The most obvious consequence of this confusion between the nation and the imperial court is that love of country turns into love of government, or even into love of that government’s leader—the sovereign. Throughout history, this confusion has led people to kill others to increase the exploits of one name, bartering their marrow in exchange for fame and wealth. Originally, this exchange had nothing to do with patriotism, but was worked into the framework of patriotism established by each dynasty. However, because citizens cannot correctly distinguish between love of country and love of government, they will praise one while praising the other. This is truly a sad state of affairs.

A little later than Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu (a leading figure in the anti-imperial Xinhai Revolution and the May Fourth Movement and a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party)wrote an essay titled “Should We Be Patriotic or Not?” Liang stated in the essay that, “When we ask whether we should love our nation, we first have to ask what “nation” means. It used to be that the nation consisted merely of organizations of people coming together to resist foreign oppression and resolve internal disputes. Good men could use the nation to resist oppression and resolve problems; bad men could use the nation to oppress other nations or tyrannize their people.” Thus, if people ask, “Should we love our nation?” we must loudly respond: “What we love are nations that work for their people’s well-being, and not nations that force their people to make sacrifices.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hong Zhenkuai, May 4th, patriotism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

“Youth” is the day’s keyword. May 4 was designated National Youth Day in 1949 to commemorate the students in the street, but it is the “new youth” from the pages of the magazine who dominate retrospectives ninety years on.

The April issue of Modern Media’s Life magazine included a supplement modeled on Chen’s magazine. The Modern Media La Jeunesse is printed vertically (in simplified characters) and includes advertisements for books and journals done up in the style of a Republican-era publication. The cover even bears an imprimatur from the PRC publishing authorities where New Youth has an authorization from the Republican post bureau.

See also a Xinhua report on the official commemoration of the historic day:

The “May Fourth Movement” started with mass student protests on May 4, 1919 against the government’s response to the Treaty of Versailles that imposed unfair treaties on China and undermined the country’s sovereignty.

It then spearheaded a national campaign to overthrow the feudal society and promote scientific and democratic ideas.

“We have seen many young people devoted themselves to the revival of great China since the ‘May Fourth Movement’,” said DengXiquan, an expert from China Juvenile Research Center. “The movement’s legacy is deeply rooted and powerful. China needs it now to unite people to work for a better country.”

The past 90 years have shown that upholding the leadership of the CPC has always been the fundamental guarantee to drive forward all social undertakings of the country, Li said in the speech.

See also an essay in People’s Daily comparing the youth protesters of 1919 to today’s “angry youth” (“奋青”).

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anniversaries, fenqing, history, May 4th, nationalism
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

From the May 4, 1989 New York Times:

Waving banners commemorating a similar demonstration 70 years earlier, thousands of university students marched through the capital this morning to press their demands for greater democracy.

The march followed the Government’s rejection Wednesday of the students’ conditions for formal talks to resolve their differences. Today, demonstrators shouted slogans criticizing the Government’s recent meeting with student leaders as a sham, and demanded that students themselves pick their representatives to meet with the authorities.

By the middle of the day, thousands of students had swept past police lines and into Tiananmen Square, the center of the capital, and policemen who had ringed it were unable to hold back the columns of marchers from at least eight universities and thousands of onlookers who also rushed to the square. Other student groups, including several from out-of-town schools, had yet to arrive at the square.

If you have access to additional sources of original reporting, video, accounts or photos from the spring of 1989, please send them to us at cdt@chinadigitaltimes.net and we’ll consider including them in this series. Many thanks.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 20 years, May 4th
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

In the perspective both of China’s 20th-century history and its last year, the spreading language of boycott offers two hints about what is likely to occur in 2009.

The first is that modern Chinese history is full of moments when groups with very different agendas employ parallel tactics. In the late 1940s, for example, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party backed demonstrations against (respectively) Russian imperialism and American imperialism that looked virtually identical (see Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China, Stanford University Press, 1991). In 2008, there was the sense of an overlapping retaliatory tinge to the east-west boycott “dialogue” – the call for Chinese to stop shopping at the French Carrefour chain mixing with the French president’s consideration of a boycott of the Olympics (or at least its opening ceremony). 2009 is shaping up to be another year when different groups employ the same basic approach even as their aims clash.

The second point is that the battle of the boycotts between the Chinese state and the dissident intellectuals and writers who signed Charter 08 can be considered the initial salvo in the kind of fight that has often occurred in years ending with a “9″: a struggle for the right to don the mantle of patriotic concern with the nation embodied by the May 4th Movement.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2009, anniversaries, Boycott, history, May 4th, protests
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

…To dismiss the importance of Charter 08 because it is the product of a single class (or sub-group within that class) is to miss a lesson of history. With a nod to Margaret Mead, I might suggest that modern Chinese history has had its own share of small groups of committed individuals whose ideas did not receive their due when first published or spoken but whom we now look back upon as transformational figures: Wang Tao, Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao, even Mao Zedong. This is not to say that the authors of Charter 08 are destined to enter such a hallowed pantheon, only that history warns us not to immediately dismiss their ideas because “only” 2000 intellectuals signed the document.

In 1919, our birthday boy Cai Yuanpei wrote:

“With regard to ideas, I act according to the general rule of the various universities of the world, following the principle of “freedom of thought” and adopting the policy of tolerating everything and including everything…Regardless of what schools of academic thought there may be, if their words are reasonable and there is cause for maintaining them, and they have not yet reached the fate of being eliminated by nature, then even though they disagree with each other, I would let them develop in complete freedom.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cai Yuanpei, Charter 08, history, May 4th
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

One could say there is a certain pattern of the past discernable in the way the authorities have run these protests. We have long seen in China political campaigns and mass movements that follow a similar pattern or political logic… There is an issue of official or presumed popular concern, the authorities urge people both within the apparat and more generally to speak out. A period of public fervor, both orchestrated and spontaneous, unfolds. This may be egged on so that mass sentiment can find expression but also be gauged. Then things go too far; the authorities are alerted to the fact that events could get out of hand and the outpourings could turn nasty or, more to the point, they could be used by ill-disciplined malcontents to be directed against the power-holders themselves. There are cautious and then more strident calls for order, followed by cautionary detentions and arrests. These are accompanied by official statements, which usually take the form of editorials in leading newspapers. The tone is set byauthorities higher up. It is declared that a sinister and long-planned plot has been uncovered.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-japan crackdown, May 4th, may fourth
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Western reports on the recent anti-Japanese protests by Chinese students have often stressed the need to pay attention to one sort of historical issue: ongoing controversies related to Japan’s treatment of its World War II atrocities. But to make sense fully of what has been going on in China, it is equally important, as some commentators have noted, to keep in mind a different sort of history: the history of Chinese youth movements. To understand why a regime that initially seemed content to allow and even encourage anti-Japanese demonstrations suddenly switched gears a couple of weeks ago and began to try to get educated youths off the streets, it is crucial to look backward to what Beijing students have done in May, and on May 4th in particular, in the past.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-japan crackdown, May 4th
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Thousands of police officers in Beijing and Shanghai stood guard on Wednesday in a show of force to ensure that one of China’s most sensitive political anniversaries did not erupt into a new wave of angry protests against Japan.

The May 4 anniversary, a pivotal date in defining modern Chinese nationalism, celebrates a famous student uprising in 1919 against Western colonialism, specifically the decision by World War I Allied powers to give Japan control of Germany’s colonial territories in China.

Thanks to yongliu for sending this link via del.icio.us.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: anti-Japan, May 4th
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

On May 4 in 1919, students in Beijing launched a nationwide movement against imperialism and a government that had failed to stand up to the West and Japan.

More than 80 years later, a new generation in China is flexing its nationalist muscle. Its members are still stoked by hostility toward Japan, but now they’re powered by laptops and high-speed broadband.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2005. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: May 4th, nationalism, youth culture
Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall