BACKGROUND TO THE MARCH FIRST MOVEMENT7 nese May Fourth Movement, also of 1919 and again with Japan as the catalyst, we do find a clear positioning. It is regarded as a pivotal point in Chinese nationalism, in which questions of East and West, China and Japan, tradition and modernity come to the fore. It is the herald of the New Culture Movement, the seedbed of the political milieu out of which grew Leviathan-like parties and the parting of ways between liberalism and socialism, scholarship and politics.

In Korea's case also, there is sufficient warrant, when one searches for something pivotal, to settle on the March First Movement. Indeed, it served as inspiration to the May Fourth students, and Ch'en Tu-hsiii among others explicitly acknowledged its role. 6 Even so, it is not comparable to the Chinese May Fourth Movement with respect to continuity or placement in modern national history (although in other respects, such as the scale of participation, it far outshines the May Fourth and most other such movements in modern times). I do not think it is quibbling over terms, therefore, to prefer to call the March First Movement a landmark rather than a milestone, 1 for the latter suggests a journey, a line of continuity. Despite the generally accepted idea that the movement was reached along a steady road of progress, 8 it seems more than a little misleading to view it as evolving according to some natural, historical logic out of the nationalist milieu of the preceding nine years. More importantly, the movement did not have a successor. If anything qualifies as a direct prog-eny of the movement, it is the Provisional Government which was established in the French Concession of Shanghai between May and October 1919. But even this was founded in response to the same international developments attending the end of World War I that had inspired the March First Movement: it would very likely have been founded March