This paper aims to grasp how Tiananmen Square was used in the May Fourth Movement 1919 which is regarded as a landmark incident of modern history in China, as well as in repeated mass movements that occurred in 1920s Beijing mainly by using newspapers.
The May Fourth Movement started with a student protest in Beijing on May 4th, 1919, and ended on June 28th 1919 when the Republic of China (ROC) declined to sign the Treaty of Versailles. The first place that the protesters gathered on May 4th, 1919 was Tiananmen Square. Previous research gives the following three reasons why Tiananmen Square was used as a gathering place: 1) convenience as a key traffic stop, 2) openness as a public space, and 3) closeness to foreign embassies. In addition to these three reasons, this paper pointed out that the speech events held by Peking University in November 1918 in celebration of the World War I victory can be considered as a fourth reason. But after the first day, the students who participate the May Fourth Movement did not use the Tiananmen Square and distributed flyers and speech at various places in the city area, because the Square was sealed by Beijing police forces.
After the May Fourth Movement, mass movements began happening frequently in Beijing. By investigating two newspapers called "Morning Post" and "Shuntian Times", events occurred at Tiananmen Square total 29 in 9 years from 1919 to the end of the Beijing Government of the ROC, of which there were 23 mass movements. Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of the mass movements that happened in Tiananmen Square during this period, and shows that the Square began to be used not only by students but also by business groups and workers in Beijing, that the scale of the movements expanded, and that the movements were often hindered by government authorities. And some unique uses of the space were also discovered in Table 1. In these mass movements, the people temporarily installed a speech podium at the center of Tiananmen Square and used the Square as meeting place or last destination of the demonstration activities in surrounding city streets.
Comparing the usage of Tiananmen Square before and after the May Forth Movement, it is possible to find clear differences. One example of use before the May Fourth Movement is the military parade by the first president Yuan Shikai on the ROC's National Foundation Day, 1913. Yuan's military parade was held by Beijing Government of the ROC, used Tiananmen as a viewing stage of the president, and used only the Square without using the surrounding city streets, and was quite different from the characteristics of the usage of the mass movements after the May Fourth Movement, which were led by students and workers, temporarily installed a speech podium on the Square, and used the square together with the demonstration activities in streets. It is interesting that the usage of Tiananmen Square sharply changed before and after the May Fourth movement, but the space structure of the Square is almost unchanged except for a railroad track laid in 1924. It can be said that such situation seen in Tiananmen Square before and after the May Fourth movement is similar to Tokyo's Imperial Palace Sqaure or Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square before and after World War II.
