His fellow students quickly mobilized, and on May 4, 1919, three thousand students from the capital’s finest colleges marched through the Legation quarter of the city and set fire to the house of a government minister whom they condemned as a “traitor to the nation”—an apologist for Japanese interests. The students sparked a wider movement that vowed to use “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy” to revive a society suffering from “warlordism within, and imperialism from outside.” The demonstration was over in a few hours, but the aftershocks helped to transform Chinese society and culture for decades
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