The historical facts such as the occupation of Shantung province by the Japanese troops in 1914 and the forced Chinese acceptance of the 21 Demand by the Japanese in 1915 aroused the patriotism and nationalism of the Chinese people.
China participate...
The historical facts such as the occupation of Shantung province by the Japanese troops in 1914 and the forced Chinese acceptance of the 21 Demand by the Japanese in 1915 aroused the patriotism and nationalism of the Chinese people.
China participated in World War Ⅰ on the side of the Allies, and sent her representatives to the Paris Peace Conference after the war with the purposes of stopping the Japanese invasion of the continent and recovering her sovereignty in Shantung. Chinese diplomatic efforts at the conference, however, ended in a failure, and the Japanese position in Shantung was internationally recognized.
A chain of humiliations China suffered during the 1910's in her relations with foreign countries gave an impetus to arouse Chinese nationalism and patriotism, resulting the Anti-Japan Movement, the Save-the-Nation Campaign, and the New Cultural Movement. The save-the-nation political campaign started from the May Fourth Movement developed to the formation of the Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party.
What China experienced in her relations with foreign countries in the 1910's had two significant meanings to the domestic political developments of China after 1920. For one thing, her disappointment at the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference made Chinese peoples to regard Western and Japanese imperialism as a public enemy of China. Consequently Chinese intellectuals came to have much interest in the Bolshevik revolution, Marxism and Leninism, which gave a birth to an organized political power, the Chinese Communist Party, in 1921.
Secondly, the political, financial and military privileges Japan gained from China in the 1910's became the base of the full-scale Japanese invasion of China. The Japanese military invasion not only deprived China of her opportunity to developing her as a unified stable country. But also caused her to fall into economic debacle. Under these circumstances, the Chinese Communist Party could gain more power, and finally took over the entire continent of China.