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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2019
It is next to impossible to write today, now, in this fraught historical moment about the May Fourth Movement and its centenary with anything other than sheer astonishment—still!—over the number of different sorts of people in China who organized themselves at that time, and who, in the extended process of self-organization, articulated—however inchoately and sometimes even incoherently—an intellectual and activist program of resistance and opposition to the corrupt domestic governmental systems, global institutions, local organizations, and specific individuals who were betraying the very principles of democracy and sovereignty that were supposed to be upheld. The betrayal of democratic and sovereign principles was part of an ongoing process of the elaboration of an establishment political position exercised by and through the wished-for domination of political and economic possibility by the powerful and by those who strove for power. As that process of imperialist-colonial expansion along with anti-democratic state-formation and sociocultural hegemonizing—sometimes in tandem with one another, and sometimes separately—became ever more evident, an increasingly vocal opposition posed itself as an active political force and not merely as a detached or abstract form of remonstrance. Through their activist political interventions and in the ensuing contingent realization of an incipient mass movement—incomplete, urban-based, and often elitist, to be sure—a new political consciousness and a new political discourse arose: a consciousness and discourse of the possibilities of and in mass mobilization, of a political practice of mass democracy. The May Fourth Movement, in its temporal proximity to and political juxtaposition with the Korean and Indian movements of the same year, and in the political space created by the ongoing revolution in Russia, helped constitute a world historical moment. That protracted moment can be seen as the inflection of the forces of global capitalism and imperialism into modern historical consciousness and political activism in China, as elsewhere.
1 Rancière, Jacques, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Heron, Liz (London: Verso, 2007), 20Google Scholar.
2 The title of this article was suggested to me by a fortuitous rereading of Jonsson, Stefan, A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Lanza, Fabio, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recent commentary in the PRC on the May Fourth Movement and its aftermath is far less positive than it used to be. During the last anniversary, May 2018, articles and social media posts on WeChat and other sites were circumspect. A new historical consensus has formed to focus on what is deemed the most deleterious effects of May Fourth: that the demonstrations were illegal, gave free rein to mob rule, and were violent manifestations of the lack of the rule of law. See Dafeng Hao 大风号, WeChat forum, May 5, 2018, especially the essay by Prof. Feng Xiaocai 冯筱才.
4 This is derived from Rancière's argument in On the Shores of Politics, op. cit. note 1, a point recently recalled to me by reading Walid el Houri, “Beyond Failure and Success: Revolutions and the Politics of Endurance,” Radical Philosophy 2.02 (2018), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/beyond-failure-and-success (accessed July 3, 2018). As el Houri comments, the “failure of politics as politics is … precisely its transformation into a new order.” This point has been made by many historians of Mao's China, including by me, Maurice Meisner, Arif Dirlik, and others; it was Mao Zedong's argument that institutionalization was the death of revolution and politics.
5 I am indebted to Harry Harootunian for a long set of comments on a draft of this piece, from which the above insights are derived. Jameson's argument comes in many places, but see Jameson, Fredric, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9/10 (1984): 178–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Rodney, Walter, “The Two World Views of the Russian Revolution,” in The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, eds. Kelley, Robin D. G. and Benjamin, Jesse J. (London: Verso, 2018): 1–24Google Scholar, 9, 11.
7 Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1993). Much feminist analysis today takes this as its premise. See Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modern Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs 25, no. 4 (2000): 1077–82.
8 This repudiation sometimes is as complete as the ones depicted by Bai Xianyong (Pai Hsien-yung) in his 1970 short story “Winter Nights” (in Taipei People [bilingual ed.], trans. Bai Xianyong and Patia Yasin, ed. George Kao [Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1999]). In the story, one repudiation is by an unnamed young scholar from Harvard, who delivers a conference paper condemning Chinese intellectuals for their May Fourth abandonment of Chinese tradition; the other is by the two main characters, who were active participants in the May Fourth Movement and yet, in the course of the story, come to rethink that participation as youthful delusion. (I thank Ben Kindler for reminding me of this story.)
For a discussion of the more general repudiation of revolution in China, see Wang Hui, “The Prophecy and Crisis of October: How to Think about Revolution after the Revolution,” trans. Benjamin Kindler and Harlan Chambers, South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 4 (2017): 669–706.
9 For a long time, May Fourth was understood to have “inaugurated historical time” in its critique of the putative stagnation of Chinese “tradition.” This was always an inflationary claim.
10 William Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). Also see Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–85.
11 Massimiliano Tomba, Marx's Temporalities (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), xi.
12 This is the point John Maynard Keynes makes in his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919). As he writes: “The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered … that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from events” (2).
13 Liu Zaifu and Li Zehou argued in Gaobie Geming: Huiwang Ershi Shiji Zhongguo [Farewell to Revolution: Recuperating Twentieth-Century China] (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu Youxian Gongsi, 1997) that modern revolution had taken China off its otherwise designated historical track and should be discarded as the center of historical understanding. Dai's understanding of revolution, by contrast, is materialist: as she puts it, we must say “farewell to revolution as a form of [historical] consensus.” For Dai's argument, see Zhang Zhiqi, “Dai Jinhua: Jintian de Nianqingren Dui Quanli You Yizhong Neizaide Tiren Yu Zunzhong” [Dai Jinhua: Today's Young People Have an Innate and Respectful Form of Embodied Understanding of Power], Jiemian Wenhua [Books and Fun], WeChat forum, July 5, 2018 (accessed July 9, 2018).
14 See Harootunian, Harry, History's Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
15 As Stefan Jonsson writes of the repudiation of the French Revolution by such theorists as Edmund Burke or such novelists as Flaubert, collective life is condemned as the “seedbeds for prejudices and stereotypes. The human being is prevented from thinking independently, and his or her head is loaded with delusions, half-truths, and stupidities” (Jonsson, A Brief History, op. cit. note 2, 54). In other words, among such theorists—of which there are similar articulations and counterparts in China then and today—life cannot be lived in any manner other than individually.
16 Lefebvre, Henri, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Transaction, 1999), 23Google Scholar (emphasis in original).
17 Clearly, these restorations in Western Europe also had to make their accommodations with leftism, so as to forestall socialist revolutionary movements. Yet, as Geoff Eley pointed out in a talk delivered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in March 2017, the pre-1914 proletariat was now dead on the battlefields and the post-1918 proletariat was susceptible to being contained by state-led institutions.
18 See Fanxi's, Wang account, “Chen Duxiu: Founder of Chinese Communism,” in Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Limbo, ed. Benton, Gregor (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 585–93Google Scholar.
19 Lefebvre, Henri, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2 (London: Verso, 2002), 77Google Scholar (emphasis in original).
20 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life, op. cit. note 16, 59.