Beyond Beijing: May Fourth as a national and international movement

Abstract

The twenty-first century aboundswith centenaries of formative events that shaped the present and therefore with opportunities to commemorate and reflect on events of the previous century. What – if anything – did they mean? After commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of China’s RepublicanRevolution of 1911 and the beginning and ending ofWorld War I and on the eve ofmarking the centenary of the founding theChineseCommunist Party, we have arrived at the one hundredth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. From our current vantage point, what seems to be the significance of the movement? One straightforward response was coined by Mao Zedong. In his seminal 1940 essay “On New Democracy,” Mao stated flatly that “since the May Fourth Movement things have been different.” For Mao the movement’s primary significance lay in paving the road to Communism, but the significance of May Fourth has always been contested. Historians and politicians have assigned the movement a variety of meanings, from cultural renaissance to patriotic awakening, from the advent of Marxism to the celebration of liberalism. Yet, as is often stated, history is ever changing reflecting the concerns of scholars and pundits about their own era. Hindsight provides many reasons to reflect anew about May Fourth. What does the movement mean given what we now know about the evolution of Communism in China, the alternate paths of Taiwan and Hong Kong, the embrace of market mechanisms in Deng Xiaoping’s time, and the New Era of Xi Jinping? What do language reform and cultural reform mean in the current era of globalization and the digital revolution? As the late twentieth century’s political order of liberal democratic nation-states faces severe challenges domestically from the rise of populist leaders and internationally from the rise of China and Russia and the weakening of the United States, the centenary of May Fourth beckons us to reflect on the meaning of this movement. Viewed from the perspective of our increasingly connected world, it might be time to conceive of May Fourth as a national and international movement. This proposition inevitably raises questions about the way in which ideas spread and the relation between ideas and political change.