May Fourth spirit keeps on inspiring

BRUSSELS - The Centenary Monument was dedicated on Saturday at Deng Xiaoping Square in the French town of Montargis, which hosted hundreds of Chinese youth following China's May Fourth Movement a century ago.

"The 100th anniversary of the movement offers a good opportunity for us to review what happened in China on May 4, 1919," Philip Vanhaelemeersch, an Oxford-educated historian and director of the Confucius Institute with Howest University in Belgium, told Xinhua.

In April 1919, the Paris Peace Conference ceded Germany's possessions in China's coastal province of Shandong to Japan. It was a blow to China, a victor in World War I (1914-18), as it was hoping to regain full sovereignty over its territorial possessions.

Japan was given control over some of vanquished Germany's possessions thanks to its alliance with the Allies.

"It was therefore necessary to compensate Japan with some concessions," Jean-Louis Rizzo, a French historian, said during a ceremony held in Montargis on Saturday.

"So China was sacrificed by some secret diplomacy in Paris on April 28 and 30, 1919, when the conference validated the Japanese demands for Shandong."

"The decisions of the Paris conference had in any case made it clear to the Chinese people that they had nothing to expect from the European powers and the United States. This is one of the major consequences of the unfair decision of the Paris conference," Rizzo added.

Soon the news rippled through China, prompting a strong patriotic campaign, called the May Fourth Movement.

Lu Zhengxiang, who headed the Chinese delegation to the Paris conference, once said in a letter to his superiors that the conference was dominated by strong powers breaching international norms.

To protest the unfair treatment of his country, Lu ultimately refused to sign the Versailles Treaty, making China the only participating country not to sign. Around eight years later, Lu became a postulant in the Benedictine monastery of Sint-Andries in Bruges, Belgium.

Disappointed by the state of affairs, he told reporters that weak countries had no rights, no righteousness and no diplomacy.

Unfortunately, hegemony is still popular among some politicians and pundits a century after the Paris conference.

In that sense, ceremonies across China on Saturday marking the centenary of the May Fourth Movement served as a perfect reminder to the world about the danger of political hegemony and the urgency of building a community of a shared future for mankind as well as a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation.

China has been pursuing the concept of datong, or "a harmonious world," since ancient times, and the idea of building a community with a shared future for mankind is a reinterpretation of datong in the 21st century, said David Gosset, founder of the Europe-China Forum.

In March, at the closing ceremony of a global governance forum co-hosted by China and France in Paris, President Xi Jinping proposed a four-pronged approach to addressing "four deficits" in global affairs, namely the governance deficit, trust deficit, peace deficit and development deficit.

It is advisable to uphold a new vision of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security, discard Cold War and zero-sum mentalities, reject the law of the jungle and settle conflicts through peaceful ways, Xi said.

He called for upholding the United Nations as a banner of multilateralism, giving full play to the constructive role of global and regional multilateral mechanisms, and jointly pushing for the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

As a victim of hegemony and power politics, China has learned from its own past that it has to stand up and stand for a new type of international relations, which is the call of the times.

Xinhua