It was May 1919, and from a small desk in his simple office at Peking University, Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培) could see the campus buzzing with activity. For days now, his students–and several of his faculty–had been busy giving speeches, preparing pamphlets, and painting signs denouncing imperialism and the fecklessness of the Chinese government.
Cai’s students viewed themselves as saviors of the nation. They were heirs to a tradition of scholar activism which had long frustrated emperors and autocrats of imperial times, yet they were also the vanguard of a new kind of Chinese citizen: informed, cosmopolitan, and not always bound by conventional norms.
A frugal administrator, humble scholar who refused to ride rickshaws, and a fierce intellect, few figures bridged this gap between old and new China with as much finesse or intellectual firepower as Cai. As chancellor of Peking University, Cai had instilled the values of free thinking in his students, writing in 1919: “With regard to ideas, I act according to the general rule…of tolerating everything and including everything.” When many of his students were arrested for their part in street demonstrations on May 4 that year, protesting China’s betrayal by Japan and the Western powers at the Paris Peace Conferences, Cai resigned in solidarity with them—not the first, or the last, time he would choose academic integrity over political expediency, or even his own safety.