Lasting 15 months, the Hong Kong general strike, the longest in history, played a crucial role in China’s Second Revolution. 20 March marks the centenary of a turning point in the strike, when Chiang Kai-shek took his first step towards power. Peter Main explains the course of the strike and why this is not a centenary to celebrate.
On 15 May, 1925, the foreman of Japanese firm in Shanghai killed a striker. Widespread protests culminated in a demonstration on 30 May where 16 demonstrators were shot dead by British police and 100 wounded. The following day, the Shanghai General Union was formed and called a general strike in the city, with an appeal to workers throughout China to join the strike.
The speed of developments in Hong Kong revealed the substantial progress that had recently been made in building working class organisation in the colony, largely under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). On 11 June, local trade union leaders set up a Strike Preparation Committee. Drawing on the experience of a successful strike in 1922, an appeal for support was made to the government in Canton, led by Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Party, Guomindang (GMD).
A meeting in Hong Kong of the All-China General Union was joined by delegates to the Second Labour Congress being held at the time in Canton. There, the Preparation Committee announced its intention to call a general strike in Hong Kong.
The basis of the strike was a combination of economic and democratic demands:
- freedom of organisation and assembly
- equal rights for all nationalities
- an end to flogging
- voting rights for Chinese
- 8 hour day and a minimum wage
- repeal of the recent rent increase
- freedom to live anywhere on the island, including the Peak
On 15 June, the Canton government announced accommodation and support for strikers. The Seamen’s Union then declared that it would organise transport to Canton.
The Canton branch of the Seamen’s Union was the first to act, calling out all its 1,000 members on the routes between Hong Kong, Canton and Macao on 18 June. Over the next two weeks 50,000 workers left Hong Kong for Canton. In response, the Hong Kong government declared a State of Emergency with powers to take control of essential services.
On 23 June, in Canton, a mass, pro-strike demonstration of some 60,000 marched on the British concession on the island of Shameen. When they reached the riverbank opposite the island, British and French soldiers opened fire with machine guns, killing 52 and wounding 170.
A general strike and boycott of all British, French and Japanese goods and firms was declared and thousands more workers left Hong Kong. On 1 July, 5,000 members of the Mechanics’ Union joined the strike. By 9 July, it was estimated that 100,000 had left Hong Kong.
Organising such numbers of strikers and their families clearly could not be left to local initiatives and on 6 July, the All China General Union, led by the CCP, called a meeting of all strikers to elect a Delegate Council of 800. This met every second day throughout the strike. From it, a Strike Committee of 13, all delegates and recallable, was elected. It was organised around 3 sections: Executive, Picket organisation and, significantly, a Legislation and Judiciary section.
The HQ for the Strike Committee was provided by the Canton government which also recognised the legal authority of the Strike Committee and its pickets to enforce law and to establish judicial tribunals to try those who broke the strike regulations. The only limitation on its powers was that it could not enforce the death penalty.
The Delegate Council took responsibility for organising medical support, recreational provision, schools for pickets’ families and brigades to organise food supplies and youth activities. They also ran a workers’ college for cadres and eight schools for strikers. In all, 2,200 paramilitary pickets were organised into 5 brigades which were armed and empowered to enforce the regulations to stop all smuggling and scabs. The government also provided them with 12 gunboats as well as motor launches with which to enforce the coastal blockade of Hong Kong.
From Canton, the strikers organised a blockade of Hong Kong and the New Territories, stopping all supplies of food as well as the docking of ships. On the island itself, food supplies began to run low and civilians, mainly European ex-pats, were mobilised to undertake essential services but this was chaotic and unproductive. A ‘Labour Protection Bureau’ was established by the government which hired scabs at four times the normal wage plus three meals a day. By the end of July, the situation in Hong Kong and Kowloon had stabilised, but the strike was now solid.
The focus shifted to the boycott of the colony. At first, all foreign goods and ships were blocked. Pickets mobilised along the coast of Guangdong, searching ships and only allowing goods to proceed once payment was made to the strike fund. Although very effective, this inevitably enraged elements of the Canton bourgeoisie who had at first supported the strike; the blockade of Hong Kong was very good for their businesses! In response it was agreed to only blockade British shipping. The declaration of free trade for other countries perhaps explains Japan’s donation of £8,000 to the strike fund.
On 12 August, the Strike Committee published its Coastal Regulations, detailing all the goods that were to be blocked and organising pickets to enforce the blockade. The result was a dramatic drop in the number of ships able to dock in Hong Kong. In 1924, in the same period, some 240 ships had docked, in 1925 there were just 27 and the tonnage dropped from 2,000,000 tonnes to 270,000.
This gave a huge boost to other countries’ trade and to Chinese businesses. By the end of August, it was reckoned that £15,000,000 had been lost to Hong Kong trade. At the same time, trade in Canton and Shanghai increased and this was welcomed as a benefit of the alliance between the CCP and the GMD. The impact on the internal Hong Kong economy was also considerable: there were 3000 bankruptcies before the end of 1925.
Organisation
The scale of support for the strike was extraordinary. All strikers registered with the Canton government received board and lodging. Canton based trade unions also supported and provided accommodation for members of their own unions. The government closed all gambling houses so that their premises could be used as dormitories. Although many Hong Kong strikers went back to their home villages across Guangdong, some 270,000, including dependents, remained in Canton.
In total, the strike received $4.9 million, about half of which came from the Canton government, $1.5 million from the rest of China, $400,000 from the sale of goods seized, and $200,000 from fines that were levied on strike breakers.
Clearly, the powers of the Delegate Council went far beyond those of any ordinary strike committee. It was commonly referred to as government #2 and its decisions were binding on all strikers. One of the leaders of the strike committee, Teng Chung-hsia, was publicly recorded as likening it to the Soviets of 1917, although he accepted that the goal was the democratic reunification of China, not the overthrow of capitalism. Acceptance of that goal was also the basis of support for, and from, the GMD.
However, after the death of Sun Yat-sen in August 1925, divisions began to develop within the GMD. The dominant faction was led by Liao Zhongkai and Wang Jingwei who were regarded as the left wing of the party. The right wing, represented in the leadership by Hu Hanmin, had always opposed the relationship with the Communist Party and were now alarmed at the scale of unionisation and working class organisation. At the very beginning, all had supported the strike because of the obvious benefits to Chinese capital, but the longer term implications were becoming obvious.
On 25 August, Liao was assassinated and this revealed the depth of the emerging divisions. Although this alerted the Left, prompting Hu Hanmin to leave Canton, the Right continued to organise. On November 25, the GMD military chief tried to enforce a disarming of the pickets. He was not successful, but the dispute was resolved by integrating pickets into the army, putting them under military discipline rather than that of the Strike Committee.
The tensions within the government led to the convening of an Extraordinary Congress of the GMD in January 1926. The outcome was welcomed as a gain by the Left, including the CCP. Chiang Kai-shek, who was seen as a Leftist because of his training and support from Moscow, was elected to the Central Executive Committee and CCP members were elected as the heads of the Central HQ, the Organisation section, and the Peasant section. In addition, CCP members were the secretaries of the Propaganda, Women, Youth and Workers’ Departments.
In the following two months, military expeditions to bring the South and West of Guangdong province under Canton’s control were successfully led by Chiang Kai-shek, enhancing his reputation and the significance, and the income, of the Canton government within China.
However, on the night of 20 March, claiming that he had discovered a communist plot to take power, Chiang seized a gunboat, occupied the Strike Committee HQ, arrested fifty CCP members and enforced the disarming of the picket brigades. Both the CCP and the Strike Committee were unprepared for this, but so also was the Canton government. Wang Jingwei agreed to step down as Chair of the party and of the government, ceding power to Chiang who proceeded to issue new regulations:
- restricting the power of the Strike Committee,
- requiring the CCP to provide the names of all members in the GMD,
- limiting the number of CCP members on any committee to 1/3,
- withdrawing the legal powers of the picket brigades,
- outlawing any criticism of Sun Yat-sen’s “Three People’s Principles”
- and creating an Arbitration Committee to replace the strike committee in negotiations with the Hong Kong government.
The two most senior leaders of the CCP at the time, Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi, were in Shanghai but, when news reached them of Chiang’s coup, their response was to propose that the CCP leave the GMD but form a united front with its left wing. However, a meeting of the Central Committee decided that approval for this would have to be gained from Moscow.
Unbeknownst to any part of the CCP, the situation in China had deepened the split in the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) between, essentially, Trotsky, who also called for a break from the GMD, and Stalin, who insisted that unity with the GMD be maintained in the interests of the proposed Northern Expedition to unite the rest of the country.
Stalin’s position had been greatly strengthened at the Party’s Fourteenth Congress in January and his line was adopted. Despite their misgivings, therefore, the CCP was obliged to accept Chiang’s explanation that the 20 March events had been merely a ‘misunderstanding’. Nevertheless, Chiang’s new regulations stayed in place, establishing a complete change in the balance of forces both in Canton generally and in the strike more particularly.
The consequences for the strike soon became apparent. In April, meetings were held between the Hong Kong government and Canton, excluding the Strike Committee, and formal negotiations to end the strike began in July. The GMD delegation immediately dropped all the key demands of the strikers; strike pay, reinstatement and no victimisation and instead proposed a $10 million loan from the UK to Canton in return for ending the boycott. Realising the significance of Canton’s change of heart, the British refused any suggestion of a loan and the negotiations broke down.
On 3 September, a Royal Navy landing party forcibly cleared the pickets from the Canton wharves. After weeks of demoralising uncertainty, the GMD government formally called off the strike on 10 October. In line with instructions from Moscow, the CCP defended this as necessary in order to focus all resources on the Northern Expedition that Chiang had launched on 26 July.
The General Strike, therefore, not only ended but it ended in defeat, with none of the strikers’ demands met. Some “local” strikes did continue, often for several months, but Hong Kong employers were very quick to victimise known militants and strike activists.
That is not the whole picture, however. Across China, but especially south of the Yangzi river, the strike gave a huge boost to both working class and peasant organisation. Groups set up to organise solidarity quickly became the nuclei of unions and peasant associations. The political impact can be judged by the growth of the CCP, which had 1,000 members at the end of 1924 (and only 10 in Hong Kong!) but some 30,000 by the end of 1926. Mostly unaware of how the strike ended, millions enthusiastically welcomed the prospect of the Canton government, which had proclaimed itself the government of all China on 1 July, making that claim a reality.
The public position of the CCP, following Moscow’s orders, certainly reinforced the prestige of both the GMD government and Chiang himself. Maintaining the strategy of subordination to Chiang, not recognising the 20 March coup for what it was, left the whole working class movement unprepared for his subsequent betrayal. When the Shanghai workers took control of their city in April 1927, Chiang turned against them, just as he had in Canton, opening the way to the White Terror that left some 300,000 dead and drove the CCP out of the cities for the next twenty years.
Explainer – The GMD and the CCP
The Nationalist Party, Guomindang in Chinese, abbreviated GMD, was initially a support organisation for Sun Yat-sen who had wide support among the business communities of the province of Guangdong and was able to form a government in the provincial capital, Canton. The Chinese Communist Party, CCP, was founded in 1921 under the leadership of Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, both of whom were greatly influenced by the example of the Russian Revolution. Under the influence of the Communist International (Comintern) representatives, Chen and Li reluctantly agreed that the CCP should join GMD in 1923 and its members were instrumental in transforming it into a modern political party, with several CPers in senior positions, at a Founding Conference in January 1924. Organisationally, this brought very rapid results for both parties with CP members taking a leading role in building local branches and community groups, publishing leaflets and newspapers, organising mass meetings and demonstrations. However, politically, this led to downplaying of the difference between Communist politics and Nationalist politics, which was to prove disastrous as both the anti-imperialist struggle and the class struggle peaked in the Second Revolution, 1925-27, leading to the bloody defeat of the workers’ and peasants’ organisations and the victory of Chiang Kai-shek.
