In Our Time - The May Fourth Movement

Episode Date: December 9, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the violent protests in China on 4th May 1919 over the nation's humiliation in the Versailles Treaty after World War One. China had supported the Allies, sending workers to dig trenches, and expected to regain the German colonies on its territory, but the Allies and China's leaders chose to give that land to Japan instead. To protestors, this was a travesty and reflected much that was wrong with China, with its corrupt leaders, division by warlords, weakness before Imperial Europe and outdated ideas and values. The movement around 4th May has since been seen as a watershed in China’s development in the 20th century, not least as some of those connected with the movement went on to found the Communist Party of China a few years later.The image above is of students from Peking University marching with banners during the May Fourth demonstrations in 1919.With Rana Mitter Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College, University of OxfordElisabeth Forster Lecturer in Chinese History at the University of SouthamptonAnd Song-Chuan Chen Associate Professor in History at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Mel Gerdroich here, I'm just after a moment of your time before you listen to this podcast. Now, this Christmas, thousands of people across the UK will be without a safe place to call home. But listen up, you can help change that. St. Martin's helps ensure that people experiencing homelessness can find and keep a safe place to live. Your gift could help support somebody to take the next step towards a more secure future. Please support the BBC Radio 4 Christmas Appeal with St Martin in the fields by donating online on the Radio 4 website.

Together we can help bring people a step closer to home. I thank you. Now go on, enjoy your podcast. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, on May the 4th in 1990 in China,

Violent protests broke out over the Versailles Treaty, which had concluded the First World War. China had supported the Allies, and sent 100,000 young men to dig trenches on the front line and expected, in return, to regain the German colonies on its territories. But at Versailles, its leaders and the Allies gave the land to Japan instead. To protest this was a sellout, and showed much that was wrong with China,

corrupt leaders, weakness before Imperial Europe, outdated ideas, and the movement around May 4th, became seen as a watershed on China's shift towards modernity. We need to discuss the May 4th Movement are Elizabeth Foster, lecturer in Chinese history at the University of Southampton, Song Chan Chun, Associate Professor in History at the University of Warwick, and Rana Mehta, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China

and fellow at St Cross College University of Oxford, Rana. There had been great shifts within China in the early 20th century. Can you give us an outline of that? The first two decades of the 20th century in China were absolutely turbulent and very, very troubling to many of the people who looked at the state that China was in and worried that it essentially might collapse. A lot of people summarized the problems that China had at that time by saying that it was suffering from imperialism from outside and warlordism from inside. What they meant by that was that a lot of foreign countries, Britain, France, the United States, Japan had especially spent most of the late 19th century seizing parts of the territory, Hong Kong is a well-known example, but also essentially putting their own laws and their own tariffs onto China, which essentially both reduced its economic freedoms

and essentially humiliated its people because they essentially had to obey laws that they themselves hadn't chosen. But the warlordism idea was also about the fact that China has started to collapse from inside. Different military leaders in different provinces and parts of China, Manchuria up in the northeast or Shanxi in central China, made up their own armies. They brought together their own armed forces and essentially fought for power at the centre. So even though in 1911 there was a revolution which overthrew the last emperor, made famous through Bertolich's movie, who was only a little boy at the time, even though the emperor was overthrown and at the beginning of 1912, China actually became Asia's first republic

and briefly had a president Sun Yat-Sen, who was a well-known revolutionary of the time. In fact, the constitutional republic, which existed on paper, essentially fell apart because of these military forces tearing it apart from inside and the fact that the foreign powers were still trying to find ways to gain power within China. Was the abolition of civil service exams, the Confucian system which had been going on for about a thousand years, that was abolished, why did that matter so much? The abolition of the traditional system of examinations for civil servants in China was an absolutely crucial. moment in terms of the turn towards modernity in China. For about a thousand years, ever since the Song Dynasty, there had been some form of competitive exams, almost always for, well, it was always for men, and it was almost always the more elite people who took part in it. But technically, it was a sort of meritocracy in which would-be civil servants had to study for many years

to try and learn the Confucian classics, the philosophical classics and texts that made up the Chinese literary tradition. And if they did, well, very small number got through, they would be on the rising ladder to bureaucratic success. And by the 19th century in the early 20th century, the exams that these Confucian scholars had taken had become very inward looking. It didn't tell people about the science or the modernity that the outside world was bringing. So finally, the Qing dynasty, the last ruling dynasty of China, after a whole variety of disasters, including the so-called boxer war of 1900, when essentially a rebellion was put down but only with foreign forces coming in,

they decided to go very, very radically for change and pretty much within a year, the year 1904 to 5, abolished the thousand-year-old examination system. And that meant that thousands and thousands of people who had been training for years to take these exams, which they saw as a passport to success in the bureaucracy, suddenly found themselves essentially unemployed and, of course, very angry with the existing system

whose success they no longer had a central stake in. Song Changju, what was the status of the intellectual, of these intellectuals in China? Did they have a sense of mission? Yes, they certainly have. The mission is to save the nation, put it simply. What we describe as intellectuals was known by Chinese society around this time as do-su-souren, that is book-reading people. To these book-reading people, learning and learning.

serving the country are closely linked. The well-known Confucius saying goes like this. The official, having discharged all his duties, should devote his leisure to learning. The student, having completed his learning, should apply himself to be an official. Based on this concept, the book reading people were well respected as political and social elites, even though the civil of examination, as Rana referred to earlier, is already abolished by this time. Their duty was to serve the country still, and particularly when facing national crisis, such as those of the early Republican era. How did Chinese intellectuals respond to the war in Europe? We call the First World War.

When the news of this war in Europe arrived in China, the intellectuals were actually shocked. By then, it had been established. among the intellectuals that Western Europe was an advanced civilization and that China should imitate its culture and political system. Conservative intellectuals spoke out stronger than ever against wholesale adoption of Western ways and were justified in doing so by the horrors of the First World War. Other intellectuals spotted opportunities to take back Chinese territories under the control of imperial power. by joining the winning side. They urged the government to join the Allies, but China did not send soldiers to fight in battle. Rather, they supplied labors to work in the trenches and in military logistics and the Western Front.

Thank you. Elizabeth Foster, before the 4th of May, there was already an overarching movement called the New Culture Movement. How did that get started? May 4th actually has two aspects to add the political aspects, which is the demonstrations that started on the 4th of May 1919 and the cultural aspect, which as you say is sometimes also called the new culture movement. It's also called May 4th. It's a little bit confusing. Now, this cultural side of May 4th, the new culture movement arguably made Chinese culture modern. A whole lot of ideas became popular in China that shape China until the present day. So among those ideas was communism. So communism was popularized as part of the cultural aspect of May 4th. And communism is, of course, incredibly important in China because China is socialist until the present day. And that goes back to that time period. Then a precursor of the modern Chinese language of modern Mandarin

was promoted as part of the cultural aspects of May 4th. The social ethics completely changed. So people started to say, well, we need to get away from these Confucian, ethical systems. So these ethical systems have had really shaped Chinese society in previous centuries. And we want to get more towards things like individualism, emancipation for women and so on and so forth. So society was completely changed. And science and democracy was advocated as well. So all these incredibly modern ideas became popularized through the cultural aspects of Mayfo, through the new culture movement. And the most famous one of these groups of reformers, cultural reformers,

where people writing for a journal and that was called New Youth in Chinese Xinjiang. So this journal, New Youth, was founded in 1950, became the most famous one of these journals that were around at the time. And it advocated exactly the set of ideas that I mentioned earlier, so communism, language reform, emancipation of women's science and democracy. Who was Chen Duxu and how integral was he to this new culture movement? So Chen Gensu was absolutely important to the new culture movement. Chen Gensu was an intellectual and he was by contemporary seen as one of the centre, as they call it, as one of the masters, also the word the contemporaries used of the new culture movement, of the cultural aspect. He was at University of Peking, which was at the centre of all this, wasn't he?

He was dean of the humanities faculty at Beijing University when in the year 1919 actually got fired just before. the May 4th demonstrations and then became sort of an independent intellectual. But yeah, he did have this very prestigious position. He had an interesting career later on as well. He would be among the founders of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. And so I mentioned earlier how communism was popularized through the new culture movement, the cultural aspect of Mayfors. So this was an implication of that.

And Chen Duesue would be among the founders of the party, which is the exact same party that are still leading China today. But as part of the... the new cultural movement, the cultural aspect of May 4th, people called him one of the centres, one of the masters, because he edited this journal New Youth that I mentioned earlier on. So he launched that in 1950. Rana, Ron Amitre, what happened on May the 4th, 1919? Was there anything that specifically sparked the protests which led them to Tiananmen

before it became Tiananmen's square, but it was the same place? The reason that there was a demonstration on the 4th of May 1919 actually originated thousands of miles away in Paris at the end of April, which is the event that, you know, in the European context, we know of as the end of the Paris Peace Conference and the signing of the Versailles Treaty. And essentially China had sent nearly 100,000 workers to the Western Front to work on the Allied side. Many of the Chinese who had essentially supported that decision thought that the German colonies that had existed. before World War I in China, would be handed over to the Chinese government as a reward for essentially having defeated the Germans and their allies. And instead, because of a series of essentially backhand deals that were done between the Japanese and certain Chinese ministers in secret, in fact, those territories were handed over to the Japanese instead. And when the news of this came back to China, they were absolutely outraged. And we have reports saying that, first of all, on the university campus, people gathered in huge numbers, threatening in some cases, you know, very

demonstratively to kill themselves because of the disgrace that this Versailles Treaty had visited upon the Chinese nation. And so there was a gathering of these students, and then about 3,000 of them, made their way from the campus of Peking University, which, by the way, in those days, was just behind the Forbidden City, the great Ming Dynasty Palace at the center of Beijing to this day. in fact. So they made their way to Tiananman, the gate of heavenly peace, the front gate of the forbidden city, not the square in those days. That was only built in the 1950s much later on. They started to demonstrate. They were very savvy even then. Some of these signs that they had made were actually in English, which were designed to catch the attention of the foreign press.

And then the students started marching because they felt that simply demonstrating wasn't enough. They wanted to actually show actively how disgusted they were. They made they were first to the legation quarter, where many. of the foreign diplomats in Beijing were based at that stage. And then when they were moved on, they made their way to a place called Hataman Street, where one of the ministers in the Chinese government, who was assumed or accused of being very close to the Japanese, had his house. And in the words of one foreign journalist who was following them, they'd marched in silence.

They weren't screaming or shouting, but they were very quiet. But when they got to this man's house, they broke in and in his words went mad. essentially this group of students broke into the house and smashed the whole thing to pieces. They went upstairs to the minister's bedroom and smashed the perfume bottles belonging to his wife. They tore apart the sheets. They smashed the furniture. And the minister himself, who realized what was happening, basically made himself scarce. He got a local policeman to hand over his uniform, disguised himself in a policeman's uniform and jumped over the back wall.

But one of his ministerial colleagues was not so lucky. he basically found himself in front of this mob of students who grabbed the post from one of these iron beds, an iron bed post. And basically they started hitting this minister with the bedpost. And a man called Lord Jalun, who later on, much later on, would become China's first ambassador to independent India in the 1940s. But then he was just a student, part of that May 4th movement. He wasn't involved in the violence, but he recalled that when he saw the minister's body on the floor, It looked like it was covered in fish scales because the end of the bedpost was round and he'd been hit so many times that there were little round bruises all over his body.

They left him for dead. He didn't die. But essentially the last thing the students did before actually fleeing the house was to get some matches and set the whole place on fire. Is it Saint-Canton, how well-informed were these protesters? They seemed to have gathered great strength at this time. The fact that the May 4th protest would become a... nationwide event has very much to do with development of Western-style newspapers and the use of telegraphs for communication. News of what happened in Beijing could now be printed in

Shanghai and other cities across China by the next morning. So you created this reading community and then on top of these intellectual connections, personal connections, those political, active in Beijing became known at that time as Ming Liao, which means famous and fashionable intellectual celebrities. In other words, while busy saving the nation, the intellectuals did not forget to stay elegant and perform their high social status. They were leaders of opinion and actively used newspaper

to shape the nation's mood. One article published in the morning in the morning post and eve of the May 4th protest was particularly incendiary in advocating Chinese nationalism. The author of this particular article was Lin-chanmin. Lin argued in the article that if Sandong were lost, China would no longer be a nation and would soon perish. He vowed to die a martyr taking Sandon back from the Japanese. Lin and his circle of influence were highly responsible for spreading anger over what they saw as betrayal by Western nations regarding this Sandong issue as described earlier. That's absolutely right. And one of the things that Sung Chuan has pointed out is that this sense of nationalistic anger really spreads amongst the intellectual elites.

I think this isn't yet a populist movement. But there's also what you might call a positive side, which is that the use of this sort of, of modern mode of thinking becomes absolutely central to the May 4th movement at this point. And a phrase, I mean, Elizabeth mentioned it briefly, but it's worth actually really stressing it, is the two-part answer to what the students and other demonstrators said they wanted. And they said they wanted two people, as they phrased it, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, Tziencheng, Dersiencheng. Now, in Chinese, it's actually quite an unnatural way of speaking.

It's not a sort of natural formation. So they were deliberately using a form of language that would make this phrase, sound slightly unusual. But by these two terms, they meant something in a sense both broad and specific. Science, not just in the sense of physics and chemistry, but an enlightenment-driven idea of inquiry that would ask questions without fear of upsetting old shibboleths and expectations that you would act in a particular way. So really, you know, science that would bring knowledge that broke boundaries. And democracy, not necessarily in the sense of electoral change. That had already happened with the Republic that had been set up in 1912, but rather the

idea that there would be some kind of genuine popular participation, because in politics at that time, although technically there was a constitutional republic, in fact, it was military force that actually had the most sway. Can I bring Elizabeth in here again? Can you develop the idea of anger, because this movement became extraordinarily powerful, the dominating movement, dominated and, as it were, resolved, set China on a path for the next. hundred years. Anger is an important theme and obviously the goal of Mayfors, of its political aspects, of its cultural aspects is to get rid of Western imperialism as Rana and Western imperialism is the historical context that Rana has given us just earlier on. Now the method

here is interesting and we might read it as paradoxical but we might also read it as something that makes perfect sense. So what had happened in the 19th, century is that these scholar officials, these book reading people that Sun Quan explained to us about earlier on, they had made an analysis of what had gone wrong in China,

so why China had actually suffered under Western imperialism. And the first generation of these scholar officials said, well, the problem was that China simply hadn't sufficiently good weapons. So the West had better weapons, and therefore we China lost a number of wars

against them. So the way we can deal with this anger that we have towards the West. And the way we can get rid of Western imperialism is to just import Western weapons. But then a bit later, the scholar officials made a different analysis. So they said, in fact, the secret of Western strength does not only lie in Western weapons, but in Western ideas. And it was from that point onwards that you had a huge import of Western ideas into China. And when I say Western ideas, I mean everything, philosophy, science,

which Rana has mentioned just now political thinking. This is why we got communism in China in the first place. Literature, these changes to social ideals, language reform. Sung Chun just now mentioned the newspapers, telegraphs. So all these things came into China. And this is how we had these reformist groups in the 19-teens that I mentioned earlier. That is where they got their ideas from. Now, I think it's important to note, though, that they didn't just copy and paste.

Western ideas, rather they took their inspiration from Western ideas and really reinvented them in China to make them useful for them, to make them fit to China. And the mechanics of this import of Western ideas is really quite interesting. So you had huge translation projects in which philosophical works, scientific works, works of literature were translated. And you also had students going abroad to study. So they would go to Europe, to the United States, also to Japan. So Japan was undergoing similar processes as China at that time.

And one of the very famous May 4th intellectual, the man called Hu Shui, for example, did his PhD with the philosopher John Dewe at Columbia University. Thank you, Your Honor. A writer of that time has become emblematic of the movement. Lu Shun, can you give us a sketch him and why he stood out? Lu Shun, even today, is probably regarded as a single most important moment. modern writer in the Chinese literary canon. And even today, I think pretty much every Chinese school child would read some of his works in high school. Like many modernists, actually, he's not

the easiest of people to read. His prose style is in some ways actually looking back to the old Confucian style of classical writing as much as it looks towards the modern. But he's considered essentially a transitional writer who has a huge amount to say in indicting the Chinese society of his time. So the thing that makes him so distinctive is that he basically takes on and really, in literary terms, smashes to pieces all the norms, all the assumptions of the old Confucian society. To take possibly his single most famous short story, it's called A Diary of a Madman. In some ways, it's a riff on the Russian short story of the same name by Gogol, which was also a satire of 19th century Russian society. But in this Chinese version, the character in the lead, the madman, is in fact, as often in these metaphorical stories, the only sane man in the entire place. And in his madness, he starts reading the old Confucian classics, the classical works of Chinese tradition, and realizes in his mind that in between all the lines, the words, eat people, come up.

In other words, this is a statement that Confucianism is cannibalism. So as a way of breaking old taboos, this is a really daring sort of statement. for Luzun to make. And he wrote stories like this and similar ones, including one called Kongiji, which is a sort of slightly scathing, slightly mocking account of those old scholars we mentioned before who had been put out of work by the abolition of the examination system. And he published them in that magazine, which Elizabeth mentioned earlier, New Youth. So he was one of the sort of star writers, you might say, of that particular publication.

But essentially, he's become famous and indeed in that era became a very, very, very distinguished figure because of his iconoclastic willingness to use this, you know, scathing new literary modernist technique to really no holds bar destroyed or destroy all of the assumptions about the old society. And of course, in terms of the atmosphere, he was teaching for several years at Peking University, which I think by now we see is very much the kind of hub of this whole intellectual movement. So many of these people knew and talked to each other were very much part of the same intellectual circles and Lu Xun was at the head of the literary part of that movement. Thank you. Song Chandon, why was it so important to those in the movement to change the written

language? The best way to beat the West is to use to adopt their weapons. So the intellectuals looked into the Western culture. They find the secret ingredients is in their languages. Now, Now, the common written language of traditional China was classical Chinese. The most radical intellectuals, they actually wanted the wholesale westernization of Chinese language, that is the written language. They thought that the Europeans, for instance, had got ahead by using what local languages, by breaking away from Latin, as it were, to be rough and ready about it, and taking up their local language, which gave them more flexibility, more communication and a greater dynamic. Precisely, that's the point. Because they saw classical Chinese as an embodiment of traditional culture that has by now become an obstacle of China's modernization. Also, the intellectuals were inspired by their belief that the Western state had become a strong and coherent nation by abandoning Latin, as Melvin has just said.

If China was to be modernized, these radical intellectuals believe that they needed to get rid of collections of Chinese and make the written language more similar to the spoken language. As the quality of the Chinese people improved through education, the quality of the Chinese nation would also improve. The most extreme one, they actually wanted to abolish the Chinese characteristics all together. They wanted to adopt the Roman alphabet system as their written language. Less radical intellectuals took it upon themselves to develop and implement the simplified Chinese characters that were already in use among the ordinary people.

This simplified form of Chinese character was eventually adopted by communist China in the 1960s. Well, in Taiwan, the other China, traditional Chinese characters remain in use as they had been for about 2,000 years. Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Political and cultural aspects of this were often intertwined. But can you tell us about Hushu, what his significance is with regard to this change in culture? Hushu was just like Chen Jensu, an intellectual, and he is very much associated with the language reform that Sunchun just told us about. So he's especially associated with the idea that classical Chinese, so this Latin, as it were, of China should be abandoned and that people should write in a form of language that's closer to the vernacular. And Hooshe was alongside Chen Jusu, seen by contemporaries as one of the center or one of the masters of the new culture movement, of that cultural side of May 4th.

And Hoosha was an incredibly educated person. So he had studied in the United States. States. As I mentioned just earlier, he had done his PhD with John Dewey at Columbia University, PhD in philosophy, and he became professor for philosophy at Beijing University, and it's also pronounced Peking University in 1917. And Peking University or Beijing University is an absolutely prestigious university in China. It's like the Harvard of China. He was a person who was incredibly well-educated, and he had this incredible social prestige as well through his position. And he contributed to this new culture movement by advocating language reformed by

advocating to stop writing in classical Chinese and start writing in a language that was closer to the vernacular that he called Baihua, which could be translated as plain language. And he published these ideas in the New Youth Journal that was edited by Chen Jusue. And later on, he actually depicted himself as the founder of this vernacular language or plain language movement. And Husha became an absolute celebrity as part of Mayfors and new culture. So for example, this was really good for his teaching being a celebrity. So there are stories and memoirs of students at Beijing University at the time that students crowded into his lecture rooms because they wanted to hear him speak. And there were so many students who wanted to hear his

lecture that there weren't even enough chairs. So they had to sit on the floor in what we probably in 21st century Britain would call a fire safety. and newspapers would gossip about him when he went on holidays. They would report what he had in his suitcase. So he was a real celebrity, at least within urban circles in China. The really surprising thing is that in 1990, when the new culture movement took off and Hushu became the celebrity, he was actually really depressed about what people were saying in his name.

So people would say things like, I conduct the vernacular language, the plain language movement, just like Hushu. and Hushu would go back and say, well, no, you're not actually doing at all what I'm saying. You're using your own agenda and you're using a completely different philosophy of language reform. You're just using my name as a sort of a buzzword, a sort of a marketing strategy to add some additional glamour to your old agenda. So, I mean, in reality, personally, I don't see much difference between the actual language forms that were used. But, you know, Hushu was an academic and theory was incredibly important to him. and he said this really slightly depressed thing about the new culture movement.

He said once it has started moving, you cannot stop it from moving. Rana, this period is often described as a watershed in Chinese history. Can you briefly tell us what the watershed was? I think the best way I can explain the watershed nature of the May 4th movement is to compare it to the 60s in the West, which doesn't mean the years 1960 to 69. It means a whole mood. And just as the 60s in the West was about cosmopolitanism, internationalism, sexual liberation, which was actually a big deal in the May 4th movement. So it was also for these young Chinese in the 1910s and 1920s.

I think I can summarize it briefly and best with a very quick line from one of the great May 4th poems, a poem Heavenhound by the poet Gormorororra. And he wrote in that poem, I am the sun, I am the moon, I am X-ray, I am the energy of the entire universe. And in those two or three lines, you can see this is about proud individualism, almost egotism, you might say, inspired by people like Walt Whitman, also that little flavor of science, you know, calling himself an X-ray, and the whole thing, very much part of that youthful sense of exuberance and possibility. That's what May 4th was about, and that's why it's a bit like the 60s. Song-Chantoun, how is Japan tied into this history?

Instead of the Chinese getting the German colonists, who colonized them, they went to Japan. Can you tell us a bit about that? Japan's place in this whole business is very central. So the making of this Mayfors watershed moment is everything to do with the outpouring of patriotism. And then this made Japan the number one enemy of China. Anti-Japanese sentiment became central to the development

of Chinese national identity. The intellectuals of this period had good reason to think poorly of Japan. Before 1990, the Mayfos had happened. In 1915, during the First World War, Japan made the infamous 21 demands that in essence would make China a protectorate of Japan. To the nation's dismay, the warlord government agreed to some of these demands, causing massive protests and the streets. in many parts of China. The people were angry at the fact that the warlord government gave

up part of China's sovereignty in exchange for Japanese financial and military support, which the warlords would then use to fight against each other. The date of the warlord government agreed to Japanese demands was the 9th of May, 1915, and the 9th of May was named National humiliation day. This contributed to the building up of nationalistic sentiments that led to the May 4th protest in 1919. Now, it was in these years the coupling between anti-Japanese feelings and modern Chinese nationalism were made. This antagonism to Japan was subsequently deepened by Japan's invasion of China during the Second World War and it lives on today. Very much. Elizabeth, we've sometimes, or people I've wrote, always called this China's Renaissance or its Enlightenment. Are those helpful terms?

Both terms Chinese Renaissance and Chinese Enlightenment are absolutely useful in describing different aspects of May 4. So the Chinese Enlightenment, as an expression, has been used most prominently by Vera Schwartz, who is a scholar based in the United States. and she's written one of the most influential books on the May 4th movement called the Chinese Enlightenment that was published in the 1980s. And she says the May 4th Movement was a 20th century Chinese version of this 18th century European Enlightenment. But she says it was also different from the 18th century European Enlightenment in that the Chinese Enlightenment was more a disengagement from Confucian ethics, a form of iconoclasms, she says, and cultural and political awakening. And these are the aspects that she draws attention to when she calls this a Chinese Enlightenment. And the Chinese Renaissance is an expression that I have most often found used by Chinese may force intellectual, such as Huxer, when they explained the movement to English-speaking audiences.

So I'm thinking, for example, of Huxer, who uses this expression all the time when he speaks to European and American audiences. So, for example, in 1933, Hushu traveled to the United States to give him. a lecture at the University of Chicago. These were called the Haskell Lecture. So it was just the name of that lecture series. And one of the lectures, Hu Schu gave, was on what he called the Chinese Renaissance, and he essentially talked about the new culture movement,

the cultural aspect of May 4th. And Hu Schu in this lecture actually depicted himself as the leader and very strongly depicted the new culture movement as a language reform movement. And these Haskell lectures then were incredibly influential, within the study of Mayfoth in the Western world because they were published as a book. And on every student reading list and in every book published about the Mayforth movement, you will find that book in the bibliography.

So this has been an incredibly influential book. So I think who should use this expression to explain what this movement was about to English-speaking audiences. Thank you very much. What was the early impact of the movement? There was the movement. There was the march. There was the sacking of the officials. house, the burning, the looting and so on.

What then? How quickly did this movement have an impact that seemed to be something that would be lasting? Well, I'd give two brief examples because there are so many, but these are just two, I think, very indicative ones. The first one is in terms of gendered relations between men and women. You see through the 1920s a whole variety of ways in which the changing social norms that are pushed forward by this unwillingness to obey the old Confucian norms, changed everyday life. So this was a time when China was beginning to develop urban culture with professional women actually taking up jobs as school teachers or shopkeepers, this sort of thing. And there were a lot of discussions at that time about what was appropriate in terms of dealing with, say, male bosses, I mean, questions that have some resonance even today.

Thinking about the fact that men and women could work together in a way that just would not have been possible in the old Confucian society, where it would have been seen as improper, was one of the wider social changes implied by gender that came from the rethinking of social norms because of the May 4th movement. But in terms of practical change, something that changed very, very importantly in the early 1920s,

which Elizabeth and Songchuan have both mentioned in different ways, was that founding in July of 1921 of the Chinese Communist Party, Chengdu Shoe, who we've mentioned many times, and Mao Zedong, you know, young man who would go on to become chairman, Mao, you know, the leader of China, but at that time he was a library assistant at Peking University. These were amongst a small number of people, all of the men who founded the Chinese Communist Party

in secret essentially in Shanghai. And as we know, in the next few years, it would get Soviet assistance, it would join with other parties in China, and eventually would become what it is today, a machine that essentially rules something like a quarter of humanity. So in terms of May 4th's later legacy, that 1921 foundation of the Chinese Communist Party has to be seen as one of the most important elements. Song-Han-Tun, how has May the 4th been commemorated and why? The commemoration of May 4th is very important. The commemoration is important because everybody is talking about this.

May 4th in the years between 1920 and 1949. Basically this enshrined May 4th as the most important event of that period. Every year, university students, civil society and government organizations across the country would organize various commemoration events. University students being the most active. In 1920, for example, the first year of commemoration, students at Peking University made three colored flags in yellow, white and blue, representing freedom, equality, and brotherhood to decorate their commemoration. They based this on the trickler flag of the French Revolution, but then they changed the meaning of the colors, replacing red with yellow to mean the so-called yellow race who also uphold enlightenment values. The most radical

students took the commemoration to another level by forcing shop owners to close their doors and anniversary of May 4s making them join the commemoration. Others took action by burning poorly made Chinese goods and made the force, believing that poor quality goods brought Shane and the Chinese nation identity. So these commemorations made May 4th as a celebrated and symbolic event in Chinese history. May 4th in Chinese is Wu Si. Just by using these two Chinese characters,

Wu Si, you can evoke an image of May 4 as the awakening of China. China is making effort to become a modern nation with humanistic values, similar to, if not better than those of the Western world. This meant that anyone in this period who wished to express their opinions and wanted to be heard could gain public attention by evoking this May 4 spirit. This is exactly what Chairman Mao did when he spoke of communism in the 1940s. He conjured up this May 4's spirit at least three occasions and tried to use the image of May 4th to sell his version of communist revolution.

Elizabeth Foster, what's been the longer-term legacy of the movement in China? Actually, I think there is not the one legacy that we can identify. And I say this because I think May 4th is so multifaceted. You've got the cultural side of things. You've got the political side of things. You've got these various aspects to both of these sides. So it's so multifaceted that it has really meant very different things for very different people and therefore people take different aspects of it as a legacy of Mayforce.

So some people would identify communism, others, individualism, anti-imperialism, patriotism, language reform. The list could go on. So I think Mayfors has meant different things to different people and therefore I think Mayfors has different legacies and very many different legacies. But actually, I think that's also why Mayforth is important and what actually keeps it alive. Finally, Rana, is it still developing? I think that Mayforth is currently a set of ideas that you might say is bubbling under the surface in China. If you go to Peking University, which of course is still very much the most prestigious university in China today, as Elizabeth said,

then you will find there are still plenty of people there who are very interested in May 4 values. They want to debate science. They want to debate democracy. They want to debate constitutionalism. It is the case that the current Chinese political situation is very restrictive on discussing any of those subjects. But that having been said, it's very clear that that doesn't mean the ideas have been abolished. And many of China's younger scholars in particular, I think, are still very interested in debating exactly these sorts of ideas. Certainly, if you ask them if they understood what that term,

May 4th spirit means, as Tsung Quan put it, they would know exactly what you meant without any more prompting, and that is a sign that that spirit after 100 years is still very much part of the Chinese intellectual trend today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Rana, Rana Mitter, Elizabeth Foster, and Song Chan Chong, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram, next week. God bless us, everyone. It's a Christmas carol by Charles Dickens, of course.

Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have developed that wasn't in the program? About the connection between 1989 and 1990, so the 70 years apart between the May 4th protest and then the Tiananmen Square protest that year in 1989. So what happened is not only this, the location. is kind of the same, although the square itself is much more improved in terms of putting in this concrete floor, etc. The key thing here is that the students in the protest in 1989,

they very much evoked this Mayfos spirit. And so they talked about this. Among them, they wrote this in their diaries, in their memoirs. They keep referring back to that 19... 19 moment. And then they continued to put the word democracy at the center of this. They made this statue of goddess. And so it's very much kind of they carry on that torch, so to speak, that kind of wanted to make China a modern nation and a nation with United Values. And then with kind of this kind of humanistic ideas that come.

from the traditional China. So we probably need to keep in mind that this is not a wholesale westernization. It's more like kind of mixing this to the knowledge system together. So by mixing them together and you create a new culture. And then this new culture is what this new China is about. It's neither Westernization is neither the traditional China. There's something else new here.

Could I jump in there actually, Song Chuan? Because one of the things, well, I would have loved to have said more about it if we talked more about the, if we'd had time to talk about the legacy, and actually I think it's worthy of a study in and of itself, is one particular legacy that comes from that memory of May 4th just before Tiananmen Square and the demonstrations in 1989, but has ever since been blanked out in China. And that's something called River Elegy, Heurang, in Chinese,

which was a six-part television series. It was only ever broadcast twice, both times in the summer of 1988, on CCTV 1, you know, the equivalent of BBC 1, the main television channel in China. And I would make a strong case that it may have been the most important television program ever broadcast in the history of the world, because it was watched by, you know, probably 100 million or more people. And it made a six-part philosophical argument,

drawing on the same ideas, actually, as May 4th in a sense, science and democracy. But combining with them, combining them with the idea that China could somehow create in the 1980s when it was broadcast post-cultural revolution of the 60s, but prior to what we know was this tragic crackdown and killings in 1989, a China that would have been more open to the outside world. And the title itself was very indicative because it's called the river elegy, because it was an elegy, a sort of song of mourning for the Yellow River, you know, regarded as the core of China's cultural heartland running through that lowest soil. And it's saying that China should, in a sense, look away from that inward-looking river, which had defined much of Chinese culture for thousands of years. And these students argued, who made these intellectuals who made this television program, they argued instead that China should look to the blue ocean, meaning the Pacific, and that connection to the wider outside Western world.

But in doing so, they weren't arguing that China should become the West. Just as Songtran was saying, they were arguing that China should learn from the West in a very open manner and create a new method of what it meant to be Chinese. And even now, you know, the script to the television program is available in English and clips of it you can still find online. But it has this tremendous sense of thrill and interest in the outside world and excitement after the Cultural Revolution that in some sense brings back that May 4th spirit 60 years later. Elizabeth?

Yeah, I was actually hoping to build on something related to the 19 teens, more specifically that Tsung Tran said earlier. So specifically, yeah, Sun Quan mentioned how important the press was in the 19th teens. And I think the power of the press really can't be overestimated at that point in time. So Rana gave us a very graphic description of just how violent these Mayforce demonstrations were. I mean, these students beat up a man and they burned down a house and they tried to attack a minister. So I think if the press had decided to condemn maybe not the spirit of the demonstrations with both patriotic and anti-imperalists, of course, but the actions of the demonstrators,

the story might have ended up very differently. But what the press decided was to call these students patriotic and good and the victims of a government that had sold out China. But just imagine if the press had decided to not go with this particular narrative and say, well, these students maybe have a good point. but their actions are completely out of place and they need to be back in the classroom, which was absolutely an interpretation that was around at that point in time. So some of those student demonstrators and some of their teachers actually felt incredibly

uncomfortable with the violence that was being committed. So I think we would then end up with a completely different interpretation of Mayforce rather than the sort of glorious moments of student protest to something a bit more problematic. So I'm not trying to judge the Mayfoil protest in any way. I'm just saying, I think the press had an enormous amount of power at that point in time to interpret this. Elizabeth, that's really interesting. Can I use that just briefly to touch on something else which relates to that issue of violence? I'm going to make what might be for some more controversial point about the May 4th movement, although I'm not the first one to make it, I think, which is that the most unexpected part of modern Chinese history where ideas of May 4th turn up is the cultural revolution of the 1960s,

which of course has been covered on in our time about a year or so ago. But one of the things that perhaps is less well known is that many of the figures from Mayforth, like Lu Xun, the writer, were brought up by Mao and those serving him as if what they had really wanted to put forward was the Cultural Revolution, this incredibly violent near civil war that happened in China in the 1960s. The reason they could make that argument is that some of the key themes of Mayforth, the importance of youth, as in that new youth magazine that Elizabeth was talking about. And actually the idea of violence as a sort of transformative way of changing society, which was, you know, there in the May 4th movement, but relatively minimal, was made an absolutely central part of the cultural revolution message. These things were brought together to basically try and create what you might call a distorted idea of May 4th, the idea of a sort of youthful revolution that would destroy the Confucian past. That was something that was very much central to the cultural revolution, but without the kind of outward-looking cosmopolitanism that really transformed. to the original May 4th and was also very much there in the spirit of 1989. So it does show that generation by generation,

different parts of Chinese history have found different readings of May 4th, which can often be literally violently different from each other. I probably can refer back to what Rana said earlier about the river Eulich. Interestingly, we grew up in Taiwan. I felt my education was very much that May 4th, tradition. So in the sense that we were educated in both traditional Chinese. So we didn't abolish the classical Chinese. So I learned that from very young age. So in a way, I had that the traditional Chinese education. On the other hand, we learned all the things, science, democracy,

of the Western stuff that the kind of the Mayfos generation wanted. So in a way, in Taiwan, that the education was a mix of this West and the East. and then also is the legacy of the main force. And then this river eulogy, interestingly in Taiwan, for a long while we kind of imagined Yellow River and then the Yangtze River was still part of our territory. And then we had these songs like it's called Roe, the Yellow River. And then every time now, nowadays, when I hear

a Catty Perry's song, You will hear me raw, you will hear me raw, actually it reminded me when I was young and then we were singing those songs, Roar the Yellow River. It's kind of very nationalistic mood behind it. But then it's so different from Katie Perry's song, you will hear me to roar. That's certainly a cultural connection I didn't expect to make between Katie Perry and the May 4th movement, I have to say. Sog Joad, that's definitely definitely new on me. Wonderful. Thank you very much indeed. by Simon Tillotson.

Hello, I'm Professor Stephen Pinker. We all want to reason more clearly and to make better choices about everything from life and love to medicine and money. But even the best of us get things wrong. I would have twice as many billions if I just made a different decision.

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