Five Four Incident
(五四事件)
(May Fourth Movement)
By Yen Dong 余賢鐸-積彩
Five Four meant the date of May Fourth; that is a date noteworthy in Chinese history. That was the day students
demonstrated in what was called the “Five Four Campaign” (五四運動).
The Chinese government was very weak in the nineteen century. The foreign power countries were all acting
like a pack of wolves, trying to go in and take what they could from the Chinese people after the opium war in
1840. The Chinese people reminded themselves that they were under the “Semi-Colonial” condition (次殖民),
because it’s worse than being colonized. The people knew in order to save the nation that they would just have
to get rid of this government. Revolutionary movement by intellectuals and overseas student groups were
formed. One of the leaders was Sun Yat-Sen (孫中山). He managed to unite the people in a common cause;
actually they were rightist, leftist and some didn’t care who they were with as long as he got the power.
Empress Tzu-hsi (慈禧) was a concubine to the Xianfeng Emperor (咸豐). When the emperor died, her six
year old son succeeded him as Emperor Tongzhi (同治). When she eliminated all her enemies, she ran the
empire for the next forty seven years. She had a running dog named General Yuan Shikai (袁世凱) who did all
the dirty jobs for her.
When the last Qing (清朝) monarch was overthrown on October 10, 1911, who was the president of the new
republic? It was Yuan Shikai. Sun Yat-Sen had no army to back him up. As president of the most populated
nation of the world you would think he would be very happy! Not this fat old dummy; he wanted to be an
emperor. He needed help from Japan, so he conceded to Japan’s Twenty-One Demands (二十一不平等條約).
That dummy died shortly after he became the emperor of China and other warlords took over the country.
The First World War was over in Europe in 1918 and China was on the victors’ side. The representatives of
China asked that the German-occupied city of Tsingtao (青島) be returned to China, but the major powers let
Japan take over. The people were furious when they heard the news. Peking University students organized a
protest demonstration and many university students in other cities followed.
Five thousands students joined in demonstration at Tiananmen Square (天安門) and marched toward the
embassy row, but they were blocked by a foreign security force. When they took a detour, they ran past a
mansion that happened to belong to a warlord, (曹汝霖). A student scaled the wall, went in and opened the
gate, and students rushed in, started a fire and burned the place down (火燒趙家樓). Many students got
arrested. That day was May 4, 1919.
This humble coolie was born on the same day four years later. That was also the “Sun Goddess Day” (日光娘
生日) in the Chinese calendar. When Tai Mo (Aunt Sue Wo 瑞和母) went over to tell our great grandmother
about the birth of me, she was so happy that she stood up, because that is her older son’s grandson. White Head
(白頭) was in her nineties; she worked hard all her life, she was unable to walk up right for a long time, but she
was healthy enough to take care of herself.
In China the parents often wonder out loud, what will he be like when he grows up? Is he growing up like a
dragon or a snake? I don’t have the status of a dragon, but I’m not a snake either. The animal of that year in the
Chinese calendar was a boar, so I’m a pig. Eat, sleep and complain.