One hundred years ago, students took the streets in Beijing, protesting the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the first world war. Their complaints were twofold: not only had Western powers betrayed their ideals and their ally, but China’s own government had failed to stand up for its territorial integrity.
Today, the May 4 Movement is celebrated in China as a turning point — the manifestation of brewing nationalism that helped push the country towards its modern trajectory. But the history of the United States and the movement that continues to define China’s populist nationalism are inexorably linked. Not only did the ideas expressed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson underpin the roots of the movement, but the perceived failure to live up to those same values was among the immediate causes that drove students to protest.
In January 1918, as World War I ranged, President Woodrow Wilson outlined a vision for the post-war order. Among his famous Fourteen Points were diplomatic transparency, free trade, national self-determination, and the establishment of the League of Nations. Those ideas, especially self-determination, resonated around the world and America. For many Asians, Latin Americans, and Africans, Wilson’s ideas were embraced as a promise to remedy the injustices and humiliations of European imperialism.
After the Armistice of November 1918, delegations — including representatives from China, which had supported the Allies with workers but did not fight in the war — met in Paris to broker the terms of peace. For the Chinese, the final agreement was supposed to fulfill the promise, made when they joined the Allies, that Shandong Province, formerly under German colonial rule, would be returned to China.
The final provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, however, broke that commitment. Instead, the dominant Western powers who settled on the final terms ceded Shandong to Japan, which had occupied the province.
When news of the terms of the agreement reached China on May 2, 1919, the Chinese erupted in anger. In particular, students raised in the twilight of Imperial China saw the treaty as rupturing their hopes of a modern, idealized China, secure in its future and firmly within a new, 20th-century international order. Many had been deeply influenced by the New Culture Movement, which had called for restructuring society and government. In large part, the solutions these activists called for drew on Western ideas which encouraged the replacement of traditional culture through embracing “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”
It is no surprise that students influenced by these values were palpably outraged at the news. How could America, with its ideas of self-determination and transparency, support an agreement that so clearly denied China’s territorial sovereignty? And how could China’s own government be at least complicit in this wrong, having accepted payments from Japan in 1918 in accordance with a secret agreement? To those students who would take to Tiananmen Square and the streets of Beijing on May 4, 1919, it was clear that China had been betrayed. And, despite initial arrests of students, the movement gained momentum and spread to other cities prompting similar nationalist, anti-Japanese protests and strikes. The popular outpouring sparked by the student activists in Beijing forced the government’s hand; the Chinese delegation in Paris refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
Although the May 4 protests themselves spanned only a few months, the ideas borne out by the movement — including the need for a strong state willing to stand up to imperialism and a distrust for lofty ideas claimed as universal by Western powers — persisted. Today, the movement is still celebrated by the Chinese Communist Party as nationalist propaganda, almost entirely stripped of the pro-democracy values that inspired many of the May 4 Movement demonstrators. It may seem ironic that an authoritarian party would celebrate an anti-government protest, but celebrating the nationalist and “anti-imperialist” legacy of May 1919 makes perfect sense. President Xi Jinping, like his predecessors, can draw on the movement’s call for a powerful and modern China – and not-so-subtly remind his people of Western treachery.
In the United States, this history is mostly lost, perhaps appearing, if at all, as a footnote. But China, along with other countries in the Middle East and Africa, carved up and dropped into a world the West defined, has certainly not forgotten the broken promises of American idealism from 1919.
As we continue to claim the moral high ground and even describe disputes with China as a brewing clash of civilizations, we must call to mind this forgotten chapter of history. It is not just the values we claim that matter, but our commitment to upholding them.
