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The May Fourth Movement & the birth of the CPC
The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921: intellectual ferment, anti-imperialism, and the Marxist turn.
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The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921: intellectual ferment, anti-imperialism, and the Marxist turn.
The May Fourth Movement (五四运动) erupted on 4 May 1919 when roughly 3,000 students from thirteen Beijing universities, led by Peking University, gathered at Tiananmen to protest the decision of the Paris Peace Conference. Despite China's participation in World War I on the Allied side—sending some 140,000 laborers of the Chinese Labour Corps to the Western Front—Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles transferred Germany's former concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China. This betrayal was compounded by revelations of the secret Twenty-One Demands (1915) and the Nishihara Loans, under which the Beiyang government of Duan Qirui had mortgaged Chinese sovereignty.
The protesters demanded the punishment of three pro-Japanese officials—Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu—branded as traitors (汉奸). Students burned Cao Rulin's residence at Zhaojialou and beat Zhang Zongxiang. The arrest of student demonstrators triggered a nationwide reaction. By early June 1919, the movement spread to Shanghai, where a merchant strike (罢市), worker strike (罢工), and student strike (罢课)—the "three strikes"—paralyzed China's commercial capital. This was the decisive escalation: for the first time, the industrial working class entered politics as an organized force.
The pressure forced concrete results. The Beiyang government dismissed Cao, Zhang, and Lu on 10 June 1919, and the Chinese delegation at Versailles, led by Lu Zhengxiang and including the young diplomat Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun), refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919—the only Allied power to do so. The Shandong question was eventually resolved in China's favor at the Washington Conference (1921–22) via the Nine-Power Treaty and the Shandong Treaty of 1922.
The movement is best understood in two senses. In the narrow sense, May Fourth denotes the 1919 patriotic demonstrations. In the broad sense, it forms part of the New Culture Movement (新文化运动) launched in 1915 by Chen Duxiu's journal New Youth (《新青年》). That movement championed "Mr. Science" (赛先生) and "Mr. Democracy" (德先生), attacked Confucianism—Wu Yu's slogan "down with the Confucian shop"—and promoted vernacular literature (白话文). Hu Shi's 1917 essay advocating literary reform and Lu Xun's 1918 story "A Madman's Diary" (《狂人日记》), the first modern vernacular short story, exemplified the cultural revolution underway.
The May Fourth Movement catalyzed a decisive ideological shift among Chinese intellectuals. Disillusioned with Western liberalism after Versailles, many turned toward the Bolshevik model following the October Revolution of 1917. Li Dazhao, head librarian at Peking University, published "The Victory of Bolshevism" and "My Marxist Views" in New Youth in 1918–19, becoming China's first prominent Marxist theorist. The Karakhan Manifesto of 1919, in which Soviet Russia offered to renounce Tsarist privileges in China, contrasted sharply with imperialist behavior at Versailles and won goodwill.
Marxist study societies proliferated. Communist cells formed in Shanghai (under Chen Duxiu, August 1920), Beijing (under Li Dazhao), and other cities, aided by the Comintern agents Grigori Voitinsky (1920) and Hendricus Sneevliet (Maring). The Comintern, founded in 1919, actively guided this organizing.
The First National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party convened on 23 July 1921 at 106 Rue Wantz in the French Concession of Shanghai; after a police scare, it concluded aboard a pleasure boat on South Lake (Nanhu) at Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Thirteen delegates represented some 53 members, including Mao Zedong (representing Hunan), Dong Biwu, and Zhang Guotao, with Comintern representatives Maring and Nikolsky present. Chen Duxiu, though absent, was elected the first General Secretary. The Congress adopted a program committing the Party to proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The trajectory led to the First United Front (1924) with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang, formalized at the KMT First National Congress in January 1924 under the Comintern's policy. May Fourth thus marks the conventional dividing line between China's "old democratic revolution" and "new democratic revolution"—a periodization codified in Mao Zedong's 1940 essay "On New Democracy."
For the Guokao Modern History paper, May Fourth is among the highest-yield topics, tested both as objective-knowledge items and in essay (论述) form. Examiners reward candidates who distinguish the narrow (1919 protest) from broad (New Culture, 1915–) senses, who can cite the Versailles Article 156 and Shandong cause precisely, and who explain the movement's significance as the marker between old and new democratic revolution. The official CPC narrative treats May Fourth as the ideological prelude to the Party's 1921 founding—commemorated annually, with major anniversary addresses (the 1999 80th-anniversary and 2019 centenary speeches by the General Secretary). Retain the dates 4 May 1919, 28 June 1919, and 23 July 1921; the names Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and Mao Zedong; and the slogans "Science and Democracy" and "Externally resist the great powers, internally throw out the traitors" (外争国权，内除国贼).