Strikes and labour protests in 20th Century China
This
piece may seem drastically unevenly weighted towards the 1950s,
despite the large amount of strikes and labour protests throughout
the whole of the 20th
Century in China. However, this essay seeks to examine how the nature
of strikes and labour protests, along with the causes of strikes,
changed throughout the 20th
Century. From 1949, China saw a rapid change in its economic and
political system; the state controlled the economy and made promises
to urban workers which fell short. After the political reforms and
the state's loosening of economic control from the 1980s, labour
disputes (and the economy itself, to an extent) resembled that of
pre-communist China. This being in the sense that the 1980s and
onwards has represented a slow yet steady return to capitalism. Thus,
labour disputes in post-Maoist China have lost their strict
grievances with the CCP, as was the case in the 1950s. Furthermore,
the entering of rural to urban migrants into the urban economy was a
cause of unemployment in the 1980s and the 1920s. This essay will
therefore centre around the 1950s, as this period stands out as a
transitional period; a period where labour disputes were largely
disputes of free market issues directed at individual employers, to
disputes with the Chinese state itself.
Before the CCP took power in 1949, the economy of China was not state-controlled. This seems an obvious and needless statement to make, but it explains why the nature of strikes were different from the turn of the 20th century up until 1949. During the Qing era, the Republican era, and the “warlord”/ civil war era, the Chinese economy and thus Chinese urban employers ran largely on a capitalist free market system. Strikes and unrest would therefore almost invariably involve wage disputes; but there was no state policy that guaranteed employment or welfare benefits. Thus, strikes would be inherently more scattered in this era as they were generally targeted at specific employers in cities; compared to the 1950s and onwards where strikes would be inherently directed towards the Chinese state and the CCP.1 2 This sets the pre-communist era of strikes and labour protests apart from the CCP era (up until the 1980s); the labour market was state-controlled and the CCP offered benefits and promises to workers. Although these state policies and promises fell short in the 1950s and became an issue of grievance for urban workers, the key aspect here is that this did not exist as a cause of strikes, nor a cause of strikers.
Smith's work on women's strikes in Shanghai from 1895-1927 offers an interesting and rather unique insight into the gendered aspect of striking that occurred in this era, as well as a more general overview of pre-CCP and pre-war strikes and labour disputes. Smith's work highlights the class-aspect of striking which not only existed alongside gender as a cause and source of cohesion for strikers, but also as two aspects which often correlated. The aspect of “class” here is interesting for this question; non-communist concepts of class were largely (at least officially speaking) eliminated by the CCP. Thus, unlike in the 1920s, the urban worker was part of a homogeneous group when staging strike or protest from 1949 onwards. Another aspect which differs in these eras is the source for unemployment. In the early 20th century, rural peasants fled to the cities at their own free will to compete with urbanites for factory work, becoming an issue of contention as certain factories of industries such as textiles saw a surplus of workers.3 Parallels can be drawn here with the final section of this essay: the CCP's economic and travel-restriction reforms of the late 20th century saw millions of peasants heading for the cities in search of work, leading to unemployment and thus labour disputes.4
Striking
against foreign employers, or foreign economic intruders, is another
aspect of labour dispute which died away with the CCP's coming to
power. The May Thirtieth Movement in particular, however, is another
example of a nature of strike and cause of strike unique to the
pre-communist era. In this case, economic and socio-political
disputes led to urbanites from Shanghai, Beijing and beyond to
essentially engage in warfare with “corrupt warlords” and foreign
intruders like the British and Japanese extraterritorial regions.5
To
understand the evolving nature of strikes and labour protest in the
1950s, we have to first look beyond the strikes and protests
themselves. Underpinning the change in labour protest and unrest in
the 1950s was the changing nature of the Chinese state itself; that
is, the coming to power of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the
official establishment of a communist state. The coming to power of
the communists meant that, for the first time, the economy (along
with labour and industry itself) was regulated by the state. Workers
who had, in the past, protested to private employers were now
protesting to the Chinese state itself. The Communist Party was the
targeted “victim” of labour strikes and protests from the 1950s,
and workers now looked to the state to settle their grievances with
issues such as pay and lack of employment opportunity. Partly, this
shift occurred as a natural consequence of a communist takeover of
the state and the economy; there were (at least officially) no more
any private employers or employers operating in China separately from
the state after 1950. However, the Communist Party itself was partly
to blame for this shift in labour relations – particularly due to
promises made to the public regarding a full employment rate and
better working conditions – promises which in some regards failed
to live up to society's expectations. As historians have mentioned,
labour unrest and strikes in 1950s China have gone little mentioned,
and the era is too-often perceived as China's golden era. However,
the nature of strikes in 1950s urban China represented a shift in the
state was well as labour-relations culture itself.6
7
Firstly, I will examine what allowed and encouraged strikes in 1950s urban China (particularly 1956-57 in Shanghai) to break out. This section centres around Shanghai, as the city was the epicentre of the 1950s wave of strikes; however, as has been noted, strikes extended to cities across China in this era.8 Beginning with the “top” of Chinese society in the 1950s – the CCP – provides us with an understanding of why strikes were able to break out on such a scale. Firstly, the CCP itself was not equipped to deal with the working-classes of urban China. Firstly, the CCP had only recently garnered control of China, following international and civil war. Secondly, the CCP had up until 1949 been heavily based in the countryside, and thus was affiliated with (and used to handling) the rural peasantry rather than city workers; despite the CCP's repeated promises that the working-classes would be at the forefront of party representation.9 The CCP had overstretched and over-promised to the urban working classes in the 1950s. This contrasts heavily with the nature of labour-relations before 1949, wherein little promises or guarantees were made whatsoever to workers. Pre-1949, Chinese labourers (both urban and rural) essentially worked in a capitalistic economy where employers would not offer any guarentees of full employment or working conditions. The CCP however offered hope to urban workers, and communist policies aimed at full employment, a betterment of working conditions and a general improvement in quality of life were viewed as “promises” or guarantees by Chinese workers.10 11 These CCP promises did not come to fruition: for example, Chen notes how the nationalisation of Chinese factories and urban economic restructuring “destabilized labor relations and led to a decrease in real income for workers”.12 These promises of the CCP fell short and industrial action – borne out of anger and a sense of being cheated, on behalf of workers – was guaranteed.
Certainly, we can not put all of the blame on the CCP for the outburst of strike action in 1950s urban China; the CCP in 1949 had “inherited” a largely ruined economy following the long period of war. CCP policies that sought to rapidly “liberate” workers and improve working conditions were perhaps doomed to fail in the 1950s, as was CCP policy for rapid economic growth which would not be at the expense of any sect of society. Thus, we could perhaps argue that the strikes of the 1950s were not necessarily caused by poor CCP economic or fiscal policy in itself, as the CCP had after all inherited a terrible economic state of affairs. One could even assert that there was no direct short-term cause for the unprecedented levels of strike action in the 1950s (at least, a cause that was not at the hands of the CCP). Rather, strike action, or at least a worsening of urban industrial relations in the 1950s, may have been guaranteed by the late 1930s; as China had descended into over a decade of war that was brutal on the economy. However, regardless of whether economic downturn was preventable or not by the CCP in the early 1950s, the promises made by the CCP to urban workers were destined to fail. This guaranteeing of a betterment of urban working conditions by the CCP – “guaranteeing” which was cemented into policy and public party doctrine – was a mistake which misled urban workers and left them feeling cheated.13 14 Furthermore, Chen notes how the urban working-classes themselves played little role in the communist's revolutionary war; it was largely a war fought by and amongst rural Chinese. This perhaps suggests that, for many urban workers, there was a lack of inherent loyalty towards the Mao or the CCP, or communism as a philosophy. One could perhaps speculate that if the CCP had managed to garner more loyalty from urbanites in the civil war, urban workers would have been less likely to rebel against the state in the 1950s.15 Overall, from the “top down” perspective, it is clear that the CCP's lack of urban loyalty and unfulfilled promises fuelled urban strike action and labour disputes in the 1950s. The poor state of the economy, and thus the poor prospects for urban workers of the 1950s, was perhaps an issue of the CCP's predecessors. Regardless, these are the economic and political faults of the Chinese state that sparked urban strike action in the 1950s.
Following on from the state-level “causes” of strike action and urban industrial unrest, I will briefly cover the personal grievances of urban workers that led them to take action against the CCP in the 1950s. Chen notes how wages and “welfare benefits” (i.e. job related benefits) were a source of grievance for many. An example of the latter (welfare benefits) was documented in a Jiangsu cotton mill, where workers were outraged at the sudden cancellation of their annual wage bonus, and staged walk-outs and low-level strike action.16 Although wage disputes remained a key cause of strike action in all of urban China throughout the 20th century, welfare benefits were a new issue and a new cause of industrial action. For the strikes of the 1920s, for example, welfare benefits disputes had little to no role in the vast majority of strikes. Wages, i.e. an exchange of currency for labour, long pre-dates the CCP and modern China as a whole. However, worker's welfare benefits such as healthcare or housing were a creation of the CCP and born out of communist-socialist policy. Once again, perhaps, one could place at least partial blame on the CCP policy-makers for offering such benefits and failing to deliver; before 1949, urban workers did not expect these benefits and thus did not strike over them.17
The communist era, economically but specifically in the realm of labour protest, was in interlude between capitalist eras. Into the 1970s and 1980s, extreme market reforms essentially began to turn China's economy in an increasingly capitalist direction; or at least, the economy and employment became increasingly far less dependent on the state. As ever, unemployment and wage disputes remained a key issue of grievance from the latter part of the 20th century; grievances towards the CCP directly became less obvious due to the changing nature of the Chinese state. “Changing” here is perhaps the wrong word. In many aspects, the nature of labour disputes in the 1980s, as well as the economic reforms themselves, resemble the pre-communist era: in that it is a slow but ever-continuing resumption of capitalist employment for urban workers. Another aspect observed in the 1920s – the rural to urban migration of workers – also occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, with the lessening of inter-Chinese travel restrictions. This flood of workers into cities resembled the 1920s, in that an over-abundance of low-level labour entered the employment market once again.18 With this, the ever-present grievance of unemployment became an issue once again for urban workers. This section will be kept brief, as post-Maoist China's labour and economic situation bares much similarity to what was discussed earlier of the pre-CCP era.
To conclude, labour disputes and strikes in 20th century urban China have invariably involved wage and employment disputes. The causality of these disputes has changed throughout the 20th century, however. The free market system pre-1949 had workers take up individual grievances on a lower scale with their employers; this has increasingly become the case into the 1980s and beyond. The problematic influx of rural peasantry into urban factory work led to unemployment in the 1920s and from the 1970s. However, the Maoist era in-between – particularly the 1950s – saw unique disputes. In many ways this era was an interlude, where worker's grievances were directed at the state itself and based out of promises and guarantees of the state which fell short. These promises of the state to provide did not exist before 1949, at least in no significant way; the same is ever-increasingly true from the 1980s onwards.
~
Bibliography
Steve Smith, “Class and Gender: Women's Strikes in St. Petersburg, 1895-1917 and in Shanghai, 1895-1927”, Social History, 19:2 (1994), 141-168.
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford, 2016).
Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, “China's Rural Migrant Workers, The State, and Labor Politics”, Critical Asian Studies, 46:4 (2014), 599-620.
Jack A. Goldstone, The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (New York, 1998).
Feng Chen, “Against the State: Labor Protests in China in the 1950s”, Modern China, 1:31 (2013), 2-31.
Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957”, The China Quarterly, 137 (1994), 1-27.
1Steve Smith, “Class and Gender: Women's Strikes in St. Petersburg, 1895-1917 and in Shanghai, 1895-1927”, Social History, 19:2 (1994), 141-168.
2Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (Oxford, 2016), ch. 7.
3Smith, “Class and Gender”, 140-143.
4Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, “China's Rural Migrant Workers, The State, and Labor Politics”, Critical Asian Studies, 46:4 (2014), 599-620.
5Jack A. Goldstone, The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (New York, 1998), 82-83.
6Feng Chen, “Against the State: Labor Protests in China in the 1950s”, Modern China, 1:31 (2013), 2-31.
7Elizabeth J. Perry, “Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957”, The China Quarterly, 137 (1994), 1-3.
8Chen, “Against the State”, 2-31.
9Ibid, 5.
10Ibid, 2-31.
11Perry, “Shanghai's Strike Wave”, 1-27.
12Chen, “Against the State”, 9-10.
13Chen, “Against the State”, 5-7.
14Perry, “Shanghai's Strike Wave”, 1-5.
15Chen, “Against the State”, 4.
16Chen, “Against the State”, 11.
17Smith, “Class and Gender”, 149-155.
18Chan and Selden, “China's rural migrant”, 599-620
