May 4th Movement (1919)
Sun May 04, 1919
Image: A 1976 painting by Liang Yulong celebrating the May Fourth Movement. From the Landsberger Collection
The May 4th Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist and nationalist movement that began on this day in 1919 when more than 4,000 unversity students took to the streets in protest of the Treaty of Versailles. These protests became a national and cultural movement that served as an inspiration for later left-wing movements.
On the afternoon of May 4th, over 4,000 students of Yenching University, Peking University, and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted slogans as "struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "do away with the Twenty-One Demands", and "don't sign the Versailles Treaty".
The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China. Students, merchants, and workers joined the protests. The demonstrators appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers took place, negatively impacting the economy.
In the years that followed, many Chinese political thinkers turned to leftist politics in the wake of the political upheaval of the May 4th Movement. In 1939, Mao Zedong claimed that the May Fourth Movement was a stage leading toward the fulfillment of his own communist revolution.
- Date: 1919-05-04
- Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.britannica.com.
- Tags: #Protests.
- Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org