“The Spirit of the May 4th Movement,” Deng Yingchao (1949)

I was a sixteen-year-old student at the First Normal School for Women in Tianjin when the May Fourth Movement began in 1919. A period of 30 years has elapsed. Many memories, once fresh and vivid, have been so diluted by the passage of time that they are now blurred and obscure …

On May 4, 1919, the students in Beijing staged a massive demonstration, demanding the punishment of traitors and the rejection of the Versailles Peace Treaty. In a moment of extreme anger, they burned down Chaochia Lu [the home of the Chinese foreign minister] and beat up many traitors. The news of this demonstration reached Tianjin the next day, shaking the façade of complacency to its very foundation. … On May 7 the Tianjin students staged a demonstration of their own … we also called for the abolition of the Twenty-one Demands [a], the return of Qingdao, the boycott of Japanese goods, the purchase of Chinese goods only, and, most important of all, “We are determined that we shall not be slaves to any foreigners in our own country.” 

Despite the fact that it was a patriotic students’ demonstration, the Northern Warlord government resorted to force to quell the protest. The police dispersed the march with rifles fixed with bayonets and sprayed us with hoses; and later resorted to rifle butts and even arrests….

Keep in mind that the May Fourth Movement occurred at the end of World War I when new cultures and new ideas, plus the knowledge of the successful October Revolution in Russia, made a deep impression on every youth in China. …

… our own intuition told us that a patriotic movement, to be effective, had to be more than just a students’ movement and that we had to awaken all of our brethren for the attainment of a common goal. … Many oratorical teams were organized, and I was elected captain of the speakers for the Association of Patriotic Women as well as head of the oratorical division for the Association of Tianjin Students. My duty was to provide speakers in differently areas on a regular basis.

At the beginning we, as female students, did not enjoy the same freedom of movement as our male counterparts, insofar as our speaking tours were concerned. According to the feudal custom of China, women were not supposed to make speeches in the street; we, therefore, had to do our work indoors. We gave speeches in such places as libraries and participated in scheduled debates, all inside a hall or a room. The audience was large and responsive in each of these meetings …

Besides making speeches, we also conducted house-to-house visits which often took us to more remote areas of the city and also to the slums. Some of the families we visited received us warmly, while others slammed their doors in our faces before we could utter a single word. … The Association of Tianjin Students published a journal which started as a half-weekly but became a daily shortly afterwards. … It had a circulation of 20,000 – quite an achievement at that time. …

The reactionary Northern Warlord government, however, turned a deaf ear to us. They ultimately bowed to Japanese powers, shielded the traitors, and tried to suppress the students’ movement….

In the wake of the May Fourth Movement came the feminist movement which was in fact one of its democratic extensions. Among the demands we raised at that time were sexual equality, abolition of arranged marriage, social activities open to women, freedom of romantic love and marriage, universities open to women students, and employment of women in government institutions. The first step we took toward sexual equality was to merge the associations of male and female students in Tianjin to form a new organization which students of both sexes could join. …

As pioneers in the feminist movement who had had the rare opportunity to work side by side with men, we female students in the merged association were conscious of the example we had to set so that no man in the future could deny women the opportunity to work on the ground of alleged incompetence. In short, we worked doubly hard. Fortunately, for us, the male students in the association, having been imbued with the new thought of the West, were ready to accept us as equals and judged us according to our performance rather than our sex. Each department, division, or committee was always headed by two chairpersons, one male and one female, and the female chairperson had as much authority as her male counterpart.

At this time cultural movements were developing rapidly and students were receptive to publications which promoted new ideas….In Tianjin, the Students Union every week would invite a progressive professor…to give use an academic lecture on new literary ideas such as how to write in vernacular Chinese rather than in classical stereotyped writings….

As more scientific subjects and new ideas pour into China, we felt an urgency to learn, discuss, study and understand them. … At the time we didn’t have a definite political conviction, nor did we know much about Communism. We just had a vague idea that the principle of distribution in the most advantageous society was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” We knew only that a revolution led by Lenin in Russia had been successful; and that revolution was to emancipate the majority of the people who were oppressed, and to establish a classless society.

How we did long for such a society! But at that time we could not learn about such a society because we could scarcely find any copy of Lenin’s ideas or information about the October Revolution.

[a] The Twenty-One Demands, made by Japan to China in 1915, required China to confirm Japan’s claim to the former German concessions in Shandong and various economic concessions in Manchuria and Mongolia. They also demanded extensive Japanese rights in China itself, including the appointment of Japanese advisors to the Chinese government. The Chinese successfully resisted the latter demands but gave up their claims to Shandong for economic concessions.