The May 4th Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist and nationalist movement that began on this day in 1919 when more than 4,000 unversity students took to the streets in protest of the Treaty of Versailles. These protests became a national and cultural movement that served as an inspiration for later left-wing movements.

On the afternoon of May 4th, over 4,000 students of Yenching University, Peking University, and other schools marched from many points to gather in front of Tiananmen. They shouted slogans as "struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "do away with the Twenty-One Demands", and "don't sign the Versailles Treaty".

The next day, students in Beijing as a whole went on strike and in the larger cities across China. Students, merchants, and workers joined the protests. The demonstrators appealed to the newspapers and sent representatives to carry the word across the country. In Shanghai, a general strike of merchants and workers took place, negatively impacting the economy.

In the years that followed, many Chinese political thinkers turned to leftist politics in the wake of the political upheaval of the May 4th Movement. In 1939, Mao Zedong claimed that the May Fourth Movement was a stage leading toward the fulfillment of the communist revolution.

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  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    2 years ago

    One extremely minor part of car culture that I hate is just how boring they all look, its inherently kinda depressing to me to pass near a big road and every car is just a featureless curved blob in some metallic or black color, or if you're lucky its like metallic red or blue.

    It just sucks, I hate that I get genuinely cheered up by seeing interesting looking cars because its such minor bullshit like a white car with a red roof, or it has a couple of stripes on it. When cars were square and looked angular at least that made them interesting to look at, I get why science and physics dictates that they are curved smooth and blobular now, but then you have to make it up with funny color schemes and nice lil touches.

    Anything to not feel like every road is just a line of identical bugs going around doing endless dehumanizing work.

    • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is probably the same reason I like Brutalism particularly much, both square buildings and square cars at least have character, they have texture to the eyes that makes me wanna look at them just a little bit.

      Silver blobs on wheels and glass monoliths seem to exist to just slide past my notice and be as inoffensive and universally applicable as possible, it fucking sucks to be near.