The Linguistic Legacy of the May 4 Movement

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of China’s May 4 Movement. This intellectual and cultural movement was to have a profound and lasting impact on the Chinese language.  

On 4 May 1919, thousands of students gathered in Beijing to protest China’s treatment at the Paris Peace Conference to end World War I. The conference had decided a few days earlier, on 30 April, that Germany’s territorial possessions in Shandong Province would be handed to Japan, not returned to China. The students marched to the foreign legation quarter and, finding it blocked by police, went instead to the home of communications minister Cao Rulin. Some of the students burnt the house down while others beat minister to Japan, Zhang Zongxiang. Both ministers were considered collaborators with Japan. 32 students were arrested and one died in hospital as a result of injuries from a clash with police.

More protests took place in Shanghai and other cities shortly afterwards, which also called for the release of the students. Student strikes were underway in Beijing by mid-May, and in early June workers and business people went on strike in various cities. The government responded by dismissing Cao and Zhang from their positions, and refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles. Nevertheless, the decision to transfer Germany’s holdings to Japan was formalised in Articles 156-8 of the treaty (Mackerras, 2013).

The events of 4 May were part of the broader New Culture Movement, also sometimes referred to as the May 4 Movement. This intellectual, cultural and social movement began around 1915 and continued into the 1920s. It was prompted by the failure of the 1911 revolution to establish a stable and effective republic following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and focused on critiquing and attacking traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism, which was blamed for China’s weakness.

Its main figures, such as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu, argued China needed science, democracy and a literary revolution to become a modern and prosperous country. Language was connected to all of these.

The dominant kind of written Chinese at the time was文言wényán, a traditional literary style of the language. Wényán had long been used for scholarly and official purposes and most literature. It was characterised by economy of expression, lack of punctuation and substantial use of literary allusions, all of which made it very different from the everyday spoken language. These features were particularly embodied in a style of wényán called 八股文bāgǔwén, or “eight part essay”.

Becoming literate in wényán was a challenging task requiring years of study to achieve, which severely restricted literacy among the general population (Taylor & Taylor 2014).

There was also another kind of written Chinese, known as白话 báihuà (literally “plain speech”). Báihuà was a vernacular literary language and had been used since the Tang and Song dynasties to write diaries, folk stories and plays, as well as popular novels such as Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber. It was considerably closer to the everyday spoken language than wényán.

In the late Qing dynasty, some scholars and officials called for wényán to be replaced by 白话 báihuà. Some progress towards this was made during the Reform Movement of 1898, and led to a large number of newspapers, magazines and textbooks being published in báihuà (Chen, 1999; 2007). However, opposition remained because báihuà was generally considered vulgar and unsophisticated, and as such unsuitable as a medium for important functions in society.

Promoting báihuà became a major cause for New Culture Movement figures. They argued education for the whole population was necessary to establish democracy and science in China, and education required widespread literacy (Chen, 1999). In a series of articles published in 1917 and 1918, Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu put forward the case for báihuà to become “the base for a multi-purpose modern standard written language” (Chen, 1999: 72).

In his 1917 article “Preliminary views on the reform of literature”, Hu Shi outlined eight ways in which literature could be improved, all focused on avoiding the worst elements of wényán writing. In another article the following year called “Constructive views on literary revolution”, he articulated his position on the relationship between literature and a standard written language. He contended literature must be written in the vernacular to be relevant to the present day, and exemplary works of literature written in báihuà could provide the basis for standard Chinese. Chen Duxiu similarly criticised wényán in a 1917 piece in which he described what were considered classic wényán works as “flowery, extravagant, artificial, or obscure”, and argued they were both a symptom and cause of everything that was wrong with China. He therefore believed China’s political restoration required a restoration of literature, and this required the language itself to be reformed. Like Hu Shi, his solution was báihuà (Chen, 1999: 74).

These ideas received enthusiastic support from other scholars and intellectuals spurred on by the events of May 4, 1919, and their combined efforts proved successful.

In 1920, the Ministry of Education required textbooks to be written in báihuà and báihuà to be taught in the first two years of primary school. Hundreds of newspapers and journals began using báihuà shortly thereafter. In 1921, two important literary works were published in báihuà, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun and a collection of poetry by Guo Moruo called The Goddess, which demonstrated báihuà could indeed be used for such purposes.

By the 1940s, báihuà had become the dominant kind of written Chinese (Chen 1999; Norman 1988).

Language reform continued to be an important issue throughout the rest of the Republican era and into the Communist era, but the push for báihuà to replace wényán was an important step in the development of what would eventually become China’s national standard language, pǔtōnghuà 普通话. Pǔtōnghuà is officially defined as “the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, and Northern dialects as its base dialect, and looking to exemplary modern works in báihuà ‘vernacular literary language’ for its grammatical norms” (Chen, 1999: 24). This is the linguistic legacy of the May 4 Movement.

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References

Chen, P. (1999). Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, P. (2007). China. In A. Simpson (Ed.), Language and national identity in Asia (pp. 141-167). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackerras, C. (2013). China in transformation 1900-1949 (2^nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Norman, J. (1988). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, I. & Taylor, M.M. (2014). Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese (Revised ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.