Second, students were usually physically young; they had more energy and time for them to put efforts in revolution. Therefore, they could give out such huge impact to every revolution in different eras.
After the brief introduction on why student could give out the most impact to every revolution, let me talk about how the student activism in different revolutions which I have mentioned above. The first one is the May Fourth Movement. In 1919, during the meeting of the Versailles Treaty, China’s representative had requested on different provision to protect and tried to get back China’s properties. Unfortunately, other countries representatives did not show their respect and screw the requests. Students felt uncomfortable and they wanted to do something to show the government that Chinese were treated in an unfair situation and hoped the government to do something. Actually the whole background or so far we called the nature of the May Fourth Movement was to protect the China’s property and try to maintain the national political power to show that China was not weak as foreign countries thought. …show more content…
In that period, we called student activism as ‘Red Guards’. In 1966 to 1967, Mao had initiated the Cultural Revolution and organized a mass social movement of young people. Most of the members of the Red Guards were students. They mainly helped Mao to found out those bourgeois and treated them hard. Actually the whole nature of the Red Guards was just a role of puppet. The main difference between the activism nature of May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Revolution was the idea maker. In May Fourth, student popped out their thought by their own knowledge. However in the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards were actually played as a role of Mao’s puppet. Students were trained about against bourgeois since they were in secondary school. All the ideas or thoughts were not derivate by themselves. They were just following the order from Mao’s thought. Because all the people in China in Mao’s era were absolutely believe Mao could bring them a better quality of life. As the student was believed in Mao’s policies, they just barely followed in Mao’s thought. To account on the difference of atmosphere between the May Fourth Movement and Cultural Revolution, I think the only difference was student activism in Cultural Revolution was too agitated. The reason was the whole atmosphere in that period was really hyper. People were founding out