The Beijing Olympics often seems to be seen as solely a propaganda victory for the Chinese Communist Party. It certainly is that, but it can also be seen as a realization of the goals of liberal nationalist movements that preceded it, such as the May the Fourth Movement. In Wang Zheng's Women in the Chinese Enlightenment she interviews women who seized the new opportunities suddenly available in the early twentieth century to build independent lives. One such as Lu Lihua, a physical education teacher and school principal.
She recollects meeting Ma Xiangbo in the period after the May the Fourth Incident and hearing him speak:
He appealed loudly to the audience, saying, "Revolution is made of hardships. We should never content ourselves with five minutes of enthusiasm. At the moment, China urgently needs three important things: (1) because 95 percent of Chinese are illiterate, we must promote education; (2) to be rich, we must promote industrial enterprises; and (3) to be strong, we must promote physical education."Lu Lihua founded a succession of schools among political and martial turmoil, and organised one of the first international trips by a Chinese sporting team:
In 1925 I established the first women's basketball team in China. In April 1931, I led our Liangjian women's basketball team to Japan. At the time there were already signs of a Japanese invasion of China. Sports in Japan had developed quickly, and the Japanese did well at the Olympics. But most people thought there were no sports at all in China. [...] Japanese newspapers said the whole country was shocked by the victories of the Chinese Liangjiang women's basketball team.She was kicked out of the school she founded by the new Communist government, started a business, and some more schools. Like a number of women successful under the Nationalists, she was sidelined and worse after the Communists came to power.
My school property was all taken away by the government, and I and my two children had to live in a room that measured seven square metres [...] During the Cultural Revolution, my little room was searched because people thought I had valuable things from the past. I told them that all my assets were in my school, which had been taken over by the government.It seems that only since the mid-eighties have the opportunities the young Li Lihua started to open up again. She is fairly philosophical about it:
My sister died when she was seventy-five. She was five years older than I, born in a different era. She grew up before the Xinhai Revolution, therefore her ideas were kind of old-fashioned. She had bound feet and no schooling, because school for was not popular in her day. She later blamed my parents for not letting her attend school. My parents said, "At the time, nobody went to school, so how could we let you go to school?" All her life was a hardship, with too many children.The May the Fourth movement also advocated liberal democracy and individual rights, and China is still far from that. But it is good to reflect on how far the largest nation on earth has come; a strong and wealthy China, engaged with the world, is something to celebrate.
