Tomorrow is the fourth of May.  In North America, this day has jokingly become known as “Star Wars Day” (i.e. “May the Fourth Be With You”).  But in China, it has a very different meaning.  For it was one hundred years ago tomorrow that one of the most important students revolts of all time began.

China held together just barely after the Qing dynasty was deposed in 1911.  By outmaneuvering Sun Yat-Sen and (it is widely believed) assassinating Song Jiaoren, Yuan Shikai managed to keep the country united and at peace until his death in 1916.  But he did so in part by borrowing a lot of foreign money and by giving in to various Japanese demands with respect to territories in Shandong province, which it had captured from the Germans at the start of the First World War.  The Chinese government went to Versailles in 1919 assuming/hoping that, on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it could reverse Japanese gains and reimpose its own sovereignty in the era.  When that failed to happen, and the Chinese government agreed to a treaty that was widely believed to be a national humiliation, students in Beijing took to the streets to protest.

What’s the big deal about students leading a protest?  Well, in 1919 it was a big deal because it had never happened anywhere else at that scale.  And in a year which saw Marxist revolutions aplenty in Europe, China was the only place where it was students – a group Marx never considered worth theorizing – who were making the difference. The protests spread across China and very quickly the government acceded to the protestors’ main programmatic demands – the dismissal of certain key officials and a renunciation of the country’s signature on the Versailles Treaty.  But that is perhaps the least interesting part of the story.  The students had unleashed a much broader critique about Chinese weakness and backwardness and the need to look abroad for more modern ideas (mainly ones connected with science and democracy) that could strengthen the nation as a whole.  This wasn’t exactly a new idea – Sun Yat-Sen and other pre-1911 revolutionaries all espoused it to some extent, but this was the first time anyone was making the critique about Chinese culture as a whole: until 1911 it had been aimed just against the Chinese government, which after all had been headed by foreigners (Manchus) for several hundred years.  More importantly though, the idea that it was young people taking the lead in this criticism was deeply shocking in what was (and to a large extent still is) a culture which emphasizes deference to elders. 

That students were allied with a spirit of progressive nationalism should not be a surprise; across history, student movements have been nationalist much more often than they have been internationalist, mainly because students as a “class” always saw themselves as being the future operators of the levers of state power (this was a more potent thought when students were a more self-consciously elite group than they are today).  What was odd about China was that the higher education sector, due to its size, was able to decisively influence the development of nationalist thought.  This was never the case, for instance, in countries which had been English or French colonies because their elites went to the metropole for education (for example, in India even though domestic universities pre-dated independence by 90 years, pretty much all the major independence-era leaders – Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, Ambedkar – had all done law degrees at the Inns of Court in London).  Chinese universities, therefore, have a unique relationship to both nationalism and modernism.

The May Fourth movement never coalesced around a platform or an electoral agenda (not that elections were really on the agenda in 1920s China anyways).  It was a movement with a critique, not a movement with an intent to take power.  But it was the animating spirit for “modernization with Chinese characteristics” that arguably still defines China today.  Certainly, some of its leaders such as Chen Duxiu went on to be involved in radical politics and became founders of the Chinese Communist Party.  Hence, the Party still acknowledges the event every year, although recently it has tended to reframe May Fourth as an act of mass patriotism and loyalty to China rather than an act of mass rebellion. This framing explains how earlier this week Xi Jinping could make a speech claiming that the best way to honour the spirit of May 4^th was to slavishly obey the party leadership, since the party is, of course, the highest object of patriotism around.

This interpretation is absurd and sad, but it is telling nonetheless that Xi felt the need to speak to students at all.  A sign, perhaps, that thirty years after Tiananmen Square – that other famous Chinese student rebellion – the Party remains very conscious that students still represent a potent source of potential change in the country.  Because the Party cannot escape its intellectual heritage, it sees universities as central to the creation and maintenance of a strong China.  But for precisely the same reasons, it also knows universities are an eternal threat to power in the country.  As they have been before, so they could be again.

So, tomorrow, do take some time to swing a lightsaber or watch some space opera (I’ll probably be introducing the 9 year-old to Empire which, you know, woot!).  But maybe spare a thought too for the fact that it’s the centenary of the most important student movement in history, and never forget that small groups of committed students can, in the right circumstances, change the course of history.The blog is off next week but will be back in your inboxes bright and early on May 13^th – A