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Revolution and Civil War, episode 3

New Youth

While the generals fight over Beijing, Chen Duxiu edits a magazine called New Youth that tells young Chinese to throw off Confucius and the classical language, and in Changsha a young graduate named Mao Zedong founds a study society with his friends and then comes to Beijing to work in the university library. The episode follows both men from the New Culture movement and Hu Shi's call to write as people speak to the spring of 1919, when China expects the Paris Peace Conference to give back the German rights in Shandong, and asks why the peace handed them to Japan instead, partly because Duan Qirui's government had secretly agreed. It hears the Beijing government's own case at Paris and Chinese public voices alongside scholars and the American minister Paul Reinsch.

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Transcript

Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Duan Qirui got the war he had made his policy. From ten o'clock on the fourteenth of August 1917, China was at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The nation took the news with something close to indifference, and the men who had yelled for war outside the parliament in May showed no enthusiasm at all. China's real share of the fighting would be its labourers: some 140,000 of them were shipped to France, most of them to dig trenches. And in the south, Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist members of the broken parliament had fled to Guangzhou and set up a rival government, with Sun at its head, though he had no military power behind him apart from the navy. From then on the country was split in two. The North called the South rebels, and the South called the North usurpers. That is the world of the generals, and we will be back in it soon enough. But this time I want to stay with the people who were sick of the generals, because while the soldiers fought over Beijing, a different kind of fight was starting there, a fight over words and ideas. This episode also draws on the work of Rana Mitter. We follow two men through it. One is a magazine editor in a grey three piece suit. The other is a young man from Hunan whom, for most of this story, almost nobody notices at all. To meet the first of them, we have to go back a little. The president of the young republic, Yuan Shikai, was moving to make himself emperor. Yuan accepted a throne at the end of 1915, gave it up within a few months in the face of revolt in the provinces, and died in June 1916. For a group of intellectuals, the shame of it went deeper than one man's ambition. Trying to understand how Yuan's monarchy movement could happen at all, they blamed what they called the slave mentality of the Chinese people. The New Culture movement began as the answer of a fairly small number of influential intellectuals to what Yuan's presidency had shown them. In 1915 these progressives launched it with one aim: to free China from the grip of outdated thinking. And the engine of the movement was a magazine. In the middle of September 1915, in the International Settlement of Shanghai, Chen Duxiu founded a journal called Youth. A year later he renamed it New Youth. The International Settlement was the part of Shanghai run by a council of foreign residents under foreign law, which meant that Chinese officials could not simply walk in and shut a magazine down. Chen had been born in October 1879 in Anhui province, so he was nearly thirty six. As a boy he had received a classical Confucian education. Then, in his early twenties, he went to look at modern schools in China and in Japan, and from 1903 he threw himself into revolutionary work, helping to found progressive newspapers and magazines in Shanghai and in Anhui. Chen Duxiu, whom some of you have already met in an earlier season. In the first issue, Chen wrote an appeal to the young. He told them to be independent, not servile; progressive, not conservative; to look out at the world instead of shutting themselves away; and to be scientific rather than fanciful. His target was the old Confucian morality, and his magazine became one of the most influential carriers of Western ideas in China: democracy, humanism and the latest science, individualism and liberalism, a call for the spiritual renewal of the whole society. Its writers were something like the French philosophes of the eighteenth century, who had wanted reason to take the place of faith. Here the faith they wanted to replace was the cult of tradition itself. The magazine might have stayed a Shanghai curiosity. Instead, it got a home in the capital. In the autumn of 1916 a liberal scholar named Cai Yuanpei became head of Beijing University, and under him the New Culture spread through the university and through schools and colleges across the country. Cai had been Sun Yat-sen's minister of education in the first republican government, in 1912, and he ran the university on the principle that every school of thought deserved a hearing. At the end of November 1916, Chen Duxiu was invited to join the university, and he was soon appointed dean of the College of Letters. New Youth moved north with him, and its editors were soon mostly Beijing University professors. Two of the younger men around him matter to our story. One was the university's librarian, Li Dazhao, whom you will meet shortly: ten years younger than Chen, he became his friend, and Chen greatly respected him. The other was a philosopher you are about to meet, who would start the movement's first great fight. So picture him there. Chen liked a three piece grey suit, a perfectly starched shirt and a tie, which gave him the look of an American professor at a business school. The look was deceptive. He was extremely sociable, sharp tongued and funny, sometimes peremptory in an argument, but never contemptuous of the people he argued with. And for all his radicalism, he was no socialist yet. When a reader of New Youth raised the subject, Chen answered that it made no sense to talk about socialism in a China with so little industry. He stood for personal freedom, democracy and humanism. Hold on to that answer. It is not the last word Chen Duxiu will have on the subject.

The first great battle of the New Culture was fought over language itself. For about two thousand years, educated Chinese had written in the classical language: terse, allusive, and far removed from anything anyone actually spoke. To read it, you spent your childhood memorising ancient texts. It was simply too difficult for the great mass of the Chinese people to learn to read. A Chinese writer of the time explained the problem to foreign readers. A Chinese sentence of a few words would take two or three sentences in English, because the classical language was so concise, and its literature was full of allusions to the classics that ordinary readers could not follow. His example was the president of the republic himself, who had written four characters for the cover of the writer's book. Read literally, they said day, new, grand, discussion. Each pair pointed to a passage in a different classic. Every scholar understood the whole as a grand discourse on China's latest progress. The man who proposed to change all this was Hu Shi. Early in 1917, this young graduate of Columbia University published an article in New Youth called Suggestions for the Reform of Chinese Literature. Hu was twenty five, still a student in New York, and he sent the article across the Pacific to Chen. That summer he came home to teach philosophy at Beijing University. He called for an end to classical allusions, to fixed literary conventions, and to the rigid parallel sentences the old scholars loved. He condemned the slavish imitation of ancient writers, and argued that modern China must create a living literature of its own, written in the spoken language. In his own words, the reason was simple. "In order to express an enriched content, it is necessary first to secure the emancipation of the literary form. The old bottles can no longer hold the new wine." The written language, he argued, was a dead language, and a dead language could not carry the real life and thought of the present. And here is the part I love. Hu wrote his proposal in classical Chinese. He was afraid that the very people he wanted to reach would not have taken an essay in the spoken language seriously. So the first shot in the revolution against the old language was fired in the old language. Once it was fired, though, the battle began in earnest. A band of writers rallied round Hu, and New Youth began to print all its articles in the spoken language. Chen Duxiu went further than Hu. Where Hu was cautious, Chen spoke of an army of literary revolution, and drew the political point: "we must reform the literature that shapes the spirit of those who dominate public affairs." Others went further still. An old anarchist named Wu Zhihui cried that all the classical texts should be thrown down the toilet. And Qian Xuantong, a radical scholar trained in the classics himself, declared that the Chinese written language should be abolished altogether, as the storehouse of Confucian theory and Daoist superstition. When a man raised on the classics calls for the abolition of his own language, you can measure how deep the despair ran. And it ran deep. Hu Shi himself was never that kind of radical. He argued that the spoken language had a proud history of its own. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, he pointed out, almost every branch of Chinese literature had been written in it, from philosophy to the popular novel and drama. Then, under the Ming dynasty, a strict form of composition was fixed by imperial decree for the civil examinations, and from that time on, in Hu's view, Chinese literature had been bound in the shackles of imitation. So Hu went on to champion the great old novels, the ones the scholars despised, with their roots in the tales of professional storytellers. His real question, borrowed from the pragmatism he had learned in America, was what worked. "Do the institutions and customs inherited from the past retain in the present any value to justify their existence?" Qian Xuantong was also one of New Youth's editors, and he went looking for writers. One of the men he asked was a writer in his late thirties called Lu Xun. Lu Xun was in no mood to help. He had been deadening his senses, he said later, by copying ancient inscriptions. He was working at the time as an official in the ministry of education in Beijing. He had once studied medicine in Japan, and had given it up because he decided China's sickness was not of the body. Asked for an article, Lu Xun answered with a picture. "Imagine an iron house having not a single window and virtually indestructible, with all its inmates sound asleep and about to die of suffocation." If you shout and wake a few of them, he asked, is that a kindness, when they will only die more painfully? Qian answered that if a few woke up, you could not say there was no hope of breaking the house open. So Lu Xun wrote. In May 1918 New Youth printed his story A Madman's Diary, in the spoken language. Its narrator reads through the old histories, and between the lines about benevolence and righteousness he finds only two words, written over and over: eat people. The old school fought back. Its scholars rose in bitter opposition, among them Lin Shu, the novelist and translator. Lin Shu had put well over a hundred Western novels into elegant classical Chinese without reading a word of any foreign language; friends told him the stories aloud and he wrote them down. Now he defended the old language against the young men with everything he had. The fight reached into the schools. A senior student at a well known college wrote a letter to his principal in the spoken language, and the principal wrote back warning the young man to show his superior due respect by using the proper classical style. The student demanded to know how the spoken language was a mark of discourtesy, and got a final disciplinary rebuke for it. Some months later, after the whole student body turned against him on other grounds, the principal resigned. To the old scholars, the whole thing was unfeeling smashing of idols. To the reformers, it was a way out of a soft cushioned past. As the Chinese writer put it, the gods of yore had been found to be "mere idols of clay"; the people must help themselves. But the young were winning. Any simplification of the language lightened their burden, so they took up the cause with enthusiasm. Magazines began printing their articles from left to right in horizontal lines, like a foreign book, with Western punctuation marks, something the devotees of the old school had practically never seen. Soon the editors of many leading newspapers in Beijing and Shanghai were writing their editorials in the spoken language, and even the influential Liang Qichao began writing his Sunday lay sermons in it. Within a few years, more than two hundred and sixty different periodicals were being published in the spoken language. And the mood behind it was not hard to read. Nine years of a republic held up by militarists had been a sorry failure, and people longed for something that would actually build. It was not all elegant. A clear, concise style in the spoken language turned out to be hard to write, and the movement produced a good deal of stilted and awkward prose. Left wing critics later complained that the new writing, full of coined words and Western grammar, was as hard for ordinary people as the classical language had been. But the stakes were political. In China, literacy and power had gone together for as long as there had been a state. If ordinary people could learn to read in simple schools, instead of spending years on the sacred texts, then peasants could become citizens. Hu Shi himself remained a moderate. Progress, he said, would come bit by bit and drop by drop, one reform at a time. Chen Duxiu was not so patient. Keep both of those men in mind, because the gap between them is going to grow.

Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong. Chen Zhengqing (1917–1966), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now our second man. Mao Zedong was born in December 1893 in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan province in the south of China. His father was a peasant who had prospered by farming and dealing in grain. He was a student at a provincial teachers' college, from which he would graduate in 1919. He read New Youth. In fact, in April 1917 it had printed an essay of his on physical culture. And Mao and his friends at the school talked about its editor with something like awe. In 1917 they agreed that Chen Duxiu meant as much to China as Tolstoy did to Russia: a man who had "sought after truth and abided in the truth, not caring what others might say." That autumn, the war between north and south that you heard begin last time was being fought in Hunan, Mao's home province. In November 1917, with fighting in southern Hunan, a band of soldiers came up to the gates of Mao's school. Mao ordered the school's police, the only people with real rifles, to open fire. The students set off firecrackers inside empty cans and shouted at the soldiers to hand over their weapons, and there would be no trouble. The soldiers took fright and surrendered. The school's journal recorded it drily: "The students have organized a garrison force for day and night patrols. Guard duty is extraordinary." Mao was fascinated by war at the time. Not just China but the whole world was fighting, and he followed the European front in the Beijing, Shanghai and Hunan newspapers, spending about a third of the money his father sent him on books and papers. He had a strange habit. After reading a newspaper from cover to cover, he cut off its white margins, sewed them together with thread, and wrote on them the names of the places in the news. He built up a wide correspondence with students and friends in other towns and cities. "Gradually I began to realize the necessity for a more closely knit organization", he remembered. The founding meeting took place on a Sunday morning, the fourteenth of April 1918, in the home of his friend Cai Hesen, in a village on the left bank of the Xiang River. Cai Hesen had been Mao's closest friend at school. He would become one of the leading Communists of his generation, and the party's enemies would kill him in 1931. Thirteen men assembled in a small, poorly furnished shack, hidden in the shade of dense trees. "The weather was bright and clear," Mao recalled. The breeze moved on the river and the grass along its banks, and the day, he said, left an indelible impression on everyone there. One of the thirteen was older than the rest: He Shuheng, forty two, a primary school teacher. He was short and broad shouldered, serious and modest, with big round glasses and black whiskers that made him look like a gentleman of the old school, and the others jokingly called him Bewhiskered He. He had passed the first level of the old imperial examinations at eighteen. Three years later he would be there with Mao at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. He thought Mao an extraordinary man, and despite the difference in their ages he never disputed Mao's lead. In 1920 he would become Mao's closest helper in setting up a Communist circle in Hunan. The first level of the exams made a man a xiucai, a licensed scholar: the bottom rung of the ladder that, for centuries, led to office. The meeting went through the society's rules, which Mao had helped to draft. Its aims were to reform learning, to temper its members' characters, and to improve the human heart and customs. And every member had to keep five rules: do not be hypocritical, do not be lazy, do not be wasteful, do not gamble, and do not consort with prostitutes. Joining took the recommendation of five members and a fee of one silver dollar. The name was borrowed from a journal Liang Qichao had once published in Yokohama, and in English it comes out as the Renovation of the People Study Society. Mao's friend Xiao suggested it, and everyone happily agreed. Then they chose officers. Xiao was named general secretary. The post had been offered first to Mao, but he declined it and agreed only to serve as one of Xiao's two deputies. What did they actually believe? Mostly that they had to change themselves first, and then China and the world. Mao later put the feeling well: "we all felt that in our minds the old thought, the old ethics, and the old literature had been totally swept away." That is New Youth, arriving in Changsha. What they did not have was a plan. "But how should we bring about these reforms? How should we achieve progress?" one member remembered asking. They had not even got that far. Mao's own description of his mind at the time is honest: "my mind was a curious mixture of ideas of liberalism, democratic reformism, and Utopian Socialism." He was, he added, firmly against militarism and against imperialism. Eventually seventy or eighty people joined, including several young women, among them Cai Hesen's younger sister Cai Chang and her friend Xiang Jingyu. Many of the members later became leading figures in the Communist movement, and most of those died in its struggles. That summer, a plan took hold of the society. A scheme was sending Chinese students to France to work in its factories and study at the same time, and a group of the members decided to go. In August 1918 Mao went north with them to Beijing, to help organise the trip. He never went to France himself. His friends went, and Xiao was the first to leave, in January 1919. Mao stayed.

Duan Qirui
Duan Qirui. Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While the young men of Changsha were writing rules against gambling, the government in Beijing was borrowing money. It was run by Duan Qirui, the general who had served as Yuan Shikai's lieutenant and became premier when Yuan died. And in 1917 Japan settled on a policy: it would steer Duan's government with money. Between 1917 and 1918 Japan lent Beijing some 145 million yen. Of that, only five million was ever repaid. The loans were named after the Japanese businessman who arranged them, Nishihara Kamezo, who worked for the cabinet in Tokyo outside the usual diplomatic channels. In return, Japan got the right to keep troops in northern Manchuria and Mongolia, a military agreement aimed against Bolshevik Russia, and Japanese officers to train the Chinese army and navy. And Beijing secretly promised something more: that it would not even protest against Japan's presence in Shandong. The money helped Duan tighten his grip on the parliament and the government, and build up his armies against the southern generals and Sun Yat-sen. Loans like these never came alone. In China, foreign money for mines and railways, and foreign troops to guard those mines and railways, arrived as a single package. And every yen Beijing owed Tokyo would weaken China's hand when the war ended and the peace was made. Paul Samuel Reinsch, the American minister in Beijing, who spent these years warning Washington about where Japan's schemes in China would lead, heard it put plainly by a well placed Chinese: "Japan is giving them money to build up an army." He had been a professor of politics in Wisconsin before President Wilson sent him to China in 1913, and he took the side of Chinese independence. How to make Japan stop sending money and arms to the northern militarists was, he found, one of the most burning questions for private Chinese and for the press alike. With that army, the man warned, Duan's people would overawe the president, the peace talks with the south would stop, and the war with the south would go on.

Zhang Zongxiang
Zhang Zongxiang. Unknown; scanned by Internet Archive ( https://archive.org/ ), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

To see why that promise about Shandong mattered, you need to know what was in Shandong. In 1898 Germany had seized Jiaozhou Bay and the port of Qingdao, on the Shandong coast, and built a railway from there into the heart of the province. In November 1914, Japan took them from Germany. Shandong was a province of thirty eight million people, and the German railway ran some two hundred and fifty miles from Qingdao into the interior, to Jinan. After 1914, Japanese troops stood along that railway and Japanese civil offices ran parts of the province, and Chinese opinion, especially in Shandong, grew alarmed that the occupation would become permanent. On the twenty fourth of September 1918, in Tokyo, Japan's foreign minister sent a note to China's minister there, Zhang Zongxiang. Japan proposed to pull its troops along the railway back to Qingdao, except for a contingent at Jinan; to let China form a police force for the line, with Japanese employed at its headquarters, its main stations and its training school; and to turn the railway into a joint Chinese and Japanese enterprise. The same day, Zhang Zongxiang answered: "the Chinese Government are pleased to agree to the above-mentioned Articles proposed by the Japanese Government." In another exchange that same day, China's minister agreed to Japanese loans for building railways in Manchuria and Mongolia. In one of the loan agreements Zhang signed that autumn, with a Japanese bank, one clause tells you everything about who held the stronger hand: in case of doubt in interpretation, the Japanese text would prevail. In plain words, China's government had told Japan it gladly agreed to Japanese troops in Qingdao and Jinan and along Shandong's railways. Beijing's own account was different. It said the public had been so alarmed by the Japanese troops that the government needed some way to calm people down until the war ended and a peace conference could settle everything. So it had made a preliminary agreement with Japan: a Japanese loan for two railways joining the Shandong line to two of China's main lines, and in return the Japanese troops would pull back and the civil offices would close. An advance of twenty million yen had already been paid. China's own foreign ministry had not been consulted when the minister in Tokyo signed, and the government never ratified the agreement. Most Chinese regarded it as a mere draft, and demanded that it be cancelled and the money the politicians had received be sent back. The man behind it, in the American minister's eyes, was the minister of communications, Cao Rulin, whom he called Japanese controlled. Around Cao stood two others: Lu Zongyu, the minister of finance, and Zhang Zongxiang, the minister to Tokyo. The public would soon have a name for the three of them: the traitors. Remember Zhang Zongxiang, the man who signed in Tokyo. He will meet the students in person. Whatever Beijing said it had meant, the notes existed. And when the peace conference met, they were among the documents Japan made public.

Now back to Mao, who had come north with his friends. Beijing in 1918 was deafening. Rickshaw pullers with empty rickshaws hustled for fares, shouting above the roar, and camel caravans came in off the Mongolian steppe and pushed their way through the traffic. Mao shared a tiny room with seven other young men from Hunan, so tightly packed on the brick bed that, as he told it later, he had to warn the men on either side of him whenever he wanted to turn over. He loved the city anyway. He could not afford the entrance fee to the Summer Palace, which was so high that even many rich Beijing residents never went. But what he could see was enough. In the parks and the old palace grounds he saw the early northern spring. "I saw the white plum blossoms flower while the ice still held solid", he remembered. From his lodgings it was a fifteen minute walk to the new main building of Beijing University, four and a half stories tall, its upper floors clad in dark red brick. The students called it the Red Chamber, after the great eighteenth century novel. It drew Mao like a magnet. He admired Cai Yuanpei, the head of the university. He admired its professors, Hu Shi among them. And he idolised Chen Duxiu. In October 1918, his old teacher from Changsha, Professor Yang Changji, found him a job there. Yang gave him a letter of recommendation to the head of the university library. Yang Changji had taught Mao ethics at the teachers' college, and Mao would later marry his daughter. The librarian was Li Dazhao, and he matters to this story. Li came, like Mao, from a prosperous peasant family, and he was only a little more than four years older. He was born in a village not far from Beijing in October 1889, studied the Confucian classics in a village school, then studied law and politics in Tianjin, and went on to Waseda University in Tokyo. He came home in May 1916, threw himself into the New Culture, and in January 1918 took up his posts as professor of economics and head of the university library. At Chen Duxiu's suggestion he joined New Youth's editorial board. He was tall and smiling, with round metal rimmed glasses and a long moustache, and liked on occasion to wear a Western suit with a high starched collar. People noticed him. Li offered Mao a post as assistant to the librarian, at eight dollars a month. It was not much money. But for the first time in his life Mao had his own desk, and later he would tell his relatives, with pride in his voice, that he had worked on the staff of the university. Li's interest was rare. Fragments of Marx had reached China years before: a brief excerpt from the Communist Manifesto in 1903, quoted in a Japanese book, and a full translation of a preface by Engels, put out by Chinese anarchists in 1908. Hardly anyone could tell Marx's socialism from all the other kinds. Mao himself admitted as much, many years later. "I myself did not know that there had been such a person as Marx either." He was working for the right man. Li Dazhao was the first person in China to take a serious interest in Marxism, and in 1918 he began to speak up for the Russian revolution on a wide scale. In July 1918, in an article comparing the French and Russian revolutions, he wrote: "We must proudly welcome the Russian revolution as the light of a new civilization." Soon after Mao joined the library staff, Li walked him through the basics himself. Capitalists were a tiny minority of mankind and workers the overwhelming majority, he said, and "Anyone who does not work, but who consumes that which others produce is a thief." Li thought the Russian Revolution would be to the twentieth century what the French Revolution had been to the nineteenth. And around his library and his magazines gathered the young men who would found the Chinese Communist Party. Even Li found Marx hard going. He liked to quote a German scholar who claimed that nobody could understand Marxism before the age of fifty. What drew Li and the young men around him was Marxism's promise of a guide to action, not its philosophy. At the end of December 1918, he and Chen Duxiu started a second magazine, the Weekly Review, which went after politics even more sharply than New Youth. But this was Li's faith, not yet Mao's. The assistant librarian respected Director Li. What he believed in was Professor Chen. Chen treated Mao, who was not even officially a student, as an equal. "We regard Mr. Chen as a bright star in the world of thought," Mao wrote a few months later. And since Chen was not yet a Marxist, neither was Mao. Of all the radical currents, he was most taken with anarchism, which was enormously popular at the university in these years, and whose most influential voice was Kropotkin, with his idea of mutual aid. The job itself was another matter. During the five months he worked at the university, Mao felt constantly humiliated. In Changsha he had been the best student and the acknowledged leader; here he was a poorly educated provincial. "One of my tasks was to register the names of people who came to read newspapers," he recalled, "but to most of them I didn't exist as a human being." He tried to start conversations about politics and culture. "They had no time to listen to an assistant librarian speaking southern dialect." The leaders of the student union looked straight through him. So did Hu Shi, who was only two years older. And one young activist who had already made his name among the students, Zhang Guotao, brushed him off so completely that years later Zhang could not even remember meeting him. Mao remembered it very well. That name will come back to us, in a very different place. Still, without anyone much noticing, the assistant librarian had placed himself among the very men who, in 1921, would found the Chinese Communist Party. In March 1919 news came that his mother was seriously ill. He left Beijing on the twelfth of March, but went first to Shanghai to see his friends off to France, and spent twenty days there. He told his uncles he had been held up in Shanghai on business. The business was waiting to say goodbye to his friends as they sailed. Back in Beijing he had been nobody; escorting the members of his own society to their ship, he was the leader again. He reached Changsha only on the sixth of April. He took a job teaching history at a primary school, six hours a week, for about four silver dollars a month. Which means that when the news from Paris came, Mao Zedong was a long way from Beijing.

To understand why that news hit so hard, go back to the end of the war. When the armistice was signed in Europe in November 1918, China was on the winning side. Some twenty thousand students, six or seven hundred of them young women, marched through the main streets of Beijing and cheered outside the Allied legations. Then a monument came down. Beijing had a memorial put up as China's apology for the murder of the German minister in 1900. As soon as the armistice was signed, Allied soldiers battered it in the early hours of the morning, and the Chinese government took it away. It was rebuilt in Central Park, the old grounds of the emperors, as a victory memorial. On one side, in Chinese, it now read: Right overcomes might. That was the hope, and it had a name: Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson, whom some of you have already met in an earlier season. Early in 1918 the American president had set out his Fourteen Points for the peace. The fifth called for an impartial settlement of colonial claims, in which the interests of the people concerned would weigh as much as the claims of the government seeking title. Chinese readers had no difficulty seeing their own unequal treaties in that. And Wilson spoke of justice to all peoples, "whether they be strong or weak." The American minister thought that nowhere else in the world had hopes of America's leadership at Paris been raised so high as in China. Wilson's words, he wrote, had reached the remotest parts of the country. Most Chinese expected Shandong to come back to them. They believed it had been earned, not least by the Chinese workers who had been sent to the Western Front to help the British and the French. And in law it looked simple. China had entered the war against Germany, and when it declared war it had cancelled every treaty with Germany, including the lease of 1898. So, Beijing argued, Germany had no rights left in Shandong to hand to anyone. In January 1919 a conference of twenty eight victorious powers met in Paris to draw up the peace with Germany. China's delegation reached Paris in the middle of January: fifty two men, headed by the foreign minister, Lu Zhengxiang. Its misfortunes started early. When the delegates passed through Japan in December, a box of important documents went missing, lost or stolen. And in Paris they learned that, like Belgium, Serbia or Brazil, China would have only two spokesmen at the full meetings of the conference, while the great powers had five. France proposed three seats for China. The conference turned it down. Among the delegates was Gu Weijun, China's minister in Washington, a splendid fighter and debater. He was about thirty, with a doctorate from Columbia University in New York. Towards the end of January came the first clash. Gu made a speech for the direct return of Qingdao to China, and the Allied delegates congratulated him on it. Baron Makino, for Japan, replied that the matter had already been settled by formal agreements between Tokyo and Beijing. He meant the agreements of 1915 and of 1918. President Wilson asked that the conference be given all the documents. Gu agreed at once. Makino preferred to consult his government by telegraph. And then Japan leaned on Beijing directly. On Chinese New Year's Day, the Japanese minister in Beijing, Obata, insisted on seeing Chen Lu, the vice minister in charge of the foreign ministry, though he had at first been refused because of the holiday. He said Tokyo had sent him three telegrams complaining that China's delegates were opposing Japan too strongly, and had told foreign reporters they would publish the secret agreements. He demanded two things: that the agreements not be published without Japan's consent, and that the government tell its delegates to change their attitude. If not, Japan would take whatever steps it saw fit. Word got around of what he said next. "Great Britain," he said, "is preoccupied with internal disorders. She cannot assist China. But Japan is fully able to assist," with a navy of half a million tons and an army of more than a million men. It was meant to frighten China into silence. It did the opposite. Telegrams poured in from men of every party, urging the president and the government to back their delegates by every possible means. The acting foreign minister tried to play it down. Called before parliament in secret session, he said the reports were somewhat exaggerated, and added that with militarism destroyed by the Allies, China could treat every menace of foreign aggression as a thing of the past, "and accept it with a smile." The government at first cabled its delegates not to publish the secret treaties, then left it entirely to their judgement. The quarrel moved to Paris too. China's delegates said they were willing to publish every secret agreement Japan had woven around China. Japan objected that its treaties with China could not be published without the consent of both sides. And if China was so keen to purge itself of secret diplomacy, the Japanese answered, let it publish first the agreement of September 1918, the one that had handed Germany's privileges in Shandong to Japan. Japan had another card. It claimed that when the head of China's delegation passed through Tokyo on his way to Paris, he had promised the Japanese foreign minister to keep in step with Japan at the conference. The Chinese denied it. A Chinese expert who had been present said nothing in the reply could be read as limiting the minister's freedom, and that there had been no record of the conversation at all. When a Japanese secretary later asked Gu why he had not talked his speech over with Baron Makino first, Gu answered that they had been told by telephone only an hour before the meeting that Shandong was coming up. "We were taken completely by surprise." China also set out its case in writing. That memorandum is the Beijing government's own voice, and it spoke of Shandong as more than a province. Shandong, it said, was the birthplace of China's two greatest sages, "Confucius and Mencius, and the cradle of Chinese civilization. It is, in fact, the Holy Land for the Chinese people." Every year, it said, thousands of scholars made the pilgrimage to Qufu, in the heart of the province, to honour the memory of the sages. And it asked the conference for the direct return to China of Jiaozhou, the railway, and every other German right in Shandong, promising that the people of China would feel deeply indebted to the powers, especially to Japan. But China was playing a weaker hand than it knew. Japan had come out of the war rich. It had sold munitions to the Allies and taken over Asian markets Europe could no longer supply, and its shipbuilding had risen from 85,000 tons in 1914 to 650,000 tons in 1919. And Japan had paper. In 1917 Britain, France and Italy had signed secret treaties with Japan, promising to support its claims to Shandong. Japan made them public as the conference opened. They came as a shock to the Chinese, and they put pressure on the Americans not to upset what had already been agreed. Then there were the notes of September 1918. However Beijing explained them, Japan could now point out that China had gladly agreed.

Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson. Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The decision came down to Wilson. He was sympathetic to China, but he faced sceptical allies, and a Japan still feeling its way into the club of great powers. Japan had already asked the conference to endorse the principle of racial equality, and had been rebuffed, because Australia and the United States feared it would encourage immigration from Asia. Shandong might be a way to soothe Japanese pride. And Wilson desperately wanted Japan in his League of Nations. The Italian delegation had already walked out of the conference. Wilson's adviser Colonel House became convinced Japan would follow, and the two men came to believe the League itself was in danger. Baron Makino played it well. He stood on Japan's injured pride over racial equality, and then clinched the Shandong argument by threatening to walk out. The American minister in Beijing thought it was a bluff. Japan, he wrote, set enormous store on its seat among the great powers at Paris and would never have thrown it away. But Wilson brushed aside the unanimous opinion of his own experts. He believed that once the League existed, every difficulty of detail could be resolved, and he had not studied Shandong closely enough to see that it was not a detail. At the end of April, the leaders of the great powers decided the Shandong question against China. Germany's rights in the province would go to Japan. The decision was taken on the thirtieth of April 1919. The first brief telegram reached Beijing, and then the wires were cut. For four days the capital had no foreign news, and people suspected Japanese agents had cut them to stop a Chinese protest reaching Paris. The American minister got the story by wireless, and could hardly believe it. The decision, he wrote, was "a wrong of far-reaching effect; no general benefits bestowed by a league of nations could outweigh it." He remembered how the news landed. "The first reaction of the Chinese people as a whole to this news was one of dumb dismay. It was a stunning, paralyzing blow." It sickened him, he wrote, to think how the Chinese people would receive a blow that blasted their hopes and destroyed their confidence in the fairness of nations. He feared they would turn against America, not because it was more to blame than the others, but because they had believed in it more. Foreign newspapers in China were already putting the chief responsibility on the United States. To a Chinese newspaper editor in Beijing, it came to the nation as a thunderbolt. The Chinese the minister knew did not blame America to his face. They told him of their terrible dejection, and said only that Wilson must have run into very great difficulties they could know nothing about. They knew the case had been weakened by the treaties Cao Rulin and his friends had made in the autumn of 1918. Their anger turned on Japan, which had used the war and China's weakness, and on the Chinese politicians who had become Japan's tools. At least a thousand telegrams poured in to the Chinese delegates in Paris, insisting that they sign no treaty without reservations on Shandong. Chinese judged the West by its own standards and condemned it. The liberalism Wilson preached had shown the real power of democratic ideas, and also the crippling hypocrisy of Western imperialism. Even Liang Qichao, the great reformer, who had gone to Paris himself to help China's case, now questioned Western values and urged a return to older Confucian ways. And the calendar made it worse. In a few days the whole nation would be mourning the humiliation of Japan's Twenty One Demands, and being reminded of the Japanese ultimatum. That day was already kept in the schools as a day of national humiliation. In Changsha, Mao had barely unpacked, and the political mood in the city was growing tense. In Beijing, the students met. At one meeting, a student threatened to kill himself with a knife in protest. His classmates moved fast. Within days they would be chanting a slogan with two halves: resist the foreign powers, and throw out the traitors at home. Next time: the fourth of May 1919, and the march that gave a whole movement its name.

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