Chinese Nationalism and Communism
After the death of
Yuan Shikai, the control over the government in Beijing called for
the movement in the alliances of regional warlords. The Japanese
were also threatening the nation.
During the First World War in the
year 1914, Japan was in the favour of Allies and captured all the
possessions of Germany in the province of Shandong. While in 1915,
the Japanese established the alleged Twenty-One Demands before the
warlord Beijing government that could have made China a protectorate
of the Japanese.
However, the Beijing government did not accept a
few of these demands but had to surrender towards the Japanese
persistence towards keeping the territory of Shandong which was
already possessed by them. Beijing also realised that Tokyo has a
strong control over the Southern Manchuria as well as the Eastern
Inner Mongolia. In the year 1917, countries such as Britain, Italy
and France secretly gave their assent to the claim by Japanese to
use their naval action against Germany.
Meanwhile, China
proclaimed war against Germany to recover its lost territory, which
was under the control of the Japanese in 1917. But the government of
Beijing secretly signed a deal with the Japanese accepting their
claim on the Shandong Province in 1918. In 1919, the Paris peace
conference was held, which confirmed that the Japanese have full
possession of Shandong and that Beijing had given up before the
Japanese.
Huge student demonstrations took place against the
government in Beijing and Japan on May 4, 1919. All this coupled
with political commitment, student activism and reformist
intellectual milieu set by the student protests resulted into the
development of a national awakening called the May Fourth
Movement.
The intellectual environment in which this movement was
set was recognised as the New Cultural Movement which lasted from
1917 to 1923. Student demonstrations took place on May 4, 1919
turned out to be a major point of the New Culture Movement, and
these terms are frequently used in exchange of each other. Chinas
communist rulers might adopt the new social and political theories
varying from Westernization to China through to socialism, advocated
by students returning from abroad.
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