In many ways, The Woman Warrior can best be understood in its historical context, particularly by three political incidents that occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Chinese May Fourth Movement of 1919, the 1949 Communist takeover of China, and the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the United States Congress in 1882. Although Kingston never directly discusses the May Fourth Movement or the Chinese Exclusion Act, and only indirectly the fallout from the Communists' assuming power in China, to a large degree the events in The Woman Warrior are influenced by these three historical circumstances.
Historians often mark the beginning of modern China and its literature with the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Originally a demonstration against Japanese expansionism into China, the protest rapidly coalesced into a political, social, and cultural movement that gave birth to China's Communist Party. On May 4, 1919, several thousand Chinese students gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square — the same square made famous in the West for the Chinese government-sanctioned 1989 student massacre — to protest the decision by the victorious allies of World War I to cede Chinese territory to Japan. In the nineteenth century, Germany had won small territorial concessions from a weak China. Because Japan sided with the Western alliance against Germany in World War I, the Allies at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference decided to give German-held territory in Shantung Province to Japan. When Chinese laborers, merchants, and others began supporting the student protest, the movement grew into a national crisis. The six-week standoff between the students and the Chinese government forced the Chinese delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference to reject the peace treaty.
