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China Nationalism and Communism
After Yuan Shikai's death, shifting alliances of regional
warlords fought for control of the Beijing government. The nation
also was threatened from without by the Japanese. When World War I
broke out in 1914, Japan fought on the Allied side and seized
German holdings in Shandong Province. In 1915 the Japanese set
before the warlord government in Beijing the so-called Twenty-One
Demands, which would have made China a Japanese protectorate. The
Beijing government rejected some of these demands but yielded to
the Japanese insistence on keeping the Shandong territory already
in its possession. Beijing also recognized Tokyo's authority over
southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. In 1917, in secret
communiques, Britain, France, and Italy assented to the Japanese
claim in exchange for the Japan's naval action against Germany.
In 1917 China declared war on Germany in the hope of recovering
its lost province, then under Japanese control. But in 1918 the
Beijing government signed a secret deal with Japan accepting the
latter's claim to Shandong. When the Paris peace conference of 1919
confirmed the Japanese claim to Shandong and Beijing's sellout
became public, internal reaction was shattering. On May 4, 1919,
there were massive student demonstrations against the Beijing
government and Japan. The political fervor, student activism, and
iconoclastic and reformist intellectual currents set in motion by
the patriotic student protest developed into a national awakening
known as the May Fourth Movement. The intellectual milieu in which
the May Fourth Movement developed was known as the New Culture
Movement and occupied the period from 1917 to 1923. The student
demonstrations of May 4, 1919 were the high point of the New
Culture Movement, and the terms are often used synonymously.
Students returned from abroad advocating social and political
theories ranging from complete Westernization of China to the
socialism that one day would be adopted by China's communist
rulers.
Data as of July 1987
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