The Making of the Chinese Working Class

Abstract

In the 1920s, the standard story goes, China's nascent industrial working class made its tumultuous d?but on the historical stage. Through coordinated strikes and boycotts centered in large foreign-owned enterprises in major treaty port cities and involving hundreds of thousands of workers, an organized and class-conscious working class directly challenged capitalists, warlords, and the imperialist powers. These militant actions, coordinated and led by the Chinese Communist party, culminated in the wave of revolution which swept China in the years 1924-27 and reached its crescendo in the Shanghai Insurrection. Nevertheless, Jiang Jieshi, in collusion with the Guomindang right wing, virtually annihilated the labor and communist movements in a 1927 coup d'?tat. The pioneering research of Jean Chesneaux, embodied in his book The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927, advanced this perspective. Thirty years later, Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig have fruitfully applied the lenses of the new social history to the making of the Chinese working class in ways which newly interpret its class, gender, and urban/rural character, as well as its emerging consciousness, organization, and revolutionary role. Hershatter and Honig belong to the first generation of American researchers to enjoy access to extensive documentary and interview sources in China. Their studies of the formation of the working class in Shanghai and Tianjin shed new light on the relationship of labor and the labor movement to the Chinese revolution. To the familiar triad ?working class, capitalism, imperialism?these vol umes add a formidable but elusive force at the center of working-class formation: the Green Gang and the underworld of urban crime. Countering the prevailing image of the industrial worker as urban and male, they offer compelling portraits of the rural roots and continuing rural ties of an industrial working class that included numerous women and children. In place of strikeand party-centered perspectives on the new working class, they explore manifold dimensions of working-class life including social and cultural relations, and diverse worker responses to the frequently harsh, unstable, and life-threatening conditions they confronted.