Viral Alarm

The 4th of May 2020 marked the one-hundred and first anniversary of the May Fourth demonstrations in Beijing 1919. Commemorations of that event, and the era to which it has given a name, at a time when the world is stricken by Covid-19 pandemic has given ideologues of various persuasions, and different climes, a particular opportunity. The China Heritage series ‘Viral Alarm’ offers an ongoing meditation on the coronavirus, its significance in the Chinese world, as well as its impact on China in the world. In this chapter we feature two online May Fourth commemorations which chime both with the events of 1919 and the political and social exigencies of 2020.

As a child of May Fourth myself — I was born on 4 May 1954 — added to the fact that my adult years have, for the most part, been involved with a study of the Chinese world, it is hardly surprising that date has been as inescapable as it has been significant. Indeed, I first became aware of the ‘palimpsest of May Fourth’ in my own history when, around the time of my fifteenth birthday in 1969, I first read Mao Zedong’s essay on the subject written thirty years earlier. Twenty years later, I would submit a doctoral dissertation completed under the supervision of Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys) that dealt, in the main part, with the May Fourth era and its mixed cultural and political legacies.

Previously, China Heritage has marked the May Fourth anniversary in various ways. See:

• ‘May Fourth at Ninety-nine’, 4 May 2018; and,
• ‘Anniversaries New & Old in 2019 — Remembering 5.4, Accounting for 4.28’, 4 May 2019

A decade earlier, the predecessor to this publication devoted an issue to the subject, see ‘The Heritage of Commemoration‘, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 17 (March 2009). Then, in May 2014, it featured in the history of The Australia Centre on China in the World, of which I was the founding director (see ‘CIW — Opening a Building’.)

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May Fourth 2020 has turned out to be another red-letter anniversary, one on which issues that have bedeviled China for over a century, and that have appeared as a spectre haunting the Sino-US relationship at this moment in the history of the People’s Republic, enjoyed a particular moment in the spotlight. In a pair of commemorative essays, we discuss two very different messages delivered to Young China on 4 May 2020. The first, created by a commercial video-sharing website in Shanghai, took the form of ‘agitprop-advertising’; the other was a ‘spot-off’ claim on the hearts-and-minds of China’s youth issuing from a White House that is the viral epicentre of America’s politics of treason. That someone, anyone, at the Trump White House would have the gall to lecture anyone, even people in China’s People’s Republic, about ‘Mr Democracy’ and ‘Mr Science’ — the twin tutelary spirits of May Fourth — at the height of America’s coronavirus crisis is beyond satire. It is not, however, above lambasting.

The May Fourth messages issuing from both Beijing and Washington demonstrated through their culturally specific forms of bombast, hyperbole and self-delusion just how much the two great contending powers actually share in common. They also offered a Kafkaesque backdrop to the festive spirit of Zoomed-in birthday drinks and familial conviviality that I was able to enjoy in rural New Zealand.

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‘Mangling May Fourth 2020’ is published in two parts. Part one, below, focusses a gimlet eye on Beijing. In the second part we invite readers to turn their gaze to the Far East and the topsy-turvy world of Washington.

‘Viral Alarm’ is the theme of China Heritage Annual 2020. For a table of contents and links to other chapters in the series, see here. For further reading material related to May Fourth, scroll to the end of this essay.

— Geremie R Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 May 2020

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The End of Ambiguity —
Patria, Party & Purchasing Power

 

As early as May 1919, participants in the 4 May demonstrations that year were contending over what to name that moment in Chinese history and how to think about it in the context of the social, cultural and political maelstrom of the day. As Sebastian Veg noted during the 2019 commemorating of the centennial of May Fourth, such ‘foundational ambiguity’ remains relevant to China in 2020, as well as to the rest of the world:

The foundational ambiguity of May Fourth – the somewhat tenuous connection between the student protests and the intellectual effervescence of 1915-1923 – was reflected in the battle to control the naming and narrative of the movement, which began even before the end of the demonstrations. Indeed, selective re-narration has contributed so much to May Fourth mythology that before returning to the events themselves, it is useful to begin by briefly attempting to scrape off the commemorative varnish of the last century. 

In “The True spirit of the May Fourth Movement” (26 May 1919), Luo Jialun (1897-1969), one of the PKU student leaders and editors of New Tide, not only gave the movement its name, but also argued that its spirit could be summarized as a challenge to arbitrary authority. Chen Duxiu (1879-1942), a PKU professor and founding editor of the movement’s other most influential journal, New Youth, canonized the phrase “new culture movement” in several articles published in early 1920, in which he made a case for “newness” as its intellectual core. By contrast, Hu Shih (1891-1962) was critical of the notion of “new culture” and preferred the notion of “Chinese Renaissance,” which originated in a letter addressed in 1915 by the famous journalist Huang Yuanyong (1885-1915) to the editors of Tiger magazine in Tokyo, shortly before he was tragically assassinated in San Francisco. The implications were almost diametrically opposed: while the notion of “new culture” suggested a clean break with the past, Hu’s Renaissance highlighted the need to reestablish cultural continuity through a critical confrontation with the ossified aspects of tradition.  

The ambiguities of commemoration are well reflected in the stance of political leaders. The KMT leadership, including Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek, while eager to capitalize on their connection with the patriotic student demonstrations and outrage against unequal treaties, consistently tried to minimize the significance of language reform or anti-Confucianism (although Sun and the pro-KMT newspaper Meizhou Pinglun quickly picked up the term “new culture movement”). After the KMT and the CCP entered the Second United Front in 1937, they agreed to make May Fourth into Youth Day, a national holiday, in 1939. However, in 1944, Youth Day was changed by the KMT government to March 29, while May Fourth became “Literature Day,” which remained its name after the KMT fled to Taiwan, where the movement was commemorated, but with the lament that it had led to the victory of the “communist bandits,” a conviction shared by KMT and CCP historians alike.

The CCP leadership, no less eager to rake in the political capital of the patriotic demonstrations, went to great lengths to establish a direct connection between the movement and the foundation of the Party. In 1939 in Yan’an, Mao gave a speech for the 20th anniversary of May Fourth, in which he first set out the ideas that he refined the following year in “New Democracy” and that continue to inform PRC historiography today. The two strands of the movement are tied together as “anti-feudal” (new culture) and “anti-imperialist” (patriotic marches), and the emphasis is placed on the mass mobilization of 3 June 1919 that included workers, so that the movement can be construed as the turning point from the “old democratic” revolutions (controlled entirely by the bourgeoisie) to the “new democracy,” in which the proletariat has allied with the bourgeois intellectuals. While May Fourth is portrayed as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution, it necessarily remained incomplete until the foundation of the CCP in 1921 established the leadership of the masses, which intellectuals in Yan’an were now – in 1939 – summoned to conform to. 

The notion of “enlightenment,” today a central idea in the May Fourth portfolio, was not used at the time of the events and indeed appeared quite late, in the context of the United Front of the mid 1930s. It was discussed by Li Changzhi (1910-1978) in China’s Cultural Renaissance (1946), and picked up by intellectuals in the early 1980s who were eager to salvage May Fourth from Mao’s narrative. Li Zehou (b. 1930) used it to elaborate his influential theory of “enlightenment and national salvation,” in which intellectuals’ aspirations to autonomy were repeatedly thwarted by the demands of national politics. However, it too can be viewed as an ex post reconstruction that mainly served to vindicate the loyal intellectuals whose views had been neglected by the Party and who hoped to launch a new enlightenment in the 1980s by designating Mao’s despotism as the new “feudalism.”

— Sebastian Veg, ‘May Fourth, 1919:
The Making of Modern China’
The Diplomat, 1 May 2019

As we observed in ‘Homo Xinensis‘, a preliminary study of the comrade-consumer ideal of the Xi Jinping era published in China Heritage on 31 August 2018:

The making of modern citizens, and consumers, is hardly unique to China. That it has been constantly embroiled with politics, in particular the party-state is, however, noteworthy. … In particular, we would note the importance for the party-state, be it that of the Nationalists or the Communists, to train generation after generation of young people to join the ranks of ideologically suitable patriots. As each generation ages, or becomes disaffected, new candidates are groomed.

From the 1930s, the Communist Party massaged the message of May Fourth to focus attention on patriotism. The intense ideological indoctrination process launched in the Communist wartime base at Yan’an in the early 1940s indicated Party members and China’s left-leaning intelligentsia not only into accepting the fundamentals of Mao Zedong Thought, but also, ideally, in expressing through thought, word and deed Party doctrine. A core element of the newly implanted mental landscape was that May Fourth was essentially a patriotic movement  manage and patriotism and 1-5 May holiday confounding the message.

Now the messaging is trifold: patria, party and purchasing power.

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‘Surge Forth, Wave of Youth!’
Agitrop-Advertising for May Fourth

 

As May Fourth 2020 approached, there was an ongoing repression of free speech in the People’s Republic, both in response to the disastrous mishandling of the coronavirus at home and in relation to civil life generally. (See, for example, Vivian Wang, Amy Qin and Sui-Lee Wee, ‘Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is Silencing Them’, The New York Times, 4 May 2020). As the country pursued a sector-by-sector return to the status quo ante, or 復工復產復學, commercial interests identified ways both to hail the May Fourth Youth Festival while exploiting its commercial potential. One forward-leaning Internet venture in Shanghai produced  a video ‘advertorial’ directed at the nation’s cashed-up youth while also appealing to their ideological overlords.

Bilibili 嗶哩嗶哩, also known as’B site’, is a video-sharing website built around ‘ACG’ —  animation, comic, and game, a flourishing online subculture in which users submit, view and add subtitled commentary to popular videos. On Bilibili users can submit videos that are hosted either by itself or third-party sources and there is also a live-streaming service that allows users to interact with streamers and, in real-time, overlay subtitles on videos allowing for interactive playback. That is, users can watch, engage with and comment on content. As it has grown in popularity, Bilibili expanded its pop-cultural purview to include music, dance, film, general comic entertainment, drama, fashion, lifestyle and even science and technology. One of its strengths is the kind of ‘advertorial’ or short-form advertisement or product placement films. Bilibili was also mindful of contemporary China’s particular regime of socialist-commercialism and it was energetic in the soft promotion of Party messages.

On 3 May 2020, Bilibili enjoyed a commercial propaganda bonanza. ‘Agitprop-advertising’ — ‘prop-ad’ for short — is a way of marketing a commercial brand, in this case Bilibili itself, while repeating key talking points from official propaganda. Ingeniously commodified ideological content has a long history in reform-era China. It was also the subject of ‘CCP™ & Adcult PRC’, my 1999 study of the intersection of advertising and avant-garde/ popular culture, on the one hand, and politics and propaganda (or ‘representational pedagogy’), on the other. That study addressed the question: ‘what happens when corporate competition feeds into patterns established by party-ordained ideological conditioning?’ At the time, I forecast that, ‘the avant-garde will also compose anthologies of previous avant-garde strategies, thereby enabling them to be recirculated into mainstream political and commodity culture and create a nostalgic revival of post-totalitarian tropes that have been colonized by the corporate totalitarian state.’ It’s a rather prolix way of saying that the appearance of Bilibili’s pro-patria and pro-party video ‘The Wave of Chinese Youth’ (or, ‘The Next Wave’) on 3 May 2020 hardly came as a surprise.

The title of the video, ‘後浪’ — ‘wave from behind’, ‘upcoming wave’ or ‘next wave’ — was a reference to the well-known expression 長江後浪推前浪, ‘New waves on the Yangtze River relentlessly push forward to overcome the old’. In the early evening of Sunday, the 3rd of May, Bilibili secured a four-minute advertising window for a video titled ‘Bilibili 献给新一代的演讲《后浪》’  , or ‘The Next Wave — Bilibili’s message for China’s New Generation’. During the 19:00 nationwide news program, CCTV included a two-minute clip of the video and, according to Bilibili, within the space of three hours the clip had been viewed over one million times. By the following day, 4 May, there had been 7.44 million views with over 1.25 million online comments. At the time of writing ‘The Next Wave’ had been viewed some 144 million times (see 《後浪》).

‘The Next Wave’ or ‘The Wave of Youth’ featured the stentorian tones of the popular veteran actor He Bing 何冰 and his stirring narration is accompanied by a montage of images of joyful young people, media stars, Bilibili influencers and a plethora of upbeat and glitzy romantic scenes. As He Bing tells what would soon be tens of millions of viewers:

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Within hours the leading Communist Party media outlet People’s Daily was promoting the Bilibili video and its own hashtag — #獻給年輕一代的演講#, ‘Addressing the New Generation’ — soon boasted over 80 million readers. The message was clear:

‘Recently, Bilibili released a video of a speech that acknowledges, praises and offers a word of advice to our young  people:

“All of those who complain that the youth of today can’t compare with the young people of the past need to take a good look at you. The most stunning landscape of a nation is the vista presented by its young. What great good fortune you enjoy to have been born at this time; just as the present age is fortunate to have you all living in it.”

‘Give expression to your own sense of self while embracing the world. Youth Festival [4 May] is upon us: follow your youthful dream!’

近日，嗶哩嗶哩發佈一段演講視頻，認可、贊美、寄語年輕一代：「那些抱怨一代不如一代的人，應該看看你們。一個國家最好看的風景，就是這個國家的年輕人。你們有幸遇見這樣的時代，時代更有幸遇見這樣的你們。」表達自我，擁抱世界，青年節將至，一起追夢青春！

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Many WeChat comments were also soon being reported including such lines as ‘”The Next Wave” brought tears to my eyes’ 讓人熱淚盈眶. Some went so far as to declare that the video was nothing less than an updated version of ‘A Paean to Youthful China’ 少年中國說, a celebrated essay by Liang Qichao (梁啟超, 1873-1929) composed in 1900 which contained such sentiments as:

Today’s responsibility lies with the youth. If the youth are wise, the country will be wise. If the youth are wealthy, the country will be wealthy. If the youth are strong, the country will be strong. If the youth are independent, the country will be independent. If the youth are free, the country will be free. If the youth progress, the country will progress. If are youth are better than Europeans, China will be better than Europe. If our young people are more heroic than the rest of the world, China will be more heroic than the rest of the world. 故今日之責任，不在他人，而全在我少年。少年智則國智，少年富則國富；少年強則國強，少年獨立則國獨立；少年自由則國自由；少年進步則國進步；少年勝於歐洲，則國勝於歐洲；少年雄於地球，則國雄於地球。

On 1 September 2018, Liang’s paean had featured in the Ministry of Education’s ‘First Lesson for the New School Year’ broadcast to all school-age children. (For more on this and on the Communist culture of youth under Xi Jinping, see Homo Xinensis Militant, China Heritage, 1 October 2018.) Evidently, commercial outlets like Bilibili had also been watching, and learning from, the show.

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The timing of the 4 May 2020 Bilibili video was exquisitely off-beat, for it appeared just as the world was exhibiting symptoms of what independent Beijing thinkers like Zi Zhongyun 資中筠 have referred to as ‘China Withdrawal’ as the coronavirus ravaged the international community and the Chinese Communists responded to the ‘home-goal’ global crisis by repressing outspoken critics at home, attempting to shift blame on to others overseas and unseemly crowing over the torments suffered by other countries. These are a contemporary outgrowth of the ‘dark taproots of the national character’ 國民劣根性 excoriated by Chinese writers since the May Fourth era. Neither China nor the world have witnessed such an ugly display since the zealotry of the mid 1960s when Mao’s rule reached its zenith.

Regardless of how thick the shellac of commercialism applied to the core propaganda narratives of the Chinese party-state, Bilibili’s viral message to Young China essentially replicated the infamously influential comments that Mao Zedong made to a gathering of Chinese students studying in Moscow in 1957:

‘The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’ 世界是你們的，也是我們的，但是歸根結底是你們的。你們青年人朝氣蓬勃，正在興旺時期，好像早晨八九點鐘的太陽。希望寄託在你們身上。

When the Red Guards of the early Cultural Revolution years took to educating their educators, Mao’s exhortation was an inspiration (for more on this, see the 2003 film ‘Morning Sun’ 八九點鐘的太陽.)

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The ‘positive energy’ 正能量 encapsulated in ‘The Next Wave’ and further promoted by state media was hardly greeted with universal acclaim. As Initium Media in Hong Kong reported, the ‘incoming waves’ swelling in the wash created by this latest example of ‘Amazing-China hyperbole’ broke on barren shores. As one observer remarked about the fragile economic realities of the majority of China’s urban ‘youth wave’, the minute any ‘outgoing wave’ (that is a resource-rich landlord or entrepreneur) decided to raise their rent, then the jejune torrent would end up high-and-dry on the beach of debt. Many others who were outspokenly critical of the video similarly rejected its upbeat optimism about the state of affairs in China, a country in which public opinion is tirelessly corralled by censors. What, exactly, did ‘the right to chose’ vaunted by He Bing in his patronising message to Young China actually mean in practical terms? After all, in reality, the only acceptable ‘choice’ is a status quo determined by the Party and its myriad of operatives.

Of the flood of comments that appeared in the wake of the People’s Daily cross-promotion, one prominent writer posted the following observation:

‘Young people are reduced to using all kinds of online abbreviations because they are never allowed to express themselves freely. Young people have to change the lyrics of their songs if they want to reach a broader audience. Young people want to be creative and they want to exchange ideas meaningfully with each other but, more often than not, they are reduced to silence. Young people have learned that in this cultural environment they simply have to castrate themselves. What kind of Youth Wave is that? It’s a torrent that’s only permitted to flow along a course that you carved out for it.’ 「年輕人話都說不出來得用各種縮寫，年輕人唱歌上節目都得改歌詞。年輕人想創作想談論但都被緘默，年輕人學會了在這樣的文化裏自我閹割、奔湧？是在你們劃好的渠裏苟且差不多。」

Others, writing in mock homage to the narration of ‘The Next Wave’, offered:

‘Over millennia humanity has amassed vast wealth; [searching online for] all of the knowledge, understanding, wisdom and artistry that has resulted all you get is “404 Not Found.” ‘There are countless multitudes of friends who should be raising a glass in celebration [on May Fourth Youth Festival], who can’t do so because they are invisible — their online accounts have been deleted for breaching this or that regulation.’ 「人類積攢了幾千年的財富，所有的知識、見識、智慧和藝術，404 Not Found」、「千萬個值得乾杯的朋友，帳號因被投訴違反相關規定，現已無法查看」。

‘What right do they [the makers of the video] have to talk about nurturing a new and better generation? It’s an insult to China’s youth whose talents are being squandered. Young people are expected to dance although their ankles are weighed down by shackles. This video ignores the very things that keep them padlocked.’ 這樣的環境，有什麼資格說能培養出更好的一代。它只能愧對年輕人的才華，讚賞帶著鐐銬的舞姿，而絲毫不顧他們本不該有枷鎖。

Then there were those who bewailed the fact that at least previous generations, who are denigrated by inference in the Bilibili propaganda-advertisement, at least had the chance to ‘feel the pulse of the world freely because they came into contact with it directly via things like Google and Wikipedia’. Now they, too, have fallen silent over time. So, the message their example conveys to today’s youth is clear:

‘If you can’t be a role model of rebellion going against the tide, then it’s best if you just keep quiet. To you “Last Waves [of the middle-aged]”: stop trying to hijack us with your emotive tear-jerking appeals.’ 如果不能在逆流當中成為叛逆榜樣的話，那麼沉默吧，前浪，別再用熱淚盈眶綁架我們。

The swell of publicity and propaganda hype caught the proprietors of Bilibili off guard and when confronted by the mounting controversy they distanced themselves from the ruckus by declaring to journalists from Beijing Youth News that ‘The Next Wave’ was not designed with the intention of clogging up bandwidth or wreak havoc for the competition. ‘It was nothing more than a branding exercise designed as an advertisement to appear before the Evening News on the eve of the May Fourth Youth Festival’. Bilibili ‘just wanted people to be excited by it.’

— This material has been adapted and translated  from
端小二, ‘「獻給新一代的演講」《後浪》掀爭議，
「後浪」能代表你嗎？誰能定義後浪？’,
Initium Media 端傳媒, 2020年5月4日

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Keep Growing, Garlic Chives!
生長吧，韭菜！

Within hours of its release, Bilibili’s prop-ad was being parodied and spoofs proliferated. Video spoofs had been a mainstay of online culture since the appearance of Hu Ge’s ‘Murder by mantou‘ 一個饅頭引發的血案 in late-2005. In May 2020, ‘Waves of Garlic Chives’ 《韭浪》, the tag line of which was ‘Keep Growing, Garlic Chives!’ 生長吧, 韭菜 offered a line-by-line, scene-by-scene lampooning of the po-faced bombast of ‘The Next Wave’.

The term ‘garlic chives’ 韭菜 (Allium tuberosum) is a popular Internet metaphor that refers to the vast numbers of common folk who are treated as a renewable resource that can used, exploited and repeatedly harvested by the powers-that-be and the capitalists. We have previously noted the currency of ‘garlic chives’ both in the prose of Xu Zhangrun (‘When Fury Overcomes Fear’) and in the poetry of Tsering Woeser (‘Poems from a Plague’). For this particular ridiculing recreation of ‘The Next Wave’, see:

• ‘Waves of Garlic Chives’ 《韭浪》 video

Offering a parody of ‘The Wave’, the spoof mocks the exploitation of avaricious, escapist and diversion-hungry online consumers along with the particular kind of surveillance capitalism that has developed in the national-socialist Chinese state — although, unlike the narrow generational nationalism of the original, the message of this spoof is universal, one that should readily resonate around the world in the virus year of 2020.

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The Wave of American Youth

During the epidemic people have been drawn to make endless comparisons with the  United States, and they conclude that China has shown itself to be superior by far. I’ve kept my powder dry because, in my opinion, the gap between the two countries is not a matter of a decade or so; it’s a chasm that is decades if not a century wide. America takes the lead not perhaps in regard to its factories, its housing, in finance or with its political system. Where it is undeniably superior, however, is that is boasts a nurturing environment in which the kinds of creative young people [described in this article] can grow and flourish.

The most retrograde aspect of Bilibili’s ‘Wave Proclamation’ is that it negates the positive spirit of doubt and questioning. That’s exactly where America’s ‘Wave of Youth’ [again, described in the article] excel. They can enjoy an extraordinary freedom and can access vast resources. In doing so they don’t just go and lock themselves up at home to throw shade on others or waste their time making spoofs. They are tirelessly engaging resistance, in negating and creating anew.

這次的疫情，讓國人動輒就要跟美國比較，談超越。對此，我一直持保留態度，因為兩國的差距，不是十年八年，而是幾十上百年。美國的領先，不是工廠、不是房子、也不是金融和政治體制，而是這樣的年輕人和支撐他們如此有創造力的土壤。

B站的浪潮宣言，最迂腐的一點，是對質疑批判精神的否定。這恰恰是上述美國後浪們最重要的品質。他們享受著極大的自由，有著及其充沛的資源，但他們不是宅在家自我嘲諷，惡搞，而是永不停歇的反抗、否定和創新。

— from 小強, ‘別人家的後浪，美國的年輕人實力有多強’,
《美加雙城記》, 2020年5月4日

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May Fourth and Other Related Material:

• Geremie R. Barmé, ‘CCP™ & Adcult PRC’, The China Journal, no.41 (January 1999): 1-23
• Qiang Zhai, ‘1959: Preventing Peaceful Evolution’, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 18 (June 2009)
• Geremie R. Barmé, ‘The Heritage of Commemoration’, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 17 (March 2009)
• Xu Jilin 許紀霖, ‘Historical Memories of May Fourth: Patriotism, but of what kind?’, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 17 (March 2009)
• Geremie R. Barmé, ‘The Harmonious Evolution of Information in China’, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 21 (March 2010)
• ‘The May Fourth Movement: Ninety Years After’, Chinese Studies in History, 43, no.4 (July 2010)
• Christopher G. Rea, ‘Spoofing (e’gao) culture on the Chinese internet’, in Jessica Milner Davis and Jocelyn Chey, eds, Humour in Chinese Life and Culture: Resistance and Control in Modern Times, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013, pp.149-172
• Q. Edward Wang, ‘May Fourth Movement’, Oxford Bibliographies
• Geremie R. Barmé, ‘May Fourth at Ninety-nine’, China Heritage, 4 May 2018
• Q. Edward Wang, ‘The Chinese Historiography of the May Fourth Movement, 1990s to the Present’, Twentieth Century China, 44, no.2 (May 2019): 138-149
• Q. Edward Wang, ‘The May Fourth Movement: A centennial anniversary’—Editor’s introduction’,Chinese Studies in History, 52:3-4 (2019): 183-187
• Sebastian Veg, ‘May Fourth, 1919: The Making of Modern China’, The Diplomat, 1 May 2019
• Samuel Wade, ‘CCP Aggressively Guards Claim to May 4th Legacy’, China Digital Times, 3 May 2019
• David Bandurski, ‘100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement: How China buried Mr Democracy’, Hong Kong Free Press, 4 May 2019
• Geremie R. Barmé, ‘Anniversaries New & Old in 2019 — Remembering 5.4, Accounting for 4.28’, China Heritage, 4 May 2019
• Maura Cunningham, ‘May Fourth at 100: A Reading Round-Up’, The Wandering Life, 6 May 2019
• Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds, Remembering May Fourth: The Movement and its Centennial Legacy, Leiden: Brill, 2020
• Julian Borger, ‘US uses coronavirus to challenge Chinese Communist party’s grip on power’, The Guardian, 4 May 2020
• Vivian Wang, Amy Qin and Sui-Lee Wee, ‘Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is Silencing Them’, The New York Times, 4 May 2020
• 方的言，‘關於中國B站刷屏宣傳片《後浪》的爭議，談幾點看法 (2020-05-06第279期)’
• 安迪聲, ‘China Folk News: Episode 239: B站後浪，上海後浪，香港後浪，虎門後浪’, YouTube, 2020年5月6日(with English subtitles)

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