May Fourth and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party

New Youth and the revolution in culture

In 1915, as Yuan Shikai’s monarchy collapsed, Chen Duxiu founded Youth Magazine in Shanghai and called on the young to be “independent, progressive and scientific”. The magazine attacked Confucian ethics as the foundation of despotism, and “Mr Democracy and Mr Science” became its slogan. When Cai Yuanpei became chancellor of Peking University in 1917 and made Chen dean of letters, the magazine joined forces with the university. Source 1 · Source 2

In January 1917 Hu Shih proposed writing in the vernacular instead of the classical language, and Chen Duxiu pushed it as a “literary revolution”. Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” of 1918 used the new style to indict the old society as a history of “eating people”. Within a few years the vernacular was the language of textbooks and newspapers, and this revolution in language later made mass-party propaganda possible. Source 3 · Source 4

4 May 1919

China had entered the war on the Allied side in 1917, sending 140,000 labourers to Europe, and expected as a victor the return of Germany’s rights in Shandong. But the Twenty-One Demands of 1915 and the secret loan agreements Duan Qirui’s government had signed with Japan in 1918 had effectively conceded Japanese succession, and on 30 April the Paris conference gave Shandong to Japan. Source 5 · Source 6

When the news arrived, on 4 May some three thousand students from thirteen Beijing colleges gathered at Tiananmen shouting “Struggle for sovereignty abroad, punish the traitors at home”. They burned the house of the pro-Japanese official Cao Rulin, and thirty-two were arrested. The student strikes that followed and the workers’ strike and merchants’ shutdown in Shanghai in early June forced the government to yield: three officials were dismissed and the Chinese delegation refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Source 6 · Source 7

“Problems and isms”: the movement divides

In summer 1919 Hu Shih urged “more study of problems, less talk of isms” and gradual reform; Li Dazhao replied that without a “fundamental solution” no individual problem could be solved. The exchange marked the point where the New Culture Movement split into liberalism and Marxism. That year New Youth published a special issue on Marxism edited by Li Dazhao. Source 8 · Source 3

The Russian Revolution was the background to this turn. In July 1919 the Soviet government’s Karakhan declaration renounced the privileges tsarist Russia had gained in China, in pointed contrast to the powers at Versailles. Li Dazhao read it in “The victory of Bolshevism” as a victory of the world’s workers, and by 1920 Chen Duxiu was speaking of the need for a party joined to the workers. The young Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhang Guotao encountered Marxism in these years. Source 8 · Source 9

The Comintern’s hand

In April 1920 Grigory Voitinsky of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau met Li Dazhao in Beijing and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai. With his help a Shanghai communist cell was formed that summer, and similar groups followed in Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Guangzhou and Jinan and among students in Tokyo and Paris. The cells ran a monthly, The Communist, and night schools for workers. Source 9 · Source 2

In June 1921 the Comintern representatives Maring (Sneevliet) and Nikolsky reached Shanghai and pressed for a national congress. On 23 July thirteen delegates representing the cells met in a house in the French Concession. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao were absent; Mao Zedong represented Changsha and Zhang Guotao chaired. A police search forced the congress to close on a pleasure boat on South Lake at Jiaxing in Zhejiang, and Chen Duxiu was elected secretary. Source 9 · Source 10

The founding programme and the labour movement

The First Congress programme was a pure class line — overthrow the bourgeoisie with a proletarian revolutionary army, abolish private property — and ruled out alliance with other parties. The party set up a Labour Secretariat and organised the Hong Kong seamen’s strike of January 1922, the Anyuan miners’ strike of September (Li Lisan, Liu Shaoqi) and the Beijing–Hankou railway strike of February 1923. The bloody suppression of the railway strike, the “February Seventh massacre”, showed that workers alone could not defeat the warlords. Source 9 · Source 11

The Comintern had resolved at its Second Congress in 1920 that communist parties in colonial and semi-colonial countries must cooperate with the revolutionary movement of the national bourgeoisie. Maring saw Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang as that partner and at the Hangzhou meeting of August 1922 directed a “bloc within”; despite objections from Chen Duxiu and others, Comintern discipline prevailed. The Third Congress of June 1923 resolved that Communists would join the Kuomintang, opening the next phase. Source 12 · Source 13

Legacy: the two lineages of May Fourth

May Fourth became an event every Chinese political force claimed as its own. Following Mao’s 1939 definition, the Communists made it the starting point of the “new democratic revolution” and declared 4 May Youth Day; the Kuomintang and Taiwan commemorated it as Literature Day. The students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 called the seventieth anniversary of May Fourth their own day. Source 6 · Source 14

Historians divide between those who see the New Culture Movement’s “total anti-traditionalism” as preparing later radicalism, and those who see the movement as an open space where liberalism, anarchism and Marxism coexisted, a plurality closed down by politics after 1927. That Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu began in the same magazine and went opposite ways sums up the character of these years. Source 1 · Source 3