PREFACE refew mjor events in modern Chincse isry so much discussed,yet so inadequately treated as the May Fourth Movement. For some Chinese it marks a national renaissance or liberation,for others a national catastrophe.Among those who discuss or celebrate it most,views vary greatly.Every May for the last forty years,numerous articles have analyzed and commented on the movement.Several books devoted entirely to the subject and hundreds touching on it have been published in Chinese.The literature on the subject is massive,yet most of it offers more polemic than factual accounts. Most Westerners possess but fragmentary and inaccurate information on the subject.For these reasons,preparation of this volume recounting the events of the movement and examining in detail its currents and effects has seemed to me worthwhile. More personal motives have also impelled me to undertake this task.I have been interested in the subject since my boyhood in Changsha where I was a student in the same high school from which Mao Tse-tung had graduated fifteen years before.There I was active in the current student movement and became a central figure in the student"storms"and strikes.We of course looked back to the May Fourth Movement with pride and admiration.Significantly, my first poem in the new vernacular,written in this period following over one thousand verses in the classical style which I had composed earlier,was entitled "May Fourth,We Are Not Failing You."It was published in a newspaper edited by Kuo Mo-jo and T'ien Han.Even then I dreamed of some day writing a book on the May Fourth Movement.This intention was strengthened later when I attended a Kuomintang university where student movements were nor- mally prohibited. The study and presentation of this movement as a many-faceted intellectual and sociopolitical phenomenon has not been an easy task.Aware of the contro- versial nature of the subject,I have tried to introduce as many factual records as possible.A large number of quotations have been included in the text so that the records and the people concerned might speak for themselves. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted