The Day the Students Marched: May Fourth, the Soviet Alliance, and the March North

Act I: The Day the Students Marched (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 425. Reading-guide sentence (p. 425): "On May 4, 1919, when word arrived that the decision had gone in favor of Japan, there was an explosion of popular protest."

A grievance twenty years old

Review Question 9 asks for the domestic and international catalysts of the May Fourth Incident and why it marks a turning point. The international chain begins in Shandong in 1897, when the murder of two German missionaries gave Germany its pretext to seize Jiaozhou Bay; the lease of March 1898 gave Germany the port of Qingdao, a railway to Jinan and mining rights, and touched off the scramble for concessions (Ebrey, Ch. 18, p. 328; slide c). Shandong was the home province of Confucius and Mencius, and the lease became a symbol of the humiliations after 1895.

In August 1914 Japan, allied with Britain since 1902, declared war on Germany, landed troops on the north coast of Shandong outside the leased zone, and took Qingdao after a siege that ended on 7 November (slide d). Frederick Dickinson has shown how Japanese leaders saw the European war as a chance to settle their position in China while the other powers were distracted.¹ The Twenty-One Demands of 1915, the subject of Lecture 2, then required China to accept in advance whatever Japan and Germany agreed about Shandong. Ebrey dates Yuan's acceptance, later remembered as National Humiliation Day, to 7 May; the ultimatum came on 7 May and Yuan accepted on 9 May, and both dates were later commemorated (slide e).²

Laborers, Wilson and the secret deals

China declared war on Germany in August 1917, and "although China sent no combatants, it did send some 140,000 laborers to France" (Ebrey, p. 425; slide f). Xu Guoqi's history of these men shows that recruitment began in 1916, that many came from Shandong itself, and that several thousand died in Europe. Their labor was China's claim to a seat at the peace table; Woodrow Wilson's language of self-determination made that claim seem likely to succeed.³

But "Japan had reached secret agreements with Britain, France, and Italy to support Japan's claim to German rights in Shandong," and "Japanese diplomats had also won the consent of the warlord government that held Beijing in 1918" (Ebrey, p. 425; slide g). The first were the exchanges of February and March 1917, by which the three powers promised support at the peace conference in return for Japanese naval help against German submarines. The second was the note of September 1918 in which Duan Qirui's government, dependent on Japanese loans, said it "gladly agreed" to Japan's arrangements for the Shandong railway. Margaret MacMillan's account of the conference shows how the note undercut the Chinese delegation's argument that all its concessions had been made under duress.⁴ Here domestic and international causes meet: a weak, divided and indebted government had given away the case before Paris began.

Koo at the Council of Ten

Ebrey writes that "at Versailles the Chinese representatives were not even admitted, while those from Japan were seated at the table with the Western powers." The American record does not support the first half of that sentence. China, as one of the smaller Allied belligerents, had two seats at the plenary conference, and its delegation was led by the foreign minister Lu Zhengxiang, with Wellington Koo, Alfred Sze, C. T. Wang and Wei Chenzu. What China lacked was a place on the Council of Ten, where the great powers decided. But it was invited to speak there: the minutes of 28 January 1919 record Koo's case for the return of Shandong, including his claim to speak for "400 millions, one quarter of the human race" and his description of the province as "the cradle of Chinese civilisation, the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, and a Holy Land for the Chinese" (slide h).⁵ Koo, a Columbia doctor of thirty, impressed the room; but on 30 April Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, anxious to keep Japan in the League of Nations, awarded Germany's rights to Japan. The deck therefore says that China's delegates "asked for Shandong back and were turned down."

Fourth of May

The news reached Beijing at the start of May. On Sunday 4 May about three thousand students from thirteen colleges, led by Beijing University, gathered before the Gate of Heavenly Peace with white banners demanding the return of Qingdao, the cancellation of the Twenty-One Demands and the punishment of "traitors" (slide b). "Tiananmen Square" in 1919 meant the walled space in front of the gate, not the vast square of today. Chow Tse-tsung's reconstruction follows the march to the Legation Quarter, where police kept the students out on a Sunday, and then to Zhaojialou, the house of the communications minister Cao Rulin, who had helped negotiate the 1915 treaties and arranged Japanese loans. Students broke in; Cao escaped; the minister to Japan, Zhang Zongxiang, was beaten; the house burned; police arrested thirty-two students (slide i).⁶

Strikes and refusal

What turned an incident into a movement was the response. Ebrey's list of supporters, "teachers, workers, the press, the merchants, Sun Yatsen, and the warlords," is the heart of the matter: strikes closed schools in more than two hundred cities and Japanese goods were boycotted (slide j). In early June the government arrested about 1,150 student speakers, roughly 400 on 3 June and 700 on 4 June, holding them in Beijing University buildings; Sidney Gamble photographed a column of Tsinghua students on their way to detention. From 5 June Shanghai's merchants closed their shops and tens of thousands of workers struck. On 10 June Cao, Zhang and Lu Zongyu were dismissed, and the cabinet resigned days later.⁷ In Paris the delegation asked to sign with a reservation on Shandong and was refused; on 28 June 1919 the Chinese seats in the Hall of Mirrors stayed empty (slide k). Japan returned the leasehold, and sold back the railway, only under the Washington Conference settlement of February 1922.

Why a turning point

Historians use "May Fourth" in a narrow sense, for the incident and the protests of May and June 1919, and in Chow's broad sense, for the whole ferment of about 1915 to 1923, joining the New Culture Movement of Lecture 3 to the political protest. Ebrey keeps the strands apart: the "personal and intellectual goals of the New Culture movement were pursued along with, and sometimes in competition with, the national power goals of the May Fourth movement" (p. 425). Either way, 1919 is a turning point because of who acted and how (slide l). The revolution of 1911 was made by soldiers, secret societies and exiles; the movement of 1919 was made by thousands of students, including women, and then by merchants and workers in many cities, using strikes, boycotts, lecture teams and the press, and it won a concrete victory over its own government. Vera Schwarcz and Rana Mitter have traced how "May Fourth" became a contested memory, claimed by liberals, Nationalists and Communists alike.⁸

Act II: The Alliance with Moscow (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 428. Reading-guide sentence (p. 428): "In 1922, on Comintern urging, the two parties formed a united front, as a consequence of which members of the Communist Party joined the Nationalist Party as individuals but continued separate Communist Party activities on the side."

Sun without an army

Review Question 11 asks why the Nationalists allied with the Soviet Union and the Communists, and what the coalition achieved. Ebrey's first answer is military: Yuan Shikai's easy victory "demonstrated to them that they needed their own army" (p. 428; slide n). Sun went to Guangzhou in 1917 to form a military government, but, as Marie-Claire Bergère's biography shows, he depended on southern generals who used him and discarded him. He was forced out in 1918, returned in 1920, and was driven out again in June 1922 when his commander Chen Jiongming shelled his headquarters; Chiang Kaishek joined him on a gunboat in the river for weeks.⁹ The Western powers, which recognized the Beijing government, refused him loans and arms. Russia, which had just made its own revolution in a large, poor, peasant country, looked like a better model than Japan.

The Comintern and its theory

The Communist International, founded in Moscow in 1919, adopted at its Second Congress in the summer of 1920 Lenin's theses calling on communists to support national-revolutionary movements in colonial and semi-colonial countries (slide o). Ebrey explains the logic: in Marxist-Leninist theory China had not passed through a bourgeois stage, so a Nationalist victory over the imperialists "appeared to be the next stage." She adds a strategic motive: a weak China "might invite the expansion of Japan" (p. 428). Ebrey's "in 1920, Sun turned to the Comintern" is best read as the beginning of contacts. Eugene Wu's study dates Sun's first meeting with a Comintern agent, Grigori Voitinsky, to November 1920 in Shanghai, followed by Maring in December 1921 and Joffe in January 1923; only then did help arrive.¹⁰

Joffe, Borodin and the new party

The alliance was made in three steps that Ebrey compresses (slide p). On 26 January 1923 Sun and the Soviet envoy Adolph Joffe issued a joint statement in Shanghai: communism and the Soviet system were not suited to China, but China's urgent tasks were unity and independence, and Russia would help. On 6 October 1923 Mikhail Borodin, an experienced Comintern agent who had lived for years in Chicago, reached Guangzhou. In January 1924 the Nationalist Party's First National Congress adopted the constitution Borodin had drafted, "giving it a more hierarchical chain of command" (p. 428), and seated Communists, among them Li Dazhao, on its central executive committee. When members objected that the new structure looked Communist, Sun replied that "the capitalist countries will never be sympathetic to our Party. Sympathy can only be expected from Russia, the oppressed nations, and the oppressed peoples." Ebrey takes the quotation from Wilbur and How, whose study of the Soviet advisers, based in part on Soviet papers seized in a police raid in Beijing in 1927, remains the fundamental work.¹¹

The united front

Ebrey dates the united front to 1922 (p. 428), and that is when the Comintern's agent Maring pressed the Communist leaders to accept it, at a meeting in Hangzhou in August 1922. The Communist Party's Third Congress approved the policy in June 1923, and it became formal only with the Nationalist congress of January 1924 (slide q). The arrangement, Communists joining the Nationalist Party as individuals while keeping their own organization, is what made it a "bloc within." Sun accepted it because the Communists were few, a few hundred in 1923, and he wanted "to tap all possible resources for building a strong state"; the Communists accepted because the Comintern insisted and because the Nationalist Party offered a legal mass organization they could work inside. Hans van de Ven has shown how small and loosely organized the early Communist Party was, and how the united front transformed it.¹²

Whampoa and the advisers

Ebrey says Chiang Kaishek "was sent there for four months' training in 1923" (p. 428). Eugene Wu shows that Chiang led a four-man delegation that was in the Soviet Union from 2 September to 29 November 1923, about three months; it was a study and negotiating mission, in which Chiang proposed a military plan for the northwest that Moscow declined, and he returned suspicious of Soviet aims (slide r). The Whampoa Military Academy opened on 16 June 1924, with Chiang as commandant, Soviet money and instructors, and Sun's Three Principles in the curriculum; "the first class was admitted in 1924 with nearly five hundred cadets, ages seventeen to twenty-four." Ebrey says Zhou Enlai became "deputy head of this academy's political education department"; official chronologies add that he soon became its head, in November 1924.

Ebrey's figure of "about one thousand Russian military advisers in China" by 1925 is too high. Wilbur and How, whom she cites, write of several scores of advisers. Jon Jacobson counts fifty-eight Soviet military advisers, with a technical staff, attached to units of the National Revolutionary Army during the Northern Expedition, and V. N. Usov's work in Russian archives puts the total of military and political advisers who served in China in 1925–1927 at about 150. The deck therefore says the advisers numbered in the dozens.¹³

Act III: The March North (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 428–429.

Thirtieth of May

The coalition's power came as much from the streets as from the academy. In May 1925 a strike at a Japanese-owned cotton mill in Shanghai ended with the killing of a worker, Gu Zhenghong. On 30 May students demonstrating in the International Settlement were arrested, a crowd gathered outside the Louza police station on Nanking Road, and Inspector Edward Everson ordered his Sikh and Chinese constables to fire (slide s). Ebrey says the police killed eleven (p. 428). The counts differ with the source and with what is counted: the Settlement's own police narrative gives four killed outright and more dying in hospital, its summary gives twelve, and Chinese accounts name thirteen dead. The deck gives Ebrey's figure with the range.¹⁴ As in 1919, strikes and boycotts spread to dozens of cities, now aimed at Britain as well as Japan, and both parties grew fast. The photograph on the slide was taken just after the shooting; the deck does not show the dead.

Sun's death and the split

Sun had gone north in late 1924 to negotiate with the northern generals and died of liver cancer in Beijing on 12 March 1925, aged fifty-eight (slide t). His political will, recited at party meetings for decades, ended: "The revolution is not yet complete; comrades, you must continue to strive." Without him the strains Ebrey describes, between leftists "who shared many of the goals of the communists" and rightists "who thought that Borodin had too much power" (p. 428), came into the open: the leftist Liao Zhongkai was assassinated in August 1925, and in November senior rightists meeting in the Western Hills near Beijing demanded the Communists' expulsion. In March 1926 Chiang himself moved against Communist officers in Guangzhou, a story Chapter 25 picks up.

The Northern Expedition

"In July 1926, the two-pronged Northern Expedition was finally launched, with Chiang Kaishek as military commander and Russian advisers helping with strategy" (p. 428; slide u). Chiang took his oath as commander on 9 July; Vasily Blyukher, known as Galen, was the senior Soviet adviser. Donald Jordan's history follows the main thrust through Hunan, where Changsha fell in July, to the Wuhan cities, taken between September and the surrender of Wuchang on 10 October, and the second push into Jiangxi, which took Nanchang in November.¹⁵ Communists and the party's left wing went ahead organizing peasant associations and labor unions, and many warlords changed sides rather than fight; the map on the slide shows the warlord territories of Lecture 2.

Wuhan and Shanghai

By the end of 1926 the government had moved to Wuhan, "where the left wing of the party became dominant" (p. 429; slide v). The photograph shows its leaders: Eugene Chen, T. V. Soong, Wang Jingwei and Borodin. In January 1927 crowds occupied the British concession at Hankou. Chiang kept his headquarters at Nanchang, where the party's conservatives and Shanghai's bankers looked to him. In March the army approached Shanghai, Communist-led workers rose and seized most of the Chinese city, and Nationalist troops entered on 22 March. "This would mark the end of the United Front, a topic taken up in Chapter 25" (p. 429). The immediate results of the coalition, then, were a party army, a mass movement and the conquest of half the country, and with them the conflict that would destroy the coalition within weeks.

Pierian Spring: Guangzhou, 1925

Ebrey mentions Ho Chi Minh in a single paragraph (p. 428; slide aa). In June 1919, as Nguyen Ai Quoc, he sent the peace conference a petition for the rights of the Vietnamese under French rule and received no answer; he joined the French Communist Party at its founding in December 1920, went to Moscow in 1923, and reached Guangzhou late in 1924 under the name Ly Thuy, working in Borodin's office. There he gathered young exiles, sent some to Whampoa, and in June 1925 founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League. William Duiker's biography and Sophie Quinn-Judge's study of his "missing years" are the guides.¹⁶

The second story is the strike (slide bb). In mid-June 1925, in sympathy with Shanghai, Hong Kong workers led by Communist organizers such as the seamen's leader Su Zhaozheng began leaving the colony for Guangzhou. On 23 June a great procession of workers, students and Whampoa cadets passed the Shamian enclave; shots were fired, each side blamed the other, and British and French troops fired into the crowd. Ebrey's "fifty-two" is the Chinese count; British reports gave lower figures. The strike and boycott, run by a strike committee with its own armed pickets, lasted until October 1926, damaging Hong Kong's trade and giving the Communists their first mass base.¹⁷

Corrections and Cautions

Notes

1. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999). On China's own wartime diplomacy, Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China's Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ↩

2. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1915 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924), doc. 154. The Lecture 2 deck (slide j) and its essay give the full sequence. ↩

3. Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese Workers in the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), places May Fourth alongside the Egyptian, Indian and Korean protests of the same spring, all fed by disappointed hopes in Wilson. ↩

4. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), ch. 23, "Shandong." ↩

5. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1943), doc. 50, "Secretary's Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon's Room at the Quai d'Orsay, Paris, on Tuesday, January 28, 1919, at 11 o'clock a.m.," online at the Office of the Historian, history.state.gov. Koo's own account is in his memoirs, the Columbia University oral history, and is summarized in many Chinese studies. ↩

6. Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), ch. 4. The deck shows Cao's portrait rather than a scene of the fire; no reliable photograph of the burning house is known to the deck's author. ↩

7. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, ch. 5, gives the arrest figures; Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), explains how the Shanghai strikes worked and why they mattered more than the student strikes alone. ↩

8. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ↩

9. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For Chiang's early career, Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). ↩

10. Eugene W. Wu, "Divergence in Strategic Planning: Chiang Kai-shek's Mission to Moscow, 1923," Republican China 16, no. 1 (November 1990), pp. 18–34. For the Comintern side, Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000). ↩

11. C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution: Soviet Advisers and Nationalist China, 1920–1927 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 92 for Sun's remark. Dan N. Jacobs, Borodin: Stalin's Man in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), is the biography of Borodin. ↩

12. Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). ↩

13. Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); V. N. Usov, Sovetskaia razvedka v Kitae, 20-e gody XX veka (Moscow, 2002), chapter on the advisers in Canton. Usov gives 25 advisers in Guangzhou in June 1924 and 58 by April 1926. Thousands of Chinese, by contrast, went to study in Moscow. ↩

14. Richard W. Rigby, The May 30 Movement: Events and Themes (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1980); Shanghai Municipal Council, Annual Report for 1925, police report. Nicholas R. Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 1991), gives the Settlement's side. ↩

15. Donald A. Jordan, The Northern Expedition: China's National Revolution of 1926–1928 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976); C. Martin Wilbur, The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923–1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Ebrey's Map 24.1 (p. 416) dates the campaign "June 5, 1926–December 29, 1928," from Chiang's appointment as commander-in-chief to the end of the campaign in Manchuria; the text's "July 1926" (p. 428) is the formal launch, and the two agree. ↩

16. William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000); Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Sources differ on whether he arrived in November or December 1924. ↩

17. Chan Lau Kit-ching, China, Britain and Hong Kong, 1895–1945 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990); John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). Wilbur and How print a Soviet adviser's report on the strike of March 1926. ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (1960). The classic account; chapters 4 and 5 for the incident and the June strikes.

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment (2007). May Fourth as one of several anticolonial protests sparked by disappointment in Wilson.

Xu Guoqi, Strangers on the Western Front (2011). The Chinese laborers in France and what China expected from their work.

Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 (2001). The peace conference, with a clear chapter on Shandong.

C. Martin Wilbur and Julie Lien-ying How, Missionaries of Revolution (1989). The Soviet advisers and the Nationalist revolution, with documents.

Hans J. van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade (1991). The making of the Chinese Communist Party in the united-front years.

Donald A. Jordan, The Northern Expedition (1976). The military and political history of the campaign.

Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution (2004). How the May Fourth era shaped the rest of the century, and how it was remembered.