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.