May 4th Movement

Chinese student-led nationalist movement ignited by demonstrations in Beijing in 1919. It demanded that China's unpopular warlord government reject the decision by the Versailles peace conference to confirm Japan's rights over the Shandong peninsula that had been asserted in the Twenty-one demands in 1915.

The students won mass workers' support in Beijing, a boycott of Japanese goods, and stimulated an intellectual revolution, the New Culture movement. Influenced by Marxist and liberal ideas, this stimulated the subsequent creation of the Chinese Communist Party. The 70th anniversary of the May 4th Movement was marked by mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.