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Revolution and Civil War, episode 4

The Fourth of May

On 4 May 1919 Beijing students march against the Shandong decision and break into the house of Cao Rulin, the official blamed for the deals with Japan, and within a month the protest has spread to merchants and workers across China. The episode follows Chen Duxiu, jailed for eighty-three days, and Mao Zedong, who goes home to Changsha and starts a magazine, through the mass arrests, the Shanghai strike and the delegates' refusal to sign the peace, and gives real time to the question of what May Fourth was and whom it spoke for. Its outside witnesses are the American philosopher John Dewey and his wife Alice, who arrived in China days before the march, with Chinese public voices and scholars alongside.

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Transcript

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

At ten in the morning on Sunday, the fourth of May 1919, more than three thousand students from colleges across Beijing gathered in the square in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the great gate before the Forbidden City. They carried white flags, white being the colour of mourning in China, and maps of Qingdao, and angry placards. Some of their banners had slogans in English and French as well as Chinese, so that foreigners could read them too. By five that afternoon a government minister's house would be on fire. And within forty days, the students would have driven the men they called traitors out of office. This is the episode where the New Culture walks out of the lecture hall and into the street. Last time, the peace conference at Paris handed Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan, and the news landed on China as a stunning, paralysing blow. Part of the reason was China's own government. Its minister in Tokyo, Zhang Zongxiang, had written in September 1918 that China gladly agreed to Japanese troops in Shandong, and Japan put that note on the table at Paris. People knew whom to blame: Zhang, and two other men around him, Cao Rulin and Lu Zongyu. They called them the traitors. And I left the students of Beijing at a meeting, where one of them threatened to kill himself with a knife in protest. They had been angry for weeks. Back in late March, one of China's own delegates at Paris, Wang Zhengting, had sent a telegram to a Shanghai newspaper saying that some Chinese had made concessions "for their own mercenary reasons." He called them "henchmen of traitors to our nation", and asked the whole country to rise against them. The search for those traitors began at once, and suspicion fell on the three leading friends of Japan in Beijing: Cao Rulin, the minister of communications; Zhang Zongxiang, the minister to Tokyo; and Lu Zongyu. Then came the final insult. The conference, which the Chinese had expected to treat their country as an equal, resolved to give back to China some ancient astronomical instruments the Germans had carried off during the Boxer rising. The students were furious. "Japan will possess Qingdao and Jiaozhou while we Chinese will do what, gaze at the stars?" On the evening of Saturday the third of May, student activists met at Beijing University and decided on a great demonstration for the next day. At that meeting a law student gave a fiery speech, slashed his finger with a knife, and wrote in his own blood on a piece of white cloth: "Return Qingdao to us!" He held it high above his head, and the hall erupted in applause. Students writing slogans in their own blood: remember that, because it is part of why people trusted them. They were seen to be acting for nothing but the country. So, the morning of the fourth. The demonstration was well organised. Students from thirteen colleges had agreed on their main demand: China's negotiators at Paris must refuse any treaty that did not give Shandong back. They also resolved to call on the Chinese in Paris to join the protest, to wake up the mass of the people, and to set up a permanent student association in Beijing. They handed out leaflets to the people watching, and their slogan had two halves: "Externally, resist the Powers; internally, throw out the traitors." A man from the ministry of education, the commander of the Beijing garrison and the chief of police all came and urged them to disperse. They did not. Where they went first tells you what they still believed. They marched towards the Legation Quarter, the walled district where the foreign ministers lived, to hand a petition to the American minister in the name of eleven thousand five hundred Beijing students. Their faith rested on Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points, with their promise of a free, open minded and impartial settlement of colonial claims. The quarter had been heavily guarded ever since the Boxer rising, and its guards would not let the crowd in. Only a handful of representatives got through, and they found the American, British, French and Italian ministers all out. They left letters. The American minister, Paul Samuel Reinsch, was out of town that day, on a trip to a temple in the hills. He had warned Washington again and again what a decision like this would do to China, and he wrote later that the students' first impulse had been to come and ask him whether the news from Paris was true. He had, he said, escaped a severe ordeal. He was a former professor of politics from Wisconsin, whom President Wilson had sent to Beijing in 1913. Hours passed. The crowd stood in the street, and relations with the police grew worse. And then the march turned.

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

The American minister heard how it happened. When the students were told he was absent, there was at first a hum of voices, and then came the cry: "To the house of the traitor!" The traitor was Cao Rulin, and his house was close by. Cao was in his early forties, a former official of the old dynasty and an aide to Yuan Shikai. He had conducted most of the bargaining with Japan over the Twenty One Demands, he had worked on the Japanese loans, and he was said to be Japan's agent. To the American minister he was "the smooth little plotter", the man most people saw as the guiding spirit of the whole humiliating business. The crowd reached the house and demanded that Cao come out and explain why he had sold his country to Japan. The guards refused, and would not admit any delegates either. A small riot broke out. Five students got into the house, taking Cao's bodyguard by surprise, and the rest poured in after them. One of the marshals of the march, a Beijing University student named Fu Sinian, a pupil of Hu Shi's, tried to stop the attack on the house. His own brother was one of the students who led it. They smashed the furniture, and broke up chairs and tables to use the pieces as weapons. What they could not smash, they threw into a pond in the courtyard. They did not catch Cao. He got out through a window and away down a narrow alley. But Zhang Zongxiang, the minister to Japan, happened to be in the house. The students caught him and beat him until he lost consciousness. Lu Zongyu, the third of the three, was nowhere to be found. Then the house caught fire. Here the sources disagree. On one side, it was an accident of the moment: a crowd kept waiting for hours outside the Legation Quarter, a cry from somewhere in it, and a riot in which some outbuildings caught fire in the melee. On the other side, it was planned: smaller groups of students, perhaps the anarchists among them, had meant from the start to turn the march into a direct attack on the officials who served Japan, and it was the students who set the house on fire. Which it was has never come fully clear. What is clear is what some of the students felt. One of the anarchists who broke into the house, Kuang Husheng, remembered schoolmates "completely resolved to adopt a passionate commitment to resisting authority," and ready to sacrifice themselves. "And I felt only the joy of self-sacrifice in going forward together." To its critics, what had begun nobly with patriotic speeches ended as pure hooliganism. The students scattered at about five in the afternoon, leaving Cao's house burning behind them. By evening thirty two students were under arrest, hauled off to police headquarters. Another was taken to hospital and died three days later. Martial law was declared around the Legation Quarter. The police, on the whole, had held back. It may be that their chiefs had no love for Cao, and it is even more likely that the ordinary policemen agreed with the students, as nearly everyone in Beijing did. The march had begun with just three thousand people. But they were the country's future educated elite, and their arrest turned the fourth of May into a spark. The arrested students drew support from every kind of Beijing citizen. A student union was formed in the city, with women among its members. When the government tried to stop the news getting out, the students beat it with couriers and the foreign telegraph services. News reached Shanghai on the sixth of May. On the seventh a citizens' assembly met there and marched, and on the eighth Shanghai had its own student union. And that same week fell the fourth anniversary of Japan's ultimatum of 1915. Schools across the country kept the anniversary of the Twenty One Demands as the Day of Humiliation. In Beijing the government tried to punish the arrested students on the spot, and the colleges answered with a strike of classes, backed by their own principals. Two days later the students were released. But at the same time, the president issued special decrees praising the three traitors, and the head of Beijing University and the minister of education were pressed to resign. The head of the university was Cai Yuanpei, the liberal who had brought New Youth's editors to Beijing. He resigned and left the city. When the thirty two went on trial, on the tenth of May, they refused to plead, and demanded that Cao Rulin and the other traitors be put on trial instead. Most of the public agreed with them. On the nineteenth of May the students went on strike across the country. Those weeks were full of meetings, demonstrations, petitions and speeches in the street. The students raised money, publicised the cases of the arrested, and began organising the high schools. Their own principals and university presidents backed them, and so did chambers of commerce, lawyers' associations and other professional bodies across the country. The Beijing government, like most warlord governments, did not want to go out of its way to persecute students the public loved. But neither could it give in and put its own officials on trial for treason. And Japan was pressing it hard, with formal protests demanding that the anti-Japanese agitation be suppressed. The president who issued those decrees was Xu Shichang, an old scholar official and an old friend of Yuan Shikai, put in office the year before by a parliament that Duan Qirui's faction controlled. Xu Shichang, whom some of you have already met in an earlier season. Duan Qirui stood by his subordinates. And the militarists as a whole, feeling that the student movement did them no good, prevailed on the government to try to put it down.

Through the second half of May, merchants and students across north China declared a boycott of Japanese goods and demanded the dismissal of the three traitors. Their weapon was the strike, passive resistance, stopping the wheels of commerce and industry until the government listened. Teachers, students, shopkeepers, drivers and dockhands would all stop work. Little groups of organisers sprang up all over China. The American minister compared them to the committees of correspondence of the American Revolution. Servants formed an association of their own. Chinese financiers put Japanese bankers under a ban, and in the end the boycott even blacklisted foreign goods that arrived in Chinese ports on Japanese ships. At one protest meeting in Beijing, a committee of twelve was chosen to go and see the officials, and four of the twelve were women. And in Beijing, the students sent out speakers. Fifty groups of them went into the streets to talk to anyone who would listen. After a month of dithering, the government moved in early June to stamp out the street speeches. Many students, and bystanders too, were beaten and arrested. By the fourth of June the makeshift jails held more than a thousand prisoners. The students arrested in those days had learned. They set out on their speaking trips with knapsacks already packed with food. Two Americans watched it happen. John Dewey, the most famous philosopher in America and Hu Shi's old teacher at Columbia, had arrived in China with his wife Alice only days before the march, to give lectures. They were writing long letters home to their children. The philosopher had a dry eye for Chinese politics. What held the country together at all, he thought, was that the generals and governors who all wanted more for themselves were afraid the whole thing would come down round their ears if any of them made a definite move. "Status quo is China's middle name, mostly status and a little quo." On the last day of May, the philosopher and his wife drove out towards the Western Hills with an official from the ministry of education, and on the way they passed students speaking to groups of people in the street. They asked the official whether the students would be arrested. "No," he said, "not if they keep within the law and do not make any trouble among the people." The next morning's paper was full of nothing else. There were about ten thousand students on strike in Beijing alone, they heard. The worst of it, they wrote, was that "the University has been turned into a prison with military tents all around it and a notice on the outside that this is a prison for students who disturb the peace by making speeches." Two hundred students were locked in the law building. Two more, who had asked some embarrassing questions of the officers who arrested them, were taken to the police rooms and flogged on the back. The couple saw students making speeches that morning, and heard later that they had been arrested. They had gone out with toothbrushes and towels in their pockets. They had come prepared, and they made a show of it. Many marched to the detention rooms in the law school with their bedding strapped to their backs, in the best of spirits. When foreigners wanted photographs, the students obliged. One of them told a policeman who tried to interfere, "Wait a minute! Can't you see that I've come fully prepared to be imprisoned." And before he went, he insisted on giving the kind foreigner a souvenir. The police hated the job. When students began to lecture on a street corner, policemen with no officers watching would ask them to move along: "We are with you, sure, but we want no trouble; please go further down." And at the next corner, the same again. The Beijing students answered by putting five thousand more speakers onto the streets. By the fifth of June the students had filled the law building, and the police had started on the science building. The faculty had to hold their meeting in the mission buildings instead. A friend of the Americans got a pass to go in. Students locked up at ten in the morning had still had no food by four in the afternoon, so the friend got the university to pay for a cartload of bread to be sent in. The police, the couple wrote, were astonished. "They really thought the arrests would frighten the others from going on. So everybody is getting an education." Then the girls came out. On the first of June, the philosopher and his wife watched a few hundred girls march out of an American mission school to go and see the president and ask him to free the imprisoned boys. Many of their mothers came to see them off. If the president would not see them, the girls meant to stand outside his palace all night, and to stay there until he did. The American minister heard that seven hundred girls from the Beijing schools assembled and marched to the president's palace. At the women's teachers' college, the principal locked the front door to keep his students in. They broke out through the wooden back gate and reached the meeting place on time. When soldiers arrested the boys and left the girls alone, the girls rounded on them. "Our country is in danger; yet you arrest those who are rousing the nation to protect itself. Have you no patriotism?" Late on the evening of the second of June, the American minister was at the legation answering telegrams when an American teacher came in with five Chinese schoolgirls, in a state of great excitement. They had stood with a crowd outside the president's palace for forty eight hours. Now two of their student leaders had been taken inside, and the girls were afraid they would be executed. They begged him to intervene. He telephoned the palace, and was told that the two were being held for being too forward in their demonstrations, but that nothing untoward would happen to them. The girls went home happy. The philosopher and his wife wrote that they were watching the birth of a nation, "and birth always comes hard." The government had made a mistake, the American minister thought. Just as student feeling seemed to be ebbing, it had issued a decree whitewashing Cao Rulin and his friends, and that fanned the flame again. Now it offered to release the students if they would go back to class and make no more trouble. The students refused. They would not leave their prisons on condition of keeping quiet, and they would not leave at all until the government had apologised for arresting them. Their classmates in all the schools, thirty thousand of them, offered to be locked up too. The government backed down. A pacification delegate came to the self imprisoned students to say that the government had made a mistake and apologised. The students marched triumphantly out, and the next day their street meetings were bigger than ever. The day before, they had hooted at four unofficial go betweens who had asked them nicely to come out of jail, but had not apologised. The couple could hardly believe the pace of it. They had been in China less than six weeks, they wrote, and they had certainly been seeing life. For a country thought of at home as stagnant and unchanging, "there is certainly something doing. This is the world's greatest kaleidoscope."

Where was Chen Duxiu in all this? Not in the classroom. Not every professor backed the students. Hu Shi thought they would do China more good in the long run if they went back to their classes. Chen Duxiu was on their side, and out of these weeks he emerged as a political leader in his own right. In the Weekly Review, the magazine he ran with Li Dazhao, Chen wrote that modern civilisation had two birthplaces, the research laboratory and the prison, and that the young should resolve to go from the one to the other and back again. He was about to take his own advice. Chen wrote a leaflet, the Declaration of the Citizens of Beijing, sharply attacking the president and the prime minister for their policy on Shandong. It demanded the dismissal of the pro-Japanese officials and freedom of speech and assembly, and warned that if the government would not listen, the citizens would take direct action. On the evening of the eleventh of June he took a bundle of the leaflets to the New World, an amusement centre in Beijing, and began scattering them down onto the crowd below. He was taken into custody on the spot. Chen Duxiu spent eighty three days in prison. When he came out, he left Beijing and settled in Shanghai. His arrest shook Mao Zedong, who idolised him. In July, in the first issue of a magazine of his own, Mao wrote about it. Mao reprinted Chen's leaflet in full, as a mark of solidarity with his teacher. And then he turned on the whole country. China's danger, he wrote, did not come from military weakness or empty coffers. "The real danger lies in the total emptiness and rottenness of the mental universe of the entire Chinese people." "Of China's 400 million people, about 390 million are superstitious", he went on, believing in spirits and fortune telling, in fate and in despotism. In name China was a republic; in reality it was an autocracy that got worse with every change of regime. Chen, he wrote, had always stood for two things, science and democracy. "For these two things, Mr. Chen has offended society, and society has repaid him with arrest and imprisonment." Science and democracy were what the students now called Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy, the two gentlemen who would revive a country suffering from warlords within and imperialism from outside.

Meanwhile the centre of the movement had moved south, to Shanghai. Shanghai's educated elite had been among the leaders of the protest from the start, the president of Fudan University among them. On the twenty sixth of May, up to twenty thousand students there went on strike. They swore an oath to save China from danger and destruction. They paraded, handed out leaflets, pasted up posters and put on patriotic plays in the street. And they policed themselves strictly. Nobody was to use the closed schools as an excuse for mischief, or even to go to the cinema. Shanghai's citizens were impressed. When the news of the mass arrests in Beijing reached Shanghai, the students called a triple strike for the fifth of June: a strike of classes, of work and of markets. The city virtually shut down. It took organisation to keep it shut. Students pressed shopkeepers to stay closed, and Boy Scouts patrolled the streets to keep order and to stop attacks on Japanese residents. The shopkeepers threatened to pay no taxes until the traitors were gone. The great General Chamber of Commerce had opposed the students all through May. But the smaller merchants of the Shanghai Commercial Federation simply shut their shops and rebuked the Chamber, and the Chamber gave way. The old associations of people from the same home province mattered too. Since February, some of them had been petitioning Beijing to stand up to Japan at Paris, and now a merchant caught trading with the Japanese could be expelled, which could ruin him. Then the workers came in. Some sixty thousand Shanghai workers went on strike in June. Dockhands refused to load or unload Japanese ships, and the Japanese owned cotton mills were struck. The strikes spread into a near total shutdown that lasted five days. Craft guilds struck, and so did the gangs of unskilled labourers. The gangs even ordered the beggars and pickpockets under their control to stop work. And the city's prostitutes sang patriotic songs instead of their usual come ons. Even the horse boys at the Shanghai Race Club went on strike. Depositors started a run on the Bank of Communications, because Cao Rulin was connected with it. At one Shanghai factory, student delegates went among the workers to persuade them not to strike, for fear of trouble with foreigners. The workers asked them, "Do you think we have no feeling for our country, nor indignation against the traitors?" The Japanese tried to brand the whole thing as anti-foreign, and to stir up memories of the Boxers, and some influential British in Shanghai, alarmed at the strikes in the factories, began saying the same. There was talk that the foreign council that ran the Settlement might crack down. The American minister told the Americans in Shanghai neither to encourage nor to oppose the movement. It was the Chinese people's own affair, and in no sense anti-foreign. From early on, he thought, the movement showed its real character. It turned on the Japanese not out of blind hostility but because they stood in the way of China's national renewal. Shanghai's students sent their own delegates out to the big cities of central and southern China, to teach the students there how to win over a city. And the boycott reached the south too. In Guangzhou, the capital of the rival southern government, it was pressed as vigorously as in the north, and North and South stood together in the country's defence. Through it all, the demand never changed: "When the three traitors are dismissed, the strike will be called off; otherwise, still more people will strike."

In Beijing, President Xu Shichang had run out of room. His government first offered to dismiss just one man, the one whose house the students had attacked on the fourth of May: Cao Rulin. It was told that would not be enough. There were rumours, the American couple heard, that the government was backing down not only because of the merchants' strike but because it was no longer sure its soldiers would obey. One rumour had a regiment in the Western Hills ready to march on Beijing on the students' side. Rumours, they added, "are one of China's strong suits." On the tenth of June they wrote that "the students have taken the trick and won the game at the present moment". But they declined, they said, to predict tomorrow, when it came to China. The government finally gave in on the eleventh of June. President Xu Shichang was forced to make Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang and Lu Zongyu resign. Shanghai would not believe it until the British minister and the American minister confirmed that the decree had really been issued. Then, on the twelfth of June, the strike was called off. It was exactly forty days since the march to Cao's house. The students had driven out the three men they called traitors without throwing a single bomb. The American minister wrote that "for the first time in her history China had roused herself and wrung from her government a specific surrender." At a meeting of the diplomatic corps, the French minister turned to him and said: "We are in the presence of the most astounding and important thing that has ever happened--the organization of a national public opinion in China for positive action." The Japanese papers, meanwhile, reported in detail how the American minister himself had organised the student movement, at a cost of two million dollars. Everyone knew how spontaneous the movement was, he wrote, and the story only caused amusement. Even the foreigners in Beijing were on China's side. On the sixth of June the Anglo-American Association of Beijing resolved that the Shandong decision would bring extreme discord between the Chinese people and Japan, and asked the British and American governments to press for a just settlement. Liberal minded people were still pessimistic, though. In early June they feared Duan Qirui's followers would force him back in as prime minister, and then there would be no escape from another revolution.

One question was left, and it was the one the whole thing had started with. Would China sign the treaty? To the Chinese public the answer was obvious. China's signature would mean recognising the transfer of Germany's rights to Japan, and they had learned one lesson the hard way: concessions to foreign powers never got China out of trouble; they only made it worse. If Beijing had refused the Germans in 1898, despite their threats, the Germans would never have got what China gave them. Now the people said, "Never again!" From China, at least a thousand telegrams went to the delegates in Paris, all saying the same thing: no signature without a reservation on Shandong. The officials in Beijing saw it differently. On the twenty eighth of May the American minister was told that nearly all of them agreed the treaty should be signed. The cabinet authorised the delegates to sign at their discretion, if the conference advised it. In the end that cabinet had to be replaced by one more obedient to the popular will. News that the officials were ready to give in brought the national movement to its height. The students had already set out their next goals: stop the signing unless it carried a reservation on Shandong, unite the nation in the boycott, and educate the less educated masses, with free schools and helpful publications. And the girls, a Chinese writer noted, stood beside their brothers in all of it. In one classroom, a teacher of international law who had once had six or eight pupils found that more than twenty signed up after the Shandong decision, though the class earned them no marks at all. In Paris, the head of China's delegation was the foreign minister, Lu Zhengxiang. Lu Zhengxiang, whom some of you have already met in an earlier season. The delegates left no stone unturned to sign with a reservation on Shandong. They asked to append a clause to the treaty, and were refused. They asked for a clause outside the treaty, and the powers still refused. They offered to issue a declaration without even using the word reservation, and were refused again. On the twenty seventh of June, Gu Weijun, China's minister in Washington and one of its delegates, called on the French foreign minister, and was told that China could file its reservation after signing, but not before. "If this is true," the Chinese asked, "why will not the Conference receive our statement before instead of after signature?" The answer: the chairman had ruled that no reservation could be admitted before signature. On the morning of the twenty eighth, China's minister in Paris made one last attempt to have the reservation accepted together with the signatures. The letter was politely returned. And in Paris itself, the Chinese students and workers in France were pressing the delegation hard. At three o'clock that afternoon, the treaty was signed in the palace at Versailles. The Chinese delegates did not come. They sent the chairman a letter saying that their government reserved the right to make a final decision about the treaty with Germany. The treaty was concluded without China. Against Beijing's own instructions, its delegates had refused to sign. It took days for the news to reach Beijing. On the second of July the philosopher and his wife heard a report that the delegates had refused, but it seemed too good to believe, and nobody could confirm it. Afterwards, a gentleman from the president's own circle assured the American minister that the president had instructed the delegates not to sign. There were rumours in Beijing, too, that the military party, having got nearly everything out of Japan that was coming to it and now finding itself on the unpopular side, was about to discover its patriotism. The only reason such men would stay bought, the couple wrote, "is that there are no other bidders in the market." Meanwhile there was no cabinet at all. The president could find no one to form one. The couple heard of one man who gave the Japanese a plain no, and told them to remember that "there was one power greater than the government, namely, the people, and that the delegates had obeyed the people." The Japanese, they wrote, would never be able to make up their minds whether they were being deliberately deceived. A British philosopher who lectured in China the following year put the Chinese view bluntly: "They saw no reason why they should be robbed of a province as a reward for having joined the Allies." The students had won a great victory. But Japan still kept Shandong. A tenuous alliance of students, merchants and workers had been made. On the tenth of September, China's delegates did sign the peace with Austria, whose clauses on China were much the same but said nothing of Shandong. That signature made China a founding member of the League of Nations after all. And the warlords were only entering their worst years. So what had all this been? The disappointment was real, and it ran deep. For decades, leading Chinese had looked to the Western nations as a model, whatever humiliations they inflicted. A Beijing University student summed up what changed: "We at once awoke to the fact that foreign nations were still selfish and militaristic and they were all great liars." The victory of November 1918 had been greeted with enthusiasm in China, because in part it was China's victory. Liang Qichao had argued for joining the war precisely so that China would be treated well afterwards. But for Wilson, China was one difficult question among many, and clearly less important than the fate of the old Austro-Hungarian empire or his League of Nations. And China was not alone. While the conference concentrated on Europe, peoples under imperial rule in Egypt, India, Turkey and Southeast Asia were protesting about their status too. The American couple saw it too. The lesson the Chinese drew, they wrote, was that might controls. And if the United States was not going to see its ideals through, "it shouldn't have professed any". Worse, they thought, even intelligent Chinese were now counting on a war between the United States and Japan, and when they found America would not fight for China, there would be a revulsion. The question of whom the fourth of May spoke for started almost at once, and every side gave its own answer. For the students, it was theirs, and their claim rested on their purity. They took oaths, made rules for themselves and wrote their slogans in blood, and even people who disliked their tactics admired their sincerity. Beside the scheming of generals and politicians, the difference was plain. For a Nationalist writer looking back, it was a movement against Japan, "led by the intellectual and mercantile elements". And the boycotts that followed did succeed because merchants backed them. For the workers, it was the moment they found their power. Deng Zhongxia, a student from Beijing who will turn up in Changsha in a moment, later recalled that "laborers demonstrated their power to bourgeois intellectuals, who could not but be impressed with its magnitude." Some of those students, he said, went out to the people, opened schools for workers, organised trade unions, and in time became Communists. And for the Communists, it was the beginning of everything. Mao Zedong would later say that the "whole of the Chinese revolutionary movement found its origin in the action of young students and intellectuals who had been awakened" by May Fourth. The Nationalists were more ambivalent, though their reformers claimed its spirit of enlightenment. Here is what I think is safe to say. The fourth of May was not the birth of modern China. That story grew up later, and the roots of modern China go back at least to the last years of the empire. Nor was it the first time Chinese had marched or boycotted. Students and merchants had boycotted American goods in 1905, over America's racist immigration laws, and in 1915 Yuan Shikai's own government had briefly used popular protest against the Twenty One Demands. But nothing before had moved such numbers: tens of thousands of students and workers, and thousands of merchants, across all the big cities. And it gave China something new: a politics for more than one class, built on two causes, resisting imperialism and opposing corrupt Chinese governments. That politics would need organisations. Out of it, in time, came parties that were not attached to any general but meant to overthrow the whole system of militarism, the Nationalists in their new form and the Communists. Neither could have emerged without it. It also trained the people who would lead them. From now on, student protest in China would never really stop, and there would always be a great reservoir of public sympathy for it. In Shanghai, as the first burst of enthusiasm died down in June, a core of activist workers from different trades met to plan a permanent workers' organisation, on the model of the labour movements abroad that anarchists, radicals and labourers returning from Europe had told them about. But street politics had its limits. A demonstration could make a government shift its stance on one policy, or carry out a few minor reforms. It could not change the system that kept producing such governments. The demonstration of the fourth of May was over in a few hours. Its aftershocks went on for decades.

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

The strike was over. The boycott was not. It had begun at the call of the Central Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, and it spread right across China. Crowds smashed the windows of shops that sold Japanese goods, seized the goods and burned them in the street. Newspapers refused to print Japanese advertisements, the sailing times of Japanese ships, or even the exchange rate of the yen. Rickshaw pullers refused to carry Japanese passengers. Shipping stopped along the Yangtze as the dockers struck, and posters went up everywhere: "Return Qingdao to us!" "Wipe Away the National Shame!" The American couple saw it in small things. In various places they found straw hats hung up, painted with Chinese characters: passers by had been stopped and their hats taken, because the hats were made in Japan. It was all good natured, they wrote, and nobody objected. In Nanjing the students were forming a patriotic league. Their teachers grumbled that instead of doing the two or three things they could do well, the students were drawing up a grand scheme to cover everything, and would exhaust themselves writing its constitution. Not everyone believed it would last. A tailor's clerk in Shanghai told them the boycott was a good thing, but that people would soon forget. In Shanghai, the papers said the boycott was spreading, though some doubted the people would hold out long enough. Meanwhile, the couple noted, Japanese money was being refused there. The Japanese themselves treated the boycott lightly at first, and said it would last five minutes. A Chinese guild that had dealt mostly in Japanese goods put its case bluntly in a letter to the authorities: nobody would order Japanese goods from it any more, the stock it had could not be sold, and since Japan's own government had caused the anger, Japan should bear the loss. It lasted much longer than that. Students set up inspections of the merchants' stock, which some merchants resented. But most stowed away their Japanese goods or handed them over for public bonfires, and in time the merchants took over the campaign themselves. Japan, by one Chinese reckoning, lost some forty per cent of its trade with China. And Chinese merchants paid too. A Japanese consul general complained that they had been impoverished as well. The girls of St. Mary's Hall, a mission school in Shanghai, put the boycott in their own words. "This 'boycott' comes from the Chinese people and not from the government. We are against the insults, 'demands' and predatory ambitions of Japan towards our country, but not against the Japanese people." It had a positive side as well. People were urged to buy the goods of China's own factories, and they did, which gave Chinese industry a great push. At a teachers' college in Beijing, the philosopher and his wife met a man organising schools for apprentices. China sold four million dollars' worth of cotton to Japan, they learned, and bought the same cotton back as thread for fourteen million. The students there were putting up three new school buildings that summer, which they had designed themselves and were building with their own hands. Travellers had announced the awakening of China a dozen times before, the couple admitted, so they hesitated to announce it again. But this, they thought, was the first time the merchants and guilds had really been stirred to improve the way China made things. Now come back to Changsha, and to Mao. When the news from Beijing arrived, students in Changsha tried to show solidarity. On the seventh of May several thousand people came out into the streets, with the merchants behind them. Troops dispersed them quickly. They belonged to the governor of Hunan, General Zhang Jingyao, a man the city called Zhang the Venomous, who had ruled it by terror for a year. Whether Mao was in that crowd, nobody knows. What he did next fits the man. In early May he began thinking about how to build an organisation that could actually lead the students of Changsha. His own society, with about seventy members and many of them now in France, had proved no use for that. In the middle of May, a student from Beijing arrived in Changsha with a detailed report on everything that had happened there. This was Deng Zhongxia. Mao, Deng and Bewhiskered He, He Shuheng, the older teacher who had been at the founding of Mao's society, decided to set up a students' association for the whole of Hunan. On the twenty fifth of May more than twenty representatives of Changsha's schools crowded into He Shuheng's apartment. Mao introduced Deng, who told them about the fourth of May and asked the students of Hunan to strike in support. His speech made their heads spin. Three days later the Hunan Students Association was founded, with a close friend of Mao's, Peng Huang, as its chairman. On the third of June, students from twenty schools in Changsha went on strike. The local newspaper printed their appeal: "Diplomacy has failed, the country has been broken apart, and unless timely measures are taken to save the state, it will perish." The summer holidays saved the students from a showdown with the governor. But they did not stop. Students going home were formed into propaganda squads to carry the boycott into the villages, with little patriotic plays they wrote themselves for audiences who could not read. Others joined inspection squads with men from the merchants' guilds to enforce the boycott. The students' own goal, as their association put it, was to use all the power students could muster to restore the nation's sovereignty and punish those who had betrayed it. On the seventh of July the students' association and the merchants' guilds together staged a great demonstration to burn Japanese goods. Zhou Shizhao, who marched in it, remembered the scene. At the front went banners: "Countrymen, be vigilant! Do not buy Japanese goods under any circumstances." Every student carried some Japanese goods on his shoulders, and behind them came shop assistants from the silk stores. They stopped in front of the education committee's building. "The students unloaded the Japanese goods, soaked them with kerosene, and set them ablaze." Only when everything had burned to ashes did they go home. Two days later, the students' leaders called a general meeting of public bodies, and it decided to form one association for the whole of Hunan, uniting every part of the population.

For Mao, it was not enough. He had become convinced that the best way to move the masses was propaganda, and the way to do propaganda was a paper. He had no money for a newspaper, so he and his friends started a student journal for all of Hunan, on the model of the Weekly Review that Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao ran in Beijing. He called it the Xiang River Review, after the river that runs past Changsha, and he announced it in a burst of excitement. "The vast and furious tide of the new thought is already rushing, surging along both banks of the Xiang River." The first issue took about ten days to put together, and it came out on the fourteenth of July 1919. Mao wrote the manifesto himself, as editor in chief. "Unfettered by any of the old views or superstitions, we must seek the truth." He wanted the masses united, and the oppressors admonished; and among the oppressors, beside bureaucrats and militarists, he now put capitalists. But he was still cautious. He wanted a bloodless revolution, he wrote, not a revolution of bombs and blood. Even against Japan, the best weapons were strikes by students, merchants and workers, and the boycott. We put into practice, he wrote, the "cry of revolution": "the cry for bread, the cry for freedom, the cry for equality". In that first issue he also published his first short note about the Bolsheviks. He passed no judgement on them. He only urged his readers to study them: "Each of us should examine very carefully what kind of thing this extremist party" really was. What struck him was the speed of it. In the twinkling of an eye, he wrote, the Bolsheviks had spread across Russia, "to everyone's amazement". The paper was his whole life that summer. "Awaking late at night, I would see a light in his room through a crack in the wall," Zhou Shizhao remembered. Mao wrote the articles, edited them, laid out the pages himself, proofread them, and sometimes even sold copies on the street. Two thousand copies of the first issue went quickly, and two thousand more sold in three days. The second issue came out in a run of five thousand. For Hunan these were enormous numbers. Of Changsha's nine daily newspapers, the best selling sold about two thousand four hundred copies. The others sold between one hundred and five hundred. Mao wrote most of the news columns himself as well: a survey of events in the West, a survey of events in the East, international notes, local notes, and new literature and art. In the second, third and fourth issues, Mao published the essay that made his name across China, The Great Union of the Popular Masses. It asked the question that tormented his generation: what can be done when the state, humanity and society have all sunk as low as they can go? His answer was union. The oppressors, aristocrats and capitalists, were united against the people. So the people must unite too: peasants, workers, students, women, teachers, policemen, rickshaw pullers, all the poor and the weak against the rich and the strong. If the masses would only unite, rise up and cry out with one voice, he wrote, "the traitors will get up and tremble and flee for their lives." He even had a message for the soldiers serving the warlords. One day, he wrote, they would realise they were the sons, brothers or husbands of the ordinary people, and they would join hands and turn the other way. And Li Dazhao's influence showed. In Russia, Mao wrote, the masses had overthrown the aristocrats and driven out the rich. "We know it! We are awakened! The world is ours, the state is ours, society is ours." But he did not want vengeance. The oppressors were human beings like themselves, he wrote, and if you used oppression to overthrow oppression, you would still have oppression. It was a gentle revolution, steeped in the anarchist idea of mutual aid. But it saluted the Russian soldiers who had swapped the imperial standard for the red flag. And the men who had looked straight through the assistant librarian in Beijing noticed him now. Hu Shi and Luo Jialun, who nine months before would have nothing to do with him, praised his essay warmly. The young provincial had stepped onto the national stage. It did not last long. The fifth issue had already been set in type when the governor's soldiers seized it at the printer's. The governor, Zhang Jingyao, was behaving like a bandit. He and his three brothers, who held high posts in his military government, robbed peasants, looted the treasury, squeezed the merchants, traded in opium and kept back the teachers' pay. They treated Hunan like a conquered province. In the middle of August, Mao and the other leaders of the students' association decided to bring the province's public bodies together against him. That autumn, Mao's own life caught up with him. His mother died on the fifth of October 1919, at the age of fifty three. He came home to bid her farewell, and at her grave he recited verses he had written himself. "I suffer endless pangs of conscience from failing to express my gratitude." Less than four months later his father died of typhus. By then Mao was away in Beijing, busy with politics, and he did not come back for the funeral. So that is where we leave him: a young man with a banned magazine, a governor he hates, and a head full of union, mutual aid and the first rumours of Bolshevism. The young people of May Fourth had found out what they could do. Now they were looking for something to believe in. Next time: a short war among the generals in the north, Mao's campaign for a self-governing Hunan, and a handful of young men who found the Chinese Communist Party, finishing their first congress on a boat.

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