Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [223]
The morning of May 4 was cool and windy. By lunchtime more than 3,000 demonstrators had converged on Tienanmen Square. Most wore the traditional silk gowns of scholars, but in a gesture to the Western world some also had bowler hats. Marchers carried placards saying “Give Us Back Tsingtao” or “Oppose Power Politics” or “China Belongs to the Chinese.” The leaders carried a manifesto which said dramatically, “This is the last chance for China in her life and death struggle.” By two P.M. the crowd was growing bigger and was moving toward the foreign legation quarter. When it reached the house of a minister widely suspected to be a stooge of the Japanese, the mood turned nasty. Demonstrators rushed into the house, smashed furniture and, when they could not find the minister himself, beat up the Chinese ambassador to Japan, whom they found hiding. The government tried to suppress the agitation by arresting the more prominent student leaders, which only inflamed opinion further. The dean of humanities from Peking University was seen handing out leaflets on a street corner. Demonstrations spread to other big cities in China, and nonstudents, from dockworkers to businessmen, began to join in. The government was obliged to back down; in a humiliating reverse, it released the students with apologies.46
The disturbances finished off that other peace conference—the one in Shanghai that was trying to reconcile north and south China. The southern faction tried to ride the wave of popular sentiment by demanding that the Peking government reject all the wartime agreements with Japan and refuse to accept the decision on Shantung. This was unacceptable to the northern faction, who were by now dominated by pro-Japanese military, and the Shanghai conference was suspended indefinitely.47 With the collapse of even that faint hope, China was condemned to another nine years of disunity and civil war.
The fourth of May was a landmark in the development of Chinese nationalism. It came to stand for the whole period of intellectual ferment; but what was more important, it marked the rejection by many Chinese intellectuals of the West. They had turned to Western democracy and liberalism before 1919, often because they could find no other model. Some had always felt uneasy with the Western stress on individualism and competition. The failure of the Chinese Republic and the spectacle of European nations tearing themselves apart in the war had deepened the unease. One distinguished scholar who was in Paris as an observer during the Peace Conference wrote home that Europeans “are like travelers in the desert and have lost their direction. . . . They are in utter despair. . . . They once had a great dream about the omnipotence of science. Now their talk is filled with its bankruptcy.”48
Coincidence counts for more in history than some may care to think, and in 1919 an alternative presented itself to the Chinese. Not the alternative of returning to China’s traditional ways, but the new order in Russia. The Russian Revolution offered an example of a traditional society, not unlike China’s, which had apparently skipped ahead to the future in one bold and glorious move. The disillusionment with the West, their own dismal experience with Western-style democracy after 1911, and the clear alternative presented by Russia all came together to make communism seem the solution to China’s problems. If further confirmation was needed, it came with an unprecedented gesture made by the new Bolshevik commissar for foreign affairs, who offered in the summer of 1919 to give up all the conquests and concessions squeezed out of China in the days of the tsars. (The Bolshevik government never actually delivered on