家國之間: 五四在香港百年回望

It is well known that the May Fourth Movement was full of ambiguity and tension. On the one hand, the term refers to a one-day incident where thousands of students marched through Beijing on the May Fourth of 1919 to protest the unequal treatment of China in the Versailles Settlement. On the other hand, the same term signifies a decade-long movement, from 1915 to 1925, to promote “science” and “democracy” by changing the Chinese language, the Confucian tradition, and the patriarchal family structure. Because of its multiple meanings, different groups commemorate the May Fourth for different reasons. Sometimes, opposing groups use the commemoration to contest for power, discursively or politically.
In this paper, I will focus on how the educated elite in colonial Hong Kong had used the commemoration of May Fourth to express their local voices. Started immediately after the May Fourth incident in 1919, every year there was a commemoration of the May Fourth in Hong Kong, sometimes in the form of public gatherings and often on the pages of newspapers and magazines. In these commemorations, we see the creativity of the Hong Kong educated elite in transformation the remembering of the May Fourth into a critique of national and local politics. Their creativity, I argue, rested in their ability to use the rhetoric of national salvation to address pressing local issues, such as racial hierarchy, the colonial structure, and the identity of Chinese residents. In this fusion of the local and national narratives, we see the dynamic process of constructing and reconstructing the “May Fourth memory” that lasts to the present day.