism and
anti-imperialism.
The emergence of the Communist Party of China on the political
platform of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism was foreshadowed by
Li Ta-chao. Throughout the months of national uncertainty that had
preceded the Shantung Resolution, Li had emphasized again and again
the need for Chinese intellectuals to be both anti-imperialist and politic-
ally active, at the same time that he exhorted his students to go to the
villages to liberate the Chinese peasantry.14
When the May Fourth Incident broke, therefore, Li Ta-chao be-
came one of the logical rallying points of the student movement. After
the first demonstration, Li' s library office at the Peking University,
14 Ibid., p. 101.
 THE MAY FOURTH MOVEMENT 13

where Mao Tse-tung had worked for a time as his assistant, became
the regular meeting place of student leaders who had come under his
intellectual influence. The Marxist Research Society, which Li had
organized earlier, now sent its members to other Chinese cities to
spread the ideas of the Movement.
Li' s pioneering work as a Marxist - imperfect though his under-
standing of Maxism was - reaped impressive results because events had
shown that it was only a revolutionary ideology which could save China.
In the anti-imperialist atmosphere engendered by the May Fourth Move-
ment, more and more Chinese intellectuals were responding to Marxism-
Leninism. Ch' en Tu-hsiu, for example, and many others who were
later to become prominent in the Chinese Communist Movement, were
drawn to Marxism because the Shantung Resolution had so obviously
revealed to them the rapacity and treachery of the imrerialist nations.
Ch'en had earlier maintained a posture of political non-involvement,
but the May Fourth Movement caused him to abandon that position.
So involved in Political action did he become that he was arrested on
June 11, 1919 while distributing leaflets in the streets of Peking. He
spent eighty-three days in prison, after which he resigned his professor-
ship at Peking University and left for Shanghai, where less than a ye:tr
later he announced his adherence to Marxism.
Li T on the other hand, had proclaimed his commitment
to Marxism before May 4, 1919. But the Incident did strengthen his
conviction that only Marxism could save China, and, in a debate ini-
tiated by Hu Shih, Li Ta-chao defended his Marxist views so intensely
as to suggest the profound effect the Movement had had on him. 15
The radicalization of many Chinese intellectuals soon began to
break down the unity of the Movement. Hu Shih, the American-
trained disciple of John Dewey, representing the reformist intellectuals,
fired the opening salvo of the intellectual debate. In a series of articles,
Hu argued against the adoption of "isms" and doctrines, and instead
suggested that what was necessary was the study of ·practical social
problems. Doctrines advocating fundamental solutions to social prob-
lems, according to Hu, were not only irrelevant but were also hindrances
to their solution.
In a letter to Hu, Li argued that specific social problems
could not be solved without the participation of the masses, and that
it was therefore necessary to instill among them a consciousness of the
15 Ibid., p. 105-106.
14 ASIAN STUDIES

problems of society as a whole, to which -they could relate their own

individual problems. In such a situation, a theory -of society was im-
portant: it could provide the people with an idealism and a common
direction. Li asserted the need for intellectuals to go out and work
"in the practical movement," which to him meant the propagation of
socialist theory and its advocacy "as a tool to eliminate the non-laboring
bureaucratic robbers." 16 More important , Li, even at that early period,
foreshadowed the later admonition by Mao Tse-tung for the revolu-
tionary to study the real conditions of the world, and to adapt the theory
to those conditions.
The issues were joined: between the conservative view that China's
problems could be solved through evolutionary social reform as advo-
cat<:_d by Hu Shih, or through revolution. It was obvious, however, that
the ideas of John Dewey which Hu Shih advocated were largely irre-
levant to China's problems. As Maurice Meisner states in his intellec-
tual biography of Li Ta-chao: 17
"Hu Shih had formulated his ideas in terms of the American
philosophical and sociologica.l tradition . . . The philosophy and
sociology of John Dewey did not need to. be concerned with the
structure of society as a whole because in the American social
context it could be optimistically assumed that the whole world
would take care of itself. Dewey's program was essentially con-
servative, assuming that reform would take place within the
framework of existing institutions; but it was a product of a
society that could afford conservatism, a society that could solve
particular social problems because there already existed a viable
social structure and a general consensus on the direction of
social progress . . ."
"As applied to China, Dewey's program was neither conserv-
ative nor radical but largely irrelevant. After the Revolution of
1911 China was confronted with a crisis of social, cultural and
political disintegration of massive proportions. The extrEmle po-
verty and widespread illite:racy of the masses of the Chinese
people and the lack of even the rudiments of responsible political
authority negated the possibility of the general social consensus
that Dewey's program presupposed. Because of the overwhelming
social crisis within and the threat of foreign aggression from
without, the very existence of the Chinese nation was in doubt
at the time . . . To advocate the study of particular social prob-
lems and to call for social reform (piecemeal) was to assume that
there existed or would soon arise a viable social and political struc-
ture within which problems could be and reforms imple-

1s Ibid., p. 106.
17 Ibid., pp. 107-iOS.
 THE MAY FOUHTH lVIOVEMENT

mented. This assumption was unwarranted either by the existing

situation or by any realistic hopes for the immediate future. In
view of the total crisis of Chinese society, Dewey's program was
doomed to failure."

The debate, however, did reveal the imperative of transforming

words to action. Marxism is, after all, not simply an intellectual posi-
tion, but also a guide to action. By mid-1920, therefore, Li Ta-chao and
Ch' en Tu-hsi:u \vere ready to assume the leadership of a revolutionary
political party. The Communist Party of China was therefore estab-
lished in July, 1921. Among those present in the founding meeting was
Mao Tse-tung, formerly Li Ta-chao's assistant. 1s

VIII
Himself profoundly influenced by the events of the May Fourth
Movement, Mao Tse-tung, writing in 1939 in commemoration of its
twentieth anniversary, saw it as an indication that "China's bourgeois
democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism had reached
a new stage." 19 The Movement was an expression of the cultural level
of the Chinese bourgeois-democratic revolution, but it had one important
difference from previous cultural revolutions, 20 "As a result of the
growth and development of the new social forces in that period, there
arose a camp which later became a powerful force in China's bourgeois
democratic revolution against imperialism and feudalism, i.e., the camp
composed of China's working class, student masses and young national
bourgeoisie . . . This showed that the May 4 Movement had advanced
a step further than the Revolution of 1911 ..."
The May Fourth Movement was the dividing line between an
earlier stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China and a later,
higher stage, which saw the emergence of the revolutionary intelligent-
sia, and an awakened working class in alliance with the progressive
bourgeoisie. In the essay "On New Democracy," 22 Mao asserts that "on
China's cultural or ideological front, the period preceding the May ·t
Movement and the period following it form two distinct historical pe-
riods." Before the Movement, "the struggle on China's cultural front
was a struggle between the new culture of the bourgeoisie and the old
culture of the feudal class ... the ideology of the new learning played
18Han Suyin, op. cit., pp. 111-116.
19Mao Tse-tung, "On New Democracy." Selected Works (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1954), pp. 143-146.
20 lb1"d. passim.
21 llricl.
16 ASIAN STUDIES

the revolutionary role of fighting the Chinese feudal ideology and was
in the service of the bourgeois democratic revolution of the old period ...
But since the May 4 Movement, things have gone differently. Since
then a brand new cultural force of fresh strength has appeared in China.
namely, the ideas of Communist culture guided by the Chinese Com-
munists: · the Communist world outlook and the Communist theory
of social revolution. The May 4 Movement occurred in 1919, and in
1921 the Chinese Communist Party was founded and China's labour
movement actually began . . .
"Before the May 4 Movement, the new culture of China was a
culture of the old-democratic character and a part of the capitalist cul-
tural revolution of the world bourgeoisie. Since the May 4 Movement,
it has become a culture of new-democratic character and a part of the
socialist cultural revolution of the world proletariat . . .
"What is called new democratic culture is the anti-imperialist and
anti-feudal culture of the broad masses of the people . ·· . New democ-
ratic culture is, in a word, the and anti-feudal culture
of the broad masses of the people under the leadership of the world
. ..."
pro1etanat
Though some scholars have taken exception to this view
of. the Movement,22 it is true nevertheless that the Movement profoundly
affected historical developments in China. It convinced many Chinese
mtellectuals, rightly or wrongly, that the only adequate response to
imperialism was the revolutionary socialism of Marx and Lenin. In a
profound sense, the Movement was the training ground, the staging
point for the future leaders of the Chinese Communist Movement, and
the crucib!e which convinced them that the main platforms of the
Chinese Revolution after 1919 should be the determination to put an
end to the twin evils of imperialism and feudalism, which had so de-
vastated and humiliated. China that, paraphrasing Maurice Meisner, her
very existence as a nation had been placed in doubt.
22 Chow Tse-tung, op. cit. pp. 338-368.