In this essay, I approach May Fourth in the spirit advocated by Raymond Geuss in Philosophy and Real Politics. Guess rejected what he calls an ‘ethics first’ type of political theorizing, that is, arguments about political action that privilege what ought to be, usually from a liberal perspective as in the case of John Rawls, to what actually happens in politics. Geuss insisted that analysing political events means examining the actions of persons as they use the power at their disposal to pursue a range of goals, not all of them well defined and often contradictory, while keeping in view the concrete alternatives available to them in a particular moment and recognizing that most actors are motivated be a desire to do good, no matter how fallible as human beings we all are.