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great speed what he was writing. He bore witness to the dehumanising impact of terror on the population and on himself during the Cultural Revolution, and he found that it was only through writing—expressing himself in language—that he could affirm his existence as a human being with the faculty to think and feel. The Cultural Revolution drew to an end, and he was able to return to his workplace in Beijing in 1975.
In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Nietzsche fever spread through the Chinese intellectual world. Mao Zedong’s social engineering blueprint for the population had denigrated the individual to the status of a nut or a bolt in the nation’s great socialist machinery, and Nietzsche’s superman philosophy was seen as a formula for reasserting the worth, autonomy, and will of the individual. China had encountered Nietzsche fever for the first time during what was designated by later historians as the May Fourth era (1915–1921). Europeans stationed in China were recalled at the outbreak of war in Europe, and Japan immediately moved to assert its claims on China’s territorial sovereignty while European warships were conveniently absent from the region: 1915 marks the year in which Japan presented its Twenty-one Demands to China and also the beginning of fierce nationalism, student activism, strikes, and nationwide mass protest movements. On the understanding that former German-held territories in Shandong Province would be returned to China, the Chinese authorities sent 140,000 Chinese labourers to help the Allies in the war against Germany in 1917. The victory of the Allies had raised Chinese hopes, but at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, it was revealed that a secret pact amongst the Allies had already decided that those territories in China were to be handed over to Japan. When the news of this betrayal became known, mass rallies and protest demonstrations erupted in Chinese cities; nationwide student-activist liaison networks were also established. On 4 May 1919 thousands of students from Beijing’s universities and high schools, joined by student activists from other cities, marched to Tiananmen Square to demand that China not become a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles and also that the pro-Japanese ministers in the government be punished. Mounted soldiers