Thread by @firstladyship

BIRTH OF A NEW NIGERIA: A CHINESE STORY.

1. Like “The May Fourth Movement” in China, A New Political Force is on the rise in Nigeria. What started as #EndSARS Peaceful Struggle, will now be decided on Saturday, the 25th of February, in the Year of our Lord 2023. WALK WITH ME! ✊

2. China share this particular History with Nigeria, & it is not palatable. History repeats itself, what ushered China into her New Age, is playing out before Nigerians. Like the EndSARS in Nigeria, China had its own struggle. Like Nigeria, China is a long History, not that good.

3. China fought more wars & staged more Revolutions, more than the entire continent of Africa. Following the success of the Russian Revolution, wave of Marxist ideas swept across Europe in the early 19th Century. This was the rise of the middle class, China picked up the wave.

4. The triumph of the Russian Revolution inspired Student Unions, Railway & proletariat families across all of China to begin a resistance through spontaneous nationwide strikes. The May Fourth Movement was born, an EndSARS styled Struggle that marked the beginning of a New Dawn.

5. It will usher in the Chinese Communist Party in the immediate aftermath. The May Fourth Movement (1917-1921) was in response to the signing of the (Treaty of Versailles) in Paris, marking the end of WWI. At the conference, the Allied Powers did the most unthinkable.

6. They ceded the former German Concessions in Shandong Province to Japan. Now historically, Shandong was home to the Shang Dynasty & the birthplace of Confucius. During WWI (1914-1918), China supported the Allied forces on the condition that German Empire’s Kiautschou Bay

7. (which was a leased Territory in Shandong Peninsula) occupied by Japan, would be returned to China. So in the immediate wake of the signing, over 3000 students from 13 colleges in Beijing, held a mass demonstrative rally against this decision at the Paris Peace Conference.

8. The silent acquiescence of the Chinese delegation in Paris to the decision, infuriated Chinese students who burned the house of the Chinese Minister of communications, & assaulted China’s minister to Japan, both men pro-Japanese.

Let’s track back a little, & lay a background.

9. The Victorian Age was underway. In the lead-up in 1840, European capitalist & World Power, Britain, keen on expanding overseas, launched the Opium War against China. British merchants were smuggling Opium into China through India. Opium was destroying the youths & the elderly.

10. The Daoguang Emperor (ruler of China) had one option, “ban Opium, or China will perish.” He did the next best thing; he outlawed the Import & Trade in Opium throughout China. And so British expeditionary force sailed across the ocean with a few thousand troops & invaded China

11. The First Opium War marked the beginning of what would be known to History as the “Century of Humiliation,” in China. While the Qing government tried to quell the Taiping Rebellion circa 1850-1864, again Britain capitalized on the brawl & waged The Second Opium War on China.

12. This time the Chinese Empire was led by the Xianfeng Emperor. France conveniently entered The Second Opium War against China (on the pretext of one of its French priest killed a year before, in Mainland China). This was simply a cover, a clever move nonetheless.

13. After the Opium Wars, Western powers, more specifically: Britain, France, Russia, Germany, US, forced China to sign hundreds of “unequal” Treaties. Corrupt & incompetent, the Qing government became no more than a puppet, a pawn in the hands of the foreign invaders in control.

14. In 1901, the Qing authority was forced to sign another unequal Treaty. This time, the “Boxer Protocol.” The Boxer Protocol compelled China to pay very huge indemnity to the foreign powers that had invaded it the year before. The sum? unprecedented in China’s modern History.

15. The conditions written into the Boxer Protocol added salt to injury. Beyond paying 450 million taels of silver, on top of that, an annual interest payments, China was also compelled to surrender control over its “Legation Quarter.”

16. This became an Exclusive Zone for foreign diplomats & Reps of foreign interests. Legation Quarter right outside the Imperial Palace, became a foreign enclave exempt from Chinese Laws. The Boxer Protocol marked a new low, it reduced China to a Semi-Feudal, Semi-Colonial State.

17. In the aftermath of The First Opium War, Qing Dynasty ceded Hong Kong to Britain in the Treaty of Nanjing. From that moment on, Hong Kong became a colony of the British Crown until it was returned to China on July 1, 1997. Now the population of China was 400 million, in 1904.

18. But Chinese people did not just sit on the fence while their country turned into ruin. So they resisted & sort for answers to their country’s woe. From the “religion inspired” Taiping Rebellion in the immediate aftermath of the Opium Wars, to the 100 Days Reform of the 1890,

19. then the Boxer Rebellion of the 1900, countless Chinese intellectuals struggled to save China & its people. From then on, the Qing Army will struggle to keep its people & the Empire together, & equally fight few more wars, the Sino-Japanese War.

20. Then in October 1911, this struggle came to a crossroads. Overstretched & tautened, the “Xinhai Revolution” overthrew the Empire (the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty). In the blink of an eye, the over 2000 years of autocratic monarchy in China, came to a close.

21. In the immediate aftermath, Emperor Puyi (the last Emperor to rule China), abdicated his throne. The “Republic of China” was born. More symbolic however is; this abolition of China’s age-long Autocratic Monarcy, sent a ripple through time. From this moment on, China is alive.

22. It saw the opening up of China, & the influx of new intellectual & ideological visitors. This in time, removed the obstacles that hitherto held up China’s development. From that moment forward, China exploding its hidden potentials, was a sure bet.

23. However, like in Nigeria today, the reality was that the 1911 Xinhai Revolution was not enough on its own to catalyze & liberate China from the powerless state it found itself. Ruler or no ruler, China remained a Semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.

24. Having wrestled power from the Qing government, the revolutionists had lost it to indigenous warlords, & unless they could defeat these non-state actors, they would have struggled for nothing. A replica of what is obtained in Nigeria. You have bandits & Agitators everywhere.

25. Therefore, the various political forces that rose from the wake of the Revolution, were all destined to fail. Pain & humiliation would remain China’s reality. But HOPE was not in short supply. In September 1915, Chen Duxiu started a publication called “Youth,” in Shanghai.

26. Rebranded “La Jeunesse,” meaning “New Youth,” the journal rejected China’s feudal culture & Confucianism (its state religion). Instead, it sort solutions to China’s woes in modern science & in democracy. A replica of my now famous “WALK WITH ME,” pen became a powerful weapon.

27. Chen was soon joined by a young man named Li Dazhao, & later by Mao Zedong. These are the three gentlemen destined to alter the course of Chinese History, all in one place. Brings me to Nigeria. I see these gentlemen in Mr. Macaroni, Falz, David Hundeyin, Rinu & in all of us.

28. Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, alongside Lu Xun, will play key roles in China’s Soro Soke (New Culture Movement) through their publications at Peking University. But this new culture movement idea centered on “Bourgeois Democratic Solutions,” was in itself: inadequate & problematic.

29. First, WWI had revealed the contradictions in Capitalism, in the most glaring terms possible. Second, the repetitive failures & attempts to remodel China along Western lines, had made the Chinese intelligentsia more skeptical about reforming China as a Capitalist State.

30. Therefore, the success of the Russian Revolution presented that ideological alternative; “Marxism.” At the core of Marxism idea is “Anti-imperialism,” which had a special appeal in China, the “subject” of capitalist & imperialist powers.

31. Henceforth, Chinese intellectuals began to move away from western inspired ideas to Socialism. China, now up against imperialism, feudalism & bureaucratic capitalism, would begin a Revolution known throughout History as The War of Liberation.

32. Like EndSARS inspired Political Revolution, were the solutions to China’s problems waiting to be tapped from Marxism that had inspired the Russian Revolution? Li Dazhao would become the first man to raise the Communist Banner in China in the wake of Russian Revolution.

33. Starting July 1918, Li Dazhao published a series of articles drawing inspiration from the October Revolution. He hailed Russia as the World’s first Communist State, & the Revolutionary Pioneer of the 20th Century. He called it “A New Dawn for all Humanity.”

34. He even prophesied that one day, the Communist Banner will fly over the entire world. The move away from Western inspired Bourgeois Political Solutions, intensified in 1919. In Paris in 1919, the world came together to negotiate the Treaty that will formally end World War I.

35. The Allied Powers rejected China’s reasonable demand to end Germany’s privileges in Shandong. Instead, Chinese Delegation proposed it’d be transferred to Japan. Under compulsion from the Allied Powers, China’s delegation were about to sign the Treaty.

36. Suddenly in China, the news of this latest Treaty humiliation broke, erupting the pent-up anger of the Chinese people like a Volcano. On May 4th 1919, more than 3000 Beijing students broke through the barricades of the military police & marched on the Tiananmen Square,

37. denouncing the terms of the Paris Peace Conference. Like the EndSARS, The May Fourth Movement (a nationwide patriotic movement) have now caught steam. It heralded the rise of the “Chinese Working-class” from the ashes, as an independent political force.

38. The Chinese working class, the proletariat of the semi-colonial & semi-feudal society, were comprised of destitute peasants & artisans. Before the May Fourth Movement, China had about 4 million industrial workers, laboring in conditions of untold hardship & poverty.

39. For these rejects, extreme long hours with piss poor wages & horrible working conditions, was their everyday reality. One month after the students protest began, on June 5, Shanghai workers spontaneously went out on strike, in support of the students. IT DOESN’T END HERE!

40. Within days, the number of striking workers peaked at 70,000. Workers in Beijing, Nanjing & other cities joined. Merchants & business owners also took action in support of the movement in many cities, grinding China’s economy to a halt.

41. In very short amount of time, the protests spilled to over 100 cities, in more than 20 provinces & regions. Faced with populist pressure & widespread discontentment at home, on June 28 1919, the Chinese representatives declined assent to the Treaty of Versailles.

42. To put things in its proper perspective, as the replica of the EndSARS Protests in Nigeria, The May Fourth Movement gave progressive forces in Chinese society, the oxygen. More specifically, Marxism became more widely adopted, especially in working class circles.

43. In considerable fear, afraid they might lose control over the Chinese people, the lack of political & moral authority over the people is now a real threat. In the small circle of Chinese bureaucratic aristocracy, people began to envisage clampdown on the nationwide protests.

44. The May Fourth Movement was the precursor to the establishment of the Communist Party of China, the CPC. In March of 1920, guided by Li Dazhao, 19 Peking University students secretly formed the Peking University Marxist Study Group.

45. At this point, Revolutionary ideas is now the National anthem, the mood of all of China. A Great Story by many stretch. China is not a best example (as it is no Democracy), I know that!! But Students in China (representatives of the Youths Demography) refused to stay down.

46. Like China, Nigeria will be no different. Like The May Fourth Movement in China, Obidients are the New Political Force in Nigeria. We will remove the PDAPC from power, legitimately (through the ballot boxes). 25th of February is a Protest Vote, FOR THE GLORY OF NIGERIA! ✊🇳🇬