The path towards modernisation in China was far from straight forward. At the start of the 20^th Century many blamed China’s weaknesses and backwardness on the ailing Imperial dynasty. The dynasty fell in 1911 creating a power vacuum in which the nationalist Kuomintang competed with regional warlords and the CCP formed in 1921 to fill (Tuner, 2000, p.38). The disarray that China fell into came as a great disappointment to the man who worked hardest for a modern Chinese republic, Sun Yat-sen. SunYat-sen was a founding member and the first leader of the Kuomintang that would govern China for much of the period up to 1949. Like the CCP the Kuomintang had a relationship with the May 4^th Movement if not the New Culture Movement. The Kuomintang was a nationalist organisation as well, split into capitalist and socialist if not communist factions. On a more practical level Sun Yat-sen helped the process of modernisation by developing China’s inadequate train network (Wakin, 1997, p.12).

Many Chinese people deeply resented foreign power and influence in China, which their governments Imperial and Republican were both incapable and unwilling to end. Germany’s defeat in the First World War did not lead to the Chinese government taking back German rights in China. Instead of that happening the Allies gave all Germany’s rights to the Japanese without bothering to consult the Chinese government. There was mass protest in China leading to the formation of the May 4^th Movement. The May 4^th Movement was dominated by young Chinese intelligentsia, some of which would later have links with the CCP. Mao himself would be close to some members of the May 4^th Movement although his ideas on modernisation and revolution would prove more radical. There were also people in China that wished to radically alter society and culture, the New Culture Movement (Starr, 2001, p.211). The May 4^th movement failed in its original aim of returning the city of Qingdao under Chinese control rather than allowing the Japanese to take control of it under the terms of the Versailles Peace Settlement (Wasserstrom, 2003, p.94). The May 4^th Movement had an influence both on the Kuomintang and the CCP that tinged both parties with strong nationalist traits yet with differing ideas of modernisation (Wasserstrom, 2003, p.138). For a time it seemed that the Kuomintang and the CCP would work together to modernise China. Such an alliance seemed practical as both parties claimed to be nationalist and revolutionary whilst looking towards the Soviet Union for support in their struggles against foreign imperialists and backwardness. Things did not turn out that way largely due to the Kuomintang turning on their communist allies once they had tightened their control over the country. Chiang Kai-shek viewed the elimination of the CCP as vital for undisputed control of China as well destroying its links with the May 4^th Movement and the New Cultural Movement. Chiang would put destroying them ahead of fighting the Japanese whilst attempting to modernise China (Hobsbawm, 1994, p.70).

Chiang’s efforts to modernise China would be hampered by increasing Japanese aggression and invasion of China during the 1930s. These failures would help the CCP build stronger relationships with those from the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement that might have followed the Kuomintang instead. Despite his best efforts Chiang could not completely destroy the CCP and the inspirational Mao. It was Mao that allowed the CCP to dominate its relationship with the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement. Chiang hoped to modernise China by extending education provision, developing or extending communications whilst attempting to industrialise the country. Chiang also attempted to modernise the Chinese army although it proved no match against the Japanese even after advice from the German army. The ‘New Life Movement’ set up in 1934 was intended to shore up the Kuomintang regimes popularity whilst helping to modernise China by persuading people that hard work and morality would lead to national regeneration. The main problem for the New Life Movement was that although Chiang himself was seen as honest, it was a virtue that many of his colleagues in the Kuomintang lacked (Brendon, 2000, p.549).

The New Life movement showed that Chiang and the Kuomintang were aware of the need to have strong nationalist support backing the regime rather than opposed to it. The Kuomintang intended to prove they were the real successors to the nationalist mantle of the May 4^th Movement or the social aims of the New Culture Movement rather than the CCP. The claims of the Kuomintang to be the truest Chinese nationalists, the best guardians of Chinese culture and the best people to modernise China would be severely dented by the failure to repel the Japanese invaders. Chinese resistance to the Japanese was sporadic, strong in places yet inept or non-existent in other places. Even if the Kuomintang had not been distracted by its campaigns against the CCP they were militarily no where near a match for the better -trained and equipped Japanese. The West looked on whilst the Japanese did what they wanted whilst military supplies from the Soviet Union were not enough to equip either government forces or the communists (Brendon, 2000, p.547). For the most part Mao and the Red Army avoided pitched battles with either Kuomintang forces or the Japanese invaders. Mao had learnt the hard way that his Red Army was at that stage no match for Chiang in a pitched battle. Defeated in 1934 Mao and his followers embarked on the long March during October 1934. Mao in the areas that the Chinese Communist Party controlled would show to many Chinese that lived in government controlled areas that the best hopes for food and land as well as modernising China lay with him. All the trials and tribulations of the CCP meant that many Chinese believed it had earned the right to take over the mantles of the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement (Wakin, 1997, pp.28-29).

Unlike Lenin and Trotsky in 1917 Mao did not have any working class militant proletariat to help him seize power even if he wanted to use them because there were none to speak of. Mao had grasped quickly that the key to political power plus social, economic and eventually a Cultural Revolution and modernisation was gaining the support of the hundreds of millions of the Chinese peasantry. Failure to gain this support had restricted the success of the May 4^th Movement and later the New Culture Movement. In that respect the relationship between the CCP and the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement was based on the CCP examining the successes and failures of the two movements. If Mao could use the support of the peasants instead of Chiang he could chose how China would be modernised. Although Mao was a committed Marxist he adapted Marxist doctrines to fit Chinese conditions. Not only did he base the revolutionary tactics of the CCP around inciting the peasants rather than the workers towards revolution he maintained that political will was of greater importance than social and economic conditions or progress. Mao saw China’s biggest failure to modernise politically, economically and socially as been due to her exploitation by the West and Japan. In other words Mao was more than happy to associate the CCP with Chinese nationalism and the cultural greatness of the Chinese combined with the wasted potential of the peasants. Mao and the CCP intended to fulfil their own aims, yet those aims shared some from the May 4^th Movement and the new Culture Movement. While the CCP went down the path of creating a strong established communist state these aims were seen as compatible with modernising China and making her resistant to foreign intervention or exploitation (Eatwell and Wright, 2003, p. 119).

For Mao gaining the support of the peasants paid dividends during the fighting against the Kuomintang and the Japanese. The support of the peasants not only allowed the Chinese Communist Party to gain power it also meant that it became far more powerful than any of the other movements that wished to modernise China. To win the war against the Japanese and the civil war against Chiang and the Kuomintang government, Mao with the Red Army mainly drawn from the peasantry fought long term guerrilla campaigns. The CCP gained in popularity as it stressed the relationship between its ideas and those of the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement. The other thing that Mao was to develop was an effective civil service wherever the Chinese Communist Party gained control (Hobsbawm, 1994, p.79).

In many ways Mao was like his mentor, Joseph Stalin in that he was from a peasant background and used the support of the peasantry (admittedly in different circumstances). Mao like Joseph Stalin believed that the best hope for his country’s success was rapid modernisation no matter what the human and environmental costs. As with Stalin Mao was prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to fulfil his own aim of bringing China into the modern world. Just because Mao understood the peasants did not mean that he was not prepared to sacrifice their lives. This was were the relationship between the May 4^th Movement had been weakest as it had not concentrated on the peasantry for support or wished to sacrifice them. Mao would allow up to 20 million of his own people to starve to death, a scale of famine previously only seen in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s. In some ways it could be argued that the relationship between the CCP and the CPSU was more important than with the May 4^th Movement and the New Culture Movement (Brendon, 2000, p. 211).

Alongside the economic and industrial modernisation of China, Mao of course instigated a Cult of Personality and indoctrination of the Chinese people with Marxism. The Cult of Personality worked not only because of well -used propaganda, it gained momentum from Mao’s reputation of standing up for China and its people. Mao and the Red Army had resisted the Japanese and went on to defeat Chiang who had placed greed and corruption ahead of ruling the country. Mao was popular with the majority of the Chinese people. For the vast majority of the peasantry their standard of living improved markedly in the first decade of the CCP’s rule. While many benefited from the distribution of land to the landless peasants all opponents of the regime were brutally repressed. The relationship with the New Culture Movement was stronger here as the CCP altered culture and society by breaking up the old elite although inadvertently created new ones (Wakin, 1997, p.31). The Chinese supported the CCP as it promised them a much better future and made the present much improved from the past (Wasserstrom, 2003, p.143).

Mao himself was not happy with the pace or direction of China’s modernisation which prompted him to launch two major campaigns to alter China economically and culturally, The Great Leap Forward of 1958 – 60 plus the later Cultural Revolution started in 1966 (Turner, 2000,p.61).

The New Culture Movement was to be closely associated with the Cultural Revolution that was the direct result of the CCP attempting to make the increasing number of workers the cultural epicentre of China and attempts to modernise her. The New Culture Movement had originally started in the 1920s and its main influence upon the CCP was the concept that a uniform of culture could be imposed upon the whole of the Chinese people. For Mao the best culture that could be imposed upon China was that of the working class proletariat as opposed to either that of the peasant or the intellectualism of the CCP bureaucrats or factory technicians (Wasserstrom, 2003, pp. 232-33). The Great Leap Forward had been a direct result of Mao allowing people to criticise the government in public in the 1957 ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’. The Chinese Communist Party had expected little criticism and much public support and was shocked by the reality of their unpopularity. Those who took up the option to criticise the government found themselves imprisoned or executed whilst Mao decided to radicalism in government policies (Starr, 2001, p.59). The Great Leap Forward was designed to advance Chinese industrial and agricultural output; it was intended to be a major stepping stone on the path the modernisation. In reality it was an economic and humanitarian disaster and caused a man made famine almost without parallel. Although the Great Leap Forward did not damage the Chinese Communist Party fatally in a political sense it was abandoned in 1960. The parallel with the failures of Stalin’s industrialisation and collectivisation programmes were uncanny (Wong, 2000, p. 15)

The end of the Great Leap Forward had not lessened the desire of Mao and the more radical members of the CCP leadership to modernise China through radical cultural, political and economic changes. The search for radical approaches to the modernisation of China would lead to the period when the relationship between the ideas of the May 4^th Movement, the New Culture Movement and the CCP would be at their strongest, during the Cultural Revolution. In many respects the Cultural Revolution would be the Chinese equivalent of the Stalinist purges. The Cultural Revolution was intended to increase the control of the CCP and Mao over the country. The aim of the Cultural Revolution was to reduce the influence of technocrats and the intelligentsia on Chinese culture and society. The Cultural Revolution would reverse one of the CCP’s most meaningful achievements, the extension of education to all. Communist rule has also expanded the number of university students and supplied China with the doctors, teachers and engineers etc needed for effective modernisation. Forcing the best trained and best educated people to work in the state owned factories, or collective farms may have fitted with following New Culture Movement concepts of having one dominant culture and the communist notion of making everybody equal but it proved ruinous to China’s modernisation (Comfort, 1993, p.139).

The simple explanation of the Cultural Revolution was that Mao did not trust technocrats, high-ranking party bureaucrats or university students and their professors (Wong, 2000, p.97). Former students formed into the Red Guard carried the Cultural Revolution forward and the Chinese Army went around the country removing any visible signs of foreign, capitalist or intellectual influence. They regarded the Cultural Revolution as a great cleansing of China. They were guided in their cleansing obey the ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao’ or the Little Red Book (Wakin, 1997, pp.33-34).

The Cultural Revolution was highly destructive as it disrupted the effective management of the economy and produced political instability. The hysteria and xenophobia that resulted from the Cultural Revolution may have resembled the attitudes or beliefs of the May 4^th Movement and the NCM yet in the end they would undermine Mao’s position within the CCP and China itself. The Cultural Revolution produced the logical outcome that could have been easily predicted and thus prevented, huge drop in factory and farm production. Even before Mao died the situation had to be reversed. Those technocrats, party bureaucrats and intellectuals that had survived the Cultural Revolution were restored to their former positions or given new ones. Mao successors attempted to further modernise China by producing economic reforms that amounted to capitalism in all but name whilst maintaining a tight grip on China’s cultural and political development (Eatwell & Wright, 2003, p.119).

Therefore it can be concluded that were relationships between the May 4^th Movement, the New Culture Movement and the CCP that contributed to the modernisation of China. These relationships varied in their strength, influence and intensity according to the situations the CCP found itself in and which views dominated the party at any given time. The main influence that the May 4^th Movement had in its relationship with the CCP was that it stressed that China had to modernise to free herself of foreign interference and invaders. The May 4^th Movement influenced not only the CCP but also it’s former allies and bitterest rivals, the Kuomintang endowing both with a strong sense of nationalism. In many ways once the CCP gained power it fulfilled the May 4^th Movement’s aims of making China a strong modernised country that did not easily give in to foreign demands or pressure.

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