Peking’s May 4th Movement Monument and La Jeunesse

I’ve walked past the rather uninspriring May 4th Movement memorial on Beiheyan Dajie in Peking quite a few times and not paid it that much attention to be honest. fortunately I don’t need to recount the history of May 4th 1919 to readers of this blog. But I did note recently that there are some covers of La Jeunesse included in the sculpture which is quite interesting. Started in 1915 by Chen Duxiu an early communist and then leader of China’s Trotskyist movement (look hard for that one in the official records!!) it was a genuinely revolutionary journal of the New Culture Movement. Nice to see it remembered in that monument – of course anybody starting up a revolutionary journal now calling for a new start, “youth” and revolution would find themselves looking a prison cell from the inside out pretty quickly – hear that noise?? That’s Chen spinning in his grave!