Griffin Phillips looks at the massive revolt that began in China 100 years ago and raised the possibility of real socialism based on workers’ power
In 1949, the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong took power in China.
It was a massive victory against imperialism and the brutal, corrupt, American-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek, and was rightly celebrated by the left around the world.
But while the new regime drove economic and social modernisation, its aim was to build state capitalism, not any form of socialism. Within a decade, it had plunged the country into a monstrous famine as it tried to increase the pace of industrialisation.
Today, many Chinese people dislike or even oppose the government, but argue that a peasant army fighting for national liberation and modernisation were the only possibilities at the time.
We disagree.
This month marks the 100 year anniversary of the most important uprising in China’s history, when the working class briefly established the beginnings of a workers’ government with the enthusiastic support of peasants.
Most Chinese people believe that there was no working class to speak of in the mid-1920s. That is mistaken.
The First World War turbo-charged capitalist development, with many factories owned by foreign businesses, forcing workers to work 12-16 hours a day on wages barely enough for survival.
By 1927 there were 1.5 million factory workers, 1.75 million other industrial workers and 11 million employed in service industries and handicrafts.
Within a few years, a militant labour movement was growing. Strikers routinely faced police or military violence, but often won their demands.
In May 1925, 4000 textile industry workers were on strike against their Japanese owner in Qingdao City, in eastern China. On 29 May, 3000 cops and a Japanese warship opened fire on the strikers, killing eight.
The next day, 30 May, in Shanghai, a Chinese worker was killed by a Japanese foreman, and the city erupted with anger. These murders symbolised the decades of oppression Chinese people of all classes had experienced at the hands of foreign imperialism.
Students and workers marched together in protest, and when some were arrested, they went to the police station to demand their release. The British police opened fire, killing 12 students. This became known as the May 30 massacre.
Right across Shanghai, workers walked out and the city was plunged into an almost total general strike.
The workers’ response spread across the country, with at least 400,000 workers involved.
Then, 12 days later, in Wuhan in central China, British sailors murdered eight Chinese protesters.
Days later a demonstration of students, workers and military cadets in the southern city of Guangzhou was met by British and French machine guns. Fifty-five students and workers were murdered.
This massacre took the rebellion in southern China to a whole new level.
Guangzhou-Hong Kong strike
The most important city in southern China is Guangzhou, 150 kilometres north of Hong Kong, which was then the main British colony in southern China.
There was already a militant workers’ movement. In 1922 Hong Kong seamen had won a major strike against British companies, forcing them to recognise the union and hand over a large pay rise.
Then on May Day 1925, just four weeks before the May 30 massacre, unions and peasant organisations had organised a massive conference. Thousands had marched through the city together.
When the massacre happened, Chinese workers employed by British capitalists in both Guangzhou and Hong Kong were already again on strike.
Now they organised a total boycott of British goods and a general strike of 250,000 workers in all industries. Then, more than 100,000 workers walked out of Hong Kong and went back to Guangzhou. The bustling colony of Hong Kong was paralysed.
Across the southern coastline of Guangdong province, newly formed peasant associations organised pickets to prevent any goods from entering other British-controlled ports.
The Governor of Hong Kong complained: “An attack has been made upon us, as representing the existing standards of civilisation, by the agents of disorder and anarchy.”
In Guangzhou, the workers set up a Delegates’ Conference to run the strike, with every 50 workers electing a representative and the conference electing a central committee of 13.
The Central Committee organised a squad of 2000 pickets to enforce and protect the strike and keep order. Workers declared war on the old customs, shutting down casinos, brothels and opium dens. They built a hospital and 17 schools and organised their own court and police.
There were potentially two governments in the city. Officially, the city government was in the hands of the fledgling Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, but they did not really control the city.
The uprising was not aimed against the Guomindang, but against the British and Japanese. In 1839 and 1856, Britain had twice gone to war against China to get the right to sell opium into the country. Through those wars they grabbed Hong Kong, and the right to export into—and control—a string of ports along the coast, and up the Yangtze river.
British exports had destroyed the lives of millions of artisans and peasants.
Seven other imperialist powers also gained special rights through war.
The Nationalist Party had been set up to fight the old feudal regime and the imperialist aggression. But it was only the economic and social power of the working class that really threatened the imperialists.
For a time, the Nationalists were happy to encourage that, but every strike, every peasant revolt and every student protest created alarm among the Chinese capitalists who were the main base of the Guomindang.
The class struggle was blowing up the Nationalist movement, and galvanising a right-wing that wanted to crush the workers’ movement before it got too strong. Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the military figure who could do that.
Communist Party
In 1921, in the wake of the Russian revolution, a Communist Party was formed in China. Its members threw themselves into organising and educating workers and peasants, and they played a major role in many strikes.
But the party faced massive intervention from the Russian Communists, increasingly controlled by Joseph Stalin. The Russian leadership had largely given up on international workers revolution; they just wanted to find allies for their isolated and threatened state, and looked to the Guomindang.
They even brought Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow for military and political training.
Stalin and his supporters argued that there was no possibility of a workers’ revolution in China. They had a stages theory of socialism—that capitalist development and parliamentary democracy had to come first. They demanded that the Communists in China join the Guomindang, obey its decisions, and refrain from criticising its leaders or organising against them.
This meant that when the workers of Guangzhou set up their powerful Strikers’ Delegates Conference, they refused to push the revolution forward. That gave General Chiang Kai-shek the space to grab power from them—first using the excuse of a right-wing conspiracy, then using a different provocation to move against the left.
He used radical slogans to give workers and peasants the hope that he would lead a war against the imperialists and give the peasants land. Then, when his army left Guangzhou, his administrators declared martial law and forcibly ended the great Guangzhou-Hong Kong strike.
The leaders of the Communist Party refused to accept that the capitalists of the Guomindang were out to crush the working class. While Communists were in hiding in Guangzhou, the Communist newspapers were insisting they were followers, not enemies of Chiang.
As Chiang’s army moved from Guangzhou towards Shanghai, workers rose up in city after city, threw out imperialist forces and broke the power of the existing warlord rulers. But without any strategy to actually take power, Chiang was able to contain then crush them and take power for himself.
All this was facilitated by the support he continued to get from the leadership of the Communist Party.
Chiang’s counter-revolution reached its peak in Shanghai in April 1927.
In March 1927, Shanghai workers rose up in a massive general strike, smashed the power of the local warlord and waited in the belief that Chiang was coming to advance the national revolution.
This was completely delusional.
Instead, he stayed outside the city, planning a coup.
Using the forces of the two most powerful criminal gangs in the region, and with the support of the British armed forces, he unleashed a bloodbath.
The massacre of the militant workers and Communists of Shanghai saw thousands machine-gunned and beheaded during the first days, and tens of thousands killed in the months that followed. It was a massacre the workers were completely unprepared for.
With the defeat of the largest working class in the country, counter-revolution was unleashed across the whole country.
In the cities there were house-to-house searches and the beheading of anyone suspected of being a Communist.
In the villages and towns, landlords, warlords and merchants executed hundreds of thousands of peasants—whether activists or not—by beheading them, burying them alive, shooting, strangling, burning them alive and cutting them into pieces. Women who looked as if they could have been activists were subjected to particularly horrific tortures.
The story does not end with the Shanghai massacre. The crushing of the workers’ movement and the Communist party organisation in the cities led the remnants of the party to flee to the mountains, and to turn to a new strategy advocated by Mao Zedong—organising peasants into a guerilla army to fight for national liberation.
To justify this strategy, this history of China’s real workers’ and peasants’ revolution had to be buried.
Now, a new, emerging generation of young Chinese activists can draw inspiration from this great revolt, and learn the lessons of its defeat, as preparation for the struggles ahead.
