The May Fourth Movement of 1919 occupies a special position in scholars’ consideration of modern China as a result of the convergence of two sets of historical constructions. In China, according to official textbooks explaining the rise of the People's Republic that were first promulgated by the new socialist state in the 1950s, 1919 was identified as the very moment of origin when cultural iconoclasm was joined to a political activism of the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle: the watershed affecting the flow of all subsequent revolutionary history. In the West, as presented in Chow Tse-tsung's highly influential 1964 volume, May Fourth was singled out as the time of patriotic awakening reached as a result of intellectual exposure to such Western liberal values as science, democracy, liberty and individualism. The May Fourth Movement has since been characterized variously as a response to Western liberal influence; as a product of education abroad in Japan, Europe or America; as an awakening to the call of international Bolshevism; and as an evaluative rejection of traditional Confucianism as the primary source of authority. Whether liberal or revolutionary, these intellectual developments were then seen as the inspiration for a unified national political movement that spread outward from Beijing and Shanghai into the provinces.
