The May Thirtieth Movement in Shanghai and the Limits of Sentiment

Abstract

The May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 was modern China’s first social movement in which the participants hailed from nearly all sectors of society. Students, Communists, members of the Guomindang Nationalist Party (GMD), businessmen, and workers found unity in the struggle for a sovereign, unified state, free from foreign interference. In Shanghai, these participants went on strike, temporarily closed their own businesses, stopped their schoolwork, protested, and boycotted foreign goods. In acknowledging that the participants had other political and economic motivations in addition to their shared feelings of nationalism and outrage over police violence, this thesis sheds light on the ad hoc and negotiated nature of participation in the Movement. The result is that feelings of nationalism and outrage, however rational, only partially explain the genesis of the Movement. This complexity suggests that researchers should reconsider narratives that characterize the unification of China in 1928 as a culmination of nationalistic sentiment.