The Expression of Justice in China

Abstract

Claims about a strident pursuit of justice weave through all of China’s modern history. Intellectual, political and social ferment that exploded on to China’s political stage on 4 May 1919 was motivated by a common will among the intellectual and political class to find a proper place for China among the family of nations. Pursuit of justice underpinned this movement, as it did the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) eight years earlier. Communism was cultivated in China in the 1920s replete with a political vocabulary that was indebted to liberal and democratic political philosophies as much as it was to communist ideology. Here too, it was the ideal of attaining justice for the populace that prompted popular reaction to the inequalities, corruption and violence endemic in the ROC from the 1920s to the 1940s. This quest drove the civil war and the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Over the course of the revolutionary era in the 1930s and 1940s, ideas put forward by some leading theorists and activists of the Chinese Communist Party advocating for a more democratic-liberal socialism were suppressed and eventually wiped out, while Maoist discourse became progressively privileged.