On 13 November 1911, after being persuaded by revolutionary Ding Weifen and several other officers of the New Army, the Qing governor of Shandong, Sun Baoqi, agreed to secede from the Qing government and announced Shandong's independence.

In 1919, Mao went to Beijing as demonstrations of the May Fourth Movement were beginning. After World War I, the Republic of China had thought that the defeat of the Germans and their allies would result in the restoration of the Shandong Province, which had been taken from China in 1898 and had been a German territory. Instead, the Allies acknowledged this territory as being a part of Japan. During the May Fourth Movement, students protested the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I and ignored the Chinese claim to the territory. This grew into greater discontent, as the changes that had been expected to follow the end of the Revolution of 1911 had not been realized. The people began to believe that all the revolution had accomplished was a regime change, not the real change that was needed to help the people. During this time, Mao began to write articles that he published in local journals, calling for cultural reforms and talking about how there was a growth of a new culture within the country.