ARI Working Paper Series

Historians have long portrayed the May Fourth Movement as a seminal period in Chinese history. By the early 1920s, that movement increased in intensity until it reached the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, newspapers such as the Le Bao (Lat Po) and the Nanyang Shang Bao (Nanyang Siang Pau) became the primary forums for discussing May Fourth ideas.

Recently, historians have thoroughly altered accepted interpretation of the May Fourth Movement. Rather than describing it as a radical rupture with China’s past, they highlight continuities that transcend the May Fourth era, linking it socially and intellectually with both the late Qing and with the later Republican and Communist eras. Others have suggested that the May Fourth Movement was a “powerful fiction” appropriated by intellectual and political elites for their own gain.

This paper looks at Singapore’s version of the May Fourth Movement in light of these revisionist interpretations. It demonstrates that May Fourth was indeed a momentous time for Singapore’s Chinese residents. At the same time, however, Singapore’s intellectuals manipulated May Fourth ideas to enhance their status relative to their rivals. In the process, they confronted their own relationship with their homeland and altered accepted definitions of the nation. For these reasons, Singapore’s May Fourth Movement sheds much light on the function of overseas print capitalism in the formation of Chinese nationalism. Furthermore, it suggests that further research is necessary to understand the link between nationalism and overseas newspapers.