A Consciousness Awakes

Zheng Chaolin

Source: An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin.

In the eighth year of the Chinese Republic, more easily remembered as 1919, Chinese became collectively aware and my own small consciousness awoke. If I had written these memoirs ten or more years ago, in the early 1930s, I would have had no need to remind readers that the May Fourth Movement broke out in 1919. But few of today’s youth, for whom this book is written, know when the May Fourth Movement happened, let alone what it meant. In 1919, I was nineteen years old. In April, the sixth class of Fujian’s Ninth Provincial Middle School (in Longyan) finished its studies and was granted special leave so that we students could go home and await the final examina- tions in June. I returned to Zhangping and relaxed. Sometime in May, an old gentleman came to our home to chat with my father. He said that there was trouble in Beijing among the students, that they were beating people, burning houses, and boycotting lectures. After he had finished speaking, he shook his head and sighed. This old gentleman was one of just a handful of people in our town who frequently read a newspaper. My father did not read one, nor did I. Even at school, I rarely went to the reading room. It held one or two Fuzhou newspapers, but as far as I know, there were none from Beijing or Shanghai, and even the Fuzhou ones were usually out-of-date. In those days, few students ever went to the reading room to look at newspapers. There were three primary schools in Zhangping, one run by the county- government, one by a clan, and one by evangelists. There were several middle school graduates in town, together with five or six people – like me – waiting to graduate. There was a student association, but it had not met for a long time. We barely responded to the hurricane from Beijing. Other places were erupting with lecture-strikes, demonstrations, and anti-Japanese consumer boycotts. Our schoolmates left behind in Longyan wrote to tell us that they had led a demonstration of all the local primary schools and had set up a checkpoint for Japanese goods outside town on the road to Zhangzhou. They had also invaded the Chamber of Commerce, where they had banged on the table, brandished teacups, and sworn at the chairman. But we students in Zhangping had barely lifted a finger. True, pupils of the New People’s Primary School run by evange- lists outside the West Gate marched into town on one occasion, and the pastor

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004282278_018 A Consciousness Awakes 173 apparently gave each a bag of sweets and made them promise never to buy Japanese products again. But that was the church-school. When I went to take the examinations in June, the movement in Longyan had already died down. Our schoolmates told those of us who had gone home some anecdotes about what had happened, that student-pickets were still active outside town, that the student association was still meeting, but that it was not holding demonstrations, boycotting classes, or causing trouble. Even so, the climate had changed dramatically in those two months. Students who normally never stirred were now active, students who never spoke were now voluble, the reading room was crowded, current events were common knowl- edge, and most important of all, the students themselves now controlled their own association. Pinned to the association notice-board were letters from peo- ple who had gone off to study in the big cities. That was May Fourth as I experienced it. At the time, I knew nothing about May Fourth other than the anti-Japanese boycott, the attacks on traitors, the refusal to sign the treaty,1 and things of that sort. It is unlikely that anyone else in Zhangping was any better informed. And Longyan? Had people in Longyan read Xin qingnian (‘New Youth’) and been carried along by the new tide? I can- not say. But even if some had, they were a rarity. After graduating from middle school, I became unaccountably depressed. I wanted to fly, I wanted to quit the narrow cage of Zhangping, even of Fujian. While still at school, I had resolved along with several others to go to Beijing and enrol at normal school – not because I felt some ‘sacred calling’ to become a scholar but because I had heard that normal schools demanded no tuition fees or board expenses and even provided a small subsidy, so that one ended up paying scarcely more than I had paid at middle school. But my father could not help me, and neither he nor I could get our hands on any other source of funds. A Longyan student who had gone ahead sent me a postcard from Shanghai describing his visit to the New World Recreation Centre. Once again I became agitated. Just at that moment, something entirely unexpected happened.

1 In 1914, Japan seized German-controlled territory in Shandong. In 1917, Britain, France, and Italy secretly agreed to support Japan’s claim to this territory, and in 1918, the Government in Beijing secretly acquiesced in this; in 1919, the Paris Peace Conference agreed to trans- fer German rights in China to Japan. On 4 May 1919, three thousand students demonstrated in Beijing against this ‘national betrayal’ and beat a pro-Japanese official. There followed a nationwide movement of strikes, lecture-strikes, and anti-Japanese boycotts. On 28 June, the Beijing Government gave in to the protest-movement and refused to sign the Peace Treaty with Germany. So the May Fourth Movement in its narrowest sense had been brought to a successful end. In its broadest sense, May Fourth was a movement of cultural renewal and revolution.