Society playing an important role in the movement at Peking University. Other pillars of the Chinese anarchist movement at the time included the Conscience Society in Guangzhou and the Masses Society in Nanjing, which later merged with the Beijing-based Truth Society to establish the Evolution Society, a nationwide anarchist umbrella organization. May Fourth Movement In 1919, a wave of student protests broke out throughout the country in response to the Beiyang government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, which had allowed the Empire of Japan to retain the territories in Shandong that it had captured from the German Empire. After student leaders of the demonstrations were arrested and imprisoned, Cai Yuanpei briefly resigned from his post as Dean of Peking University in protest, leading to a mass mobilization. News from the Russian Revolution, which Chinese radicals initially viewed as an anarcho-communist revolution, brought with it a new-found interest in socialism. Anarchists greatly benefited from the new interest in socialism, as anarchism was the most popular and widespread variant of socialism at the time. The Beiyang government became increasingly concerned with the surge in anarchist activity and began to identify extremism closely with anarchism, counterintuitively giving more publicity to the anarchist movement. Anarchist societies began to spring up across China and anarchist ideas became central to Chinese radicalism, with the New Life Movement bringing anarchist principles into everyday life, through the creation of agrarian communes. According to Zhou Zuoren, a leading figure in the movement, the main goal of these new villages was conceived as being the promotion of labor, which anarchists of the time held to be the foundation of future society. The anarchist conceptions of mutualism and education were also fundamental aspects in these experiments to reorganize social life. Anarchists of the May Fourth Movement refused to distinguish between means and ends, holding that the process of revolution lay in the creation of the future society in the present. However, these communal experiments quickly failed, with the groups involved falling victim to financial difficulties, as the situation had made economic enterprise and employment more difficult. But these short-lived communal experiments still provided inspiration for China's left-leaning intellectuals, who saw them as the beginning of a new era in human society. The newfound interest in socialism brought on by the movement also brought with it a surge in Marxism. It was at this time that the first Bolsheviks started