ON THIS DAY ·
May Fourth Movement
4 May 1919 — Three thousand students march on the Legation Quarter to protest the Shandong clause of Versailles. Strikes and boycotts spread to two hundred cities. The movement helps produce a new vernacular literature and a generation of radicalized students; two years later, a communist party follows.
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The moment in context
The grey-tan plates on the map show what happened when Yuan’s central power dissolved. A warlord governed through an army, and that army supplied his income as well as his authority. Zhang Zuolin, a former bandit backed by Japanese patrons, held Manchuria and its arsenals. The Zhili clique controlled the Peking–Tianjin plain. Peking was a prize in itself: foreign governments recognized its rulers, and the customs surplus was paid to them. Holding the capital gave a regional commander the resources and standing of the government of China.
From Warlord Era and May Fourth Movement, chapter 3 of China in Revolution, 1911–1949 (1924).
The place: May Fourth Movement — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Armies as capital, war as business. An army had to be paid, but it could also make its commander rich. Warlords taxed opium and salt, printed money, and mortgaged railways and mines to…
- The turn — May Fourth, 1919. The battles changed control of territory, often temporarily. May Fourth changed the political generation that would inherit the struggle. Its…
- What it changed — Moscow finds its opening. The Comintern saw Chinese nationalism as a force the small CCP could join. In 1923 Moscow agreed to supply Sun’s Nationalists with arms, money and…
Then ask the room: How far was the warlord era a laboratory for China’s state-building as well as an interruption of it? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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