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.
The Versailles Betrayal and the Spark of 4 May 1919
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.
Outcomes and the Refusal to Sign
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.