Author ｜
Rudolf. G. Wagner, Jemince Ru-xin Jia ed.
Abstract ｜
On June 25th, 2019, the Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) celebrated the inauguration of its centre facilities with an international audience of academic researchers, artists and politicians. On 26th June, the workshop “China and the World, the World and China, Second CATS Open Forum” took place in the main hall of the centre. The workshop, which was part of the inauguration celebration, was dedicated to Senior Professor Rudolf G. Wagner, former Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies and the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context,” for his life time commitment and extraordinary contribution to the fields of Sinology and Transcultural Studies. While the workshop included several sessions throughout the day, this contribution will focus solely on Professor Wagner’s lively and unravelling talk about the May Fourth Movement in China. The talk was presented under the title: “Reconstructing ‘May Fourth’: The Role of Communication, Propaganda, and International Actors" and is a rework of Professor Wagner’s speech delivered at the “May Fourth Conference” at Harvard University, USA, in April, 2019. The first section examines the May Fourth Movement as a carefully planned event by its Chinese and foreign protagonists; the second section challenges the popular definition on the movement’s significance as the “Chinese Renaissance;” section three expands on these arguments by presenting evidence for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Kuomintang (KMT) manipulation of the May Fourth legacy in order to satisfy their own propagandistic needs; the fourth section summarizes the main arguments of the essay and introduces the international actors who participated in the event. This essay explains, with the use of archival evidence, how this group of actors helped shape the history of China from the signing of the ‘Twenty-One Demands’, to the recovery of Shandong at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-1922. The text identifies that the movement “consciously acted as part of an international political ideological current” and “compensated for a strong asymmetry in the available means of communication, information, and propaganda compared to Japan and the Western powers.”
keywords ｜
May Fourth Movement, international actors, propaganda, May Fourth legacy, Chinese history