by Philip Short
Meanwhile in Changsha in November Mao contributed an article to the Workingmen's Association's newspaper, the Laogong zhoukan (Workingmen's Weekly). ‘The purpose of a labour organisation’, he wrote, ‘is not merely to rally the labourers to get better pay and shorter working hours by means of strikes. It should also nurture class consciousness so as to unite the whole class and seek the basic interests of the class. I hope that every member of the Workingmen's Association will pay special attention to this very basic goal.’40 Soon afterwards, Huang and Pang secretly joined the Socialist Youth League, and in December helped to organise a mass rally, which drew 10,000 people, in protest against manoeuvres by the Powers to extend their economic privileges in China.41 Mao's strategy of co-opting the anarchists, and gradually shifting their focus towards a more Marxist agenda, seemed to be succeeding.
But then, in January 1922, disaster struck. After the New Year holiday, 2,000 workers at the Huashi mill downed tools when the management announced that it was withholding their annual bonus. Equipment and furniture were smashed, and fights broke out with the company police in which three workers were killed. On January 14, Zhao Hengti, who was a major shareholder in the company, declared the strike to be ‘an anti-government act’ and sent in a battalion of troops. After handing out random beatings, they forced the men to resume work by training machine-guns on them. Next day, the 15th, a plea for help was smuggled out. The Workingmen's Association sprang into action. A message came from Governor Zhao asking the two young organisers to come to the mill to negotiate. When they arrived, at nightfall on January 16, they were detained and taken to the Governor's yamen, where Zhao questioned them at length. The workers were granted their bonus. But Huang and Pang were brought to the execution ground by the Liuyang Gate and beheaded, and the Workingmen's Association was banned.42
Their deaths, coming less than three weeks after Zhao had promulgated an ostensibly liberal provincial constitution, enshrining the principle of Hunanese autonomy, sent shock waves across China. Sun Yat-sen urged that Zhao be punished. Cai Yuanpei, at Beijing University, and other eminent Chinese intellectuals, sent telegrams of protest.43 Mao spent most of March and part of April in Shanghai, fanning a virulent campaign against Zhao in the Chinese-language press.44 Even the North China Herald declared the Governor's methods to be ‘inexcusable’.45
On April 1, Zhao issued a long, extremely defensive statement, justifying his conduct:
Unfortunately the general public does not seem to know the correct reasons for the executions, and has mixed them up with matters of the Workingmen's Association in such a way as to bring a charge against me of injuring the association … The two criminals Huang and Pang … [colluded with] certain brigands … in a plot to get arms and ammunition … Their plan was to overturn the government and spread their revolutionary ideas by causing trouble at the time of the Lunar New Year … On me rests the burden of the government of the 30,000,000 people of Hunan. I dare not allow myself to be so confused as to exhibit kindness to merely two men at the peril of the province. Had I not acted as I did, disaster could not have been averted … From the first I have always protected the interests of the workers … I look for Hunan labour to flourish and prosper.46
No one believed these assertions. But, by denying that the executions were linked to the activities of the Workingmen's Association, and explicitly affirming that the pursuit of the workers’ interests was legitimate, Zhao opened the way for the labour movement to resume.
By then Li Lisan's workers’ nightschool at Anyuan was already well-established. Li proved to be a first-rate labour organiser and, in May, persuaded the Anyuan magistrate to authorise the establishment of a ‘Miners' and Railwaymen's Club’ – a covert trade union – which soon boasted its own library, schoolroom and recreation centre. Four months after its inauguration, it had 7,000 members and opened a cooperative store to provide low-interest loans and basic necessities to the workers at substantially lower prices than any of the local merchants.47
All through the spring and summer of 1922, Mao, sometimes accompanied by Yang Kaihui, now pregnant with their first child, travelled to factories and railway depots in Hunan and western Jiangxi – which the Party had placed under the leadership of a newly formed Xiang District Special Committee,48 of which he had been named secretary – to assess the prospects for opening more schools and clubs. The Party Centre in Shanghai had given instructions that labour agitation among railway workers must have top priority. A Railwaymen's Club was established in Changsha, followed in August by one in Yuezhou, on the main line north to Hankou.49
It was at Yuezhou that the trouble began.50
On September 9, a Saturday, groups of workers blocked the line by sitting on the rails, demanding higher wages and modest welfare improvements. Troops were sent to disperse them, killing six workers and seriously injuring many more, together with women and children who had come to support their menfolk. When the news reached Changsha, Mao sent an incendiary telegram to other workers’ groups, seeking their support:
Fellow workers of all the labour groups! Such dark, tyrannical and cruel oppression is visited only on our labouring class. How angry should we be? How bitterly must we hate? How forcefully should we rise up? Take revenge! Fellow workers of the whole country, arise and struggle against the enemy!51
Governor Zhao let it be known that he would stay neutral. Yuezhou was garrisoned by northern troops loyal to Wu Peifu, the head of the Zhili warlord clique in Beijing, whom at this point Zhao viewed as an adversary; any disruption of the rail link to the north could only be to his advantage.52
Word of these events reached Anyuan late on Monday night.53 For some time, trouble had been brewing there over the mining company's refusal to pay back-wages. Now, Mao urged, the moment had come for the Anyuan men to strike too. Drawing on a classical Daoist phrase, he proposed that the guideline for the struggle should be to ‘move the people through righteous indignation’. Li Lisan drew up a list of demands, and forty-eight hours later, at midnight on September 13, the electricity supply to the mineshafts was cut; the mine entrance barricaded with timbers, and a three-cornered flag planted in front of it, bearing the defiant legend: ‘Before we were beasts of burden. Now we are men!’
The miners left two generators running, to prevent the mine flooding. But the following weekend, with negotiations going nowhere, there were calls for them to be switched off. At that, the mine directors capitulated, approving an across-the-board payrise of 50 per cent; union recognition; improved holidays and bonus conditions; the payment of back-wages; and an end to the traditional labour contract system, under which middlemen creamed off for themselves half the annual wage bill. A few days later, more than a thousand delegates from the country's four main rail systems met in Hankou, and threatened a national rail strike unless immediate wage increases were granted. Their demands, too, were met.54
In both the railwaymen's and the miners’ strike, Mao's role was indirect. As CCP Secretary in Hunan, he had guided the strike movement and acted as its political spokesman, but he played no active part in the conflict. A dispute among masons and carpenters, which began a week later in the provincial capital itself, involved him much more closely.55
All through the summer, a row had been simmering in the ancient trade guild of the Temple of Lu Ban, the patron saint of journeymen builders. Their earnings had been eroded by inflation of the paper currency, and in July they asked the Temple Board to persuade the District Magistrate to approve a wage increase.56 But the pressures of the market economy had eroded guild solidarity, too, and contrary to custom, the board insisted that the guild members subscribe 3,000 Chinese silver dollars to finance the negotiation.
‘They went off to all the fancy restaurants, like the Cavern Palace Spring, the Great Hunan and the Meandering Gardens, and held sumptuous banquets,’ one guild member recalled. ‘These bloodsuckers managed to fill their bellies with food and wine, but they didn't come up with a penny for us.’
The
stalemate was broken by a man named Ren Shude. The orphaned son of a poor peasant-farmer, he had joined the guild twenty years before as a thirteen-year-old carpenter's apprentice. The previous autumn he had done some work for the Wang Fuzhi Society, helping to get its premises ready for the new Self-Study University. Mao had befriended him, and at the beginning of 1922 he had become one of the first Changsha workers to join the Communist Party.
Ren now proposed that the men go to the Temple and demand an explanation. About 800 did so, but the board's negotiators fled to an inner sanctum, known as the Hall of Five Harmonies, where the workers dared not follow. At his suggestion, a small group then met Mao, whom Ren introduced as a school-teacher involved in the workers’ night-school movement. He advised them to create an independent organisation, with a system of ‘10-man groups’, or cells, like that used by the railwaymen's and miners’ unions. Three weeks later, on September 5, Ren presided over the founding congress of the Changsha Masons’ and Carpenters’ Union, with an initial membership of nearly 1,100 men. Mao himself drafted its charter, and appointed another Party member to act as union secretary.57
For the next month, as the mine and rail strikes unrolled at Anyuan and Yuezhou, Ren and his colleagues carefully laid their plans. Activists surreptitiously handed out pamphlets and, late at night, went to the barracks where, after the officers had retired, they fired arrows with tracts tied to them over the walls, to get the workers’ case across to the soldiers. Mao mobilised the sympathies of liberals within the provincial elite, former associates of Tan Yankai and members of the Hunan autonomy movement. The editor of the Dagongbao, Long Jiangong, inveighed against the very principle of the government regulating wages, noting that there was no comparable restriction on landlords raising rents. ‘In the provincial constitution,’ he wrote, ‘free enterprise is guaranteed. If employers object that [workers’] wages are too high, they should just refuse to hire them. Why do you want to restrict their demands and stop them raising the price of their labour?’
On October 4, the magistrate announced that the wage increase had been rejected.58 Next day, which was a local holiday, the union leaders met at Mao's home at Clearwater Pond, outside the Small East Gate, and resolved to launch a strike for more money, and for the right to free, collective bargaining. This was underlined in the strike declaration that Mao wrote, which was pasted up on walls in the city:
We, the masons and carpenters, wish to inform you that for the sake of earning our livelihood, we demand a modest pay increase … Workers like us, engaged in painful toil, exchange a day of our lives and of our energy for only a few coppers to feed our families. We are not like those idlers who expect to live without working. Look at the merchants! Hardly a day goes by without them raising their prices. Why does no one object to that? Why is it that only we workers, who toil and sweat all day long for a pittance, have to go through such an ordeal of being trampled on? … Even if we cannot enjoy our other rights, we should at least have the freedom to work and to carry out our business. On this point we will make our stand, and go to our deaths if need be. This right we will not surrender.59
The following day, all construction work in the city ceased. The magistrate, supported by the guildmasters, hoped to sit out the dispute. But winter was approaching. The authorities encountered growing public pressure for a rapid end to the strike, so that people could get repairs done to their homes before the cold weather arrived. On October 17, the magistrate appointed a mediation committee, and ordered the strikers to settle quickly: ‘If you refuse to listen, you will be bringing bitterness on yourselves,’ he warned. ‘You should all think long and hard. Do not wait till it's too late and you regret it!’ But the committee's offer, though more generous than earlier proposals, would have ended the traditional craft distinction between older and younger workers’ wages. It, too, was rejected, and the union announced that the workers world march en masse to the magistrate's yamen on Monday, October 23, to deliver a petition. The march was promptly banned, and doubts began to surface among the union leaders. The banning order described them as ‘fomenters of violence’, a term which had last been used to justify the executions of Huang Ai and Pang Renquan in January. By the weekend, the future of the strike was in the balance.
Mao spent much of Sunday night talking to Ren Shude and other members of the union committee. The situation, he argued, was totally different from that of January. Strikes were now occurring in many parts of China, and in this particular dispute, the masons and carpenters had widespread public support. Zhao Hengti had no direct interest in the outcome, as he had had at the Huashi cotton mill, of which he had been a shareholder. Moreover he was now politically isolated, having close relations neither with Sun Yat-sen in the south nor Wu Peifu in the north.
Next morning, almost all the 4,000 masons and carpenters in the city assembled in the square outside the former imperial examination hall, and marched in good order to the District Magistrate's yamen. There they found the main gate blocked by a table. On top of the table were two benches, on which stood a broad arrow, symbol of the military's right to carry out summary executions. Next to it was a board setting out the mediation committee's last offer.60
Mao had marched in the ranks with them, wearing workman's clothes. A union delegation went inside, but emerged some hours later saying that the magistrate refused any concessions. Then a second delegation was admitted. Mao remained outside. At dusk, when extra troops appeared to reinforce the yamen guards, he led the workers in chanting slogans to keep their spirits up. Darkness fell with still no agreement. Supporters brought lanterns, and they prepared to settle in for the night.
The prospect of several thousand angry men on the loose in the centre of Changsha overnight did not please Governor Zhao, who sent a staff officer to try to persuade them to leave. A missionary, who acted as an occasional correspondent for the North China Herald, happened to be on hand:
About 10 p.m. I wandered across to the precincts of the yamen, and found myself just in time to witness a most interesting interview … The staff official … was well-matched in the 10 representatives of the workmen … On both sides there was perfect courtesy. The staff official ‘mistered’ each of the representatives, and used not only the ordinary terms of respect but maintained the bearing of ordinary intercourse among gentlemen. The workmen, while speaking with complete ease and fluency, made no slips in etiquette …
The staff officer mounted a table … After [he had exhorted] the men to return to their homes … one of the ‘ten’, not the acknowledged leader, asked permission to put the officer's suggestion to a vote. ‘Will you go home? Those who are willing to do so, hold up their hand.’ Not a hand was held up. ‘Those who intend to stay holdup their hands.’ Not a hand was wanting. ‘You have your answer,’ was all that the representative commented …
The staff officer … openly admitted not only that the District Magistrate, but that even the Governor, had no right to fix the rate of wages by proclamation without the agreement of both sides … Now and again things became lively; but the workmen paid pretty good attention to the commands for order and silence from their own delegates. After an hour's enjoyment of as well-conducted debate as I have ever listened to, I left the disputants at it. It was 2 a.m. before, tired out and hungry (the soldiers prevented anyone from carrying in either food or clothing), the workmen agreed to go back to their headquarters.61
The ‘acknowledged leader’ whose debating skills so impressed the worthy prelate was Mao. The union representative who called the vote was probably Ren Shude. Before the workers left, they had extracted a promise that talks would resume at the Governor's yamen next morning. For two days more, Mao and the union leaders negotiated with Governor Zhao's deputy, Wu Jinghong. If a businessman could stop selling goods because it was no longer profitable, Mao argued, why could a worker not stop work? If a merchant could raise the price of a product, why could a worker not raise the price of his labour? The right to petition, he noted, was laid down in
the provincial constitution. ‘What law, then, are we breaking? Please inform us, honourable Director, sir!’ In the end, the Governor's decision not to use force, and the administration's concern lest the strike trigger civil disorder, left it no way to resist. Director Wu, Mao, Ren Shude and a dozen other union delegates signed an accord, to which the official seal was solemnly affixed, acknowledging that ‘all wage increases are a matter of free contractual relations between labourers and employers’.
With that, the power of the guilds, which had lasted almost unchanged since the Ming dynasty, 500 years earlier, was effectively destroyed in Changsha. The daily rate for the masons and carpenters was raised from 20 to 34 silver cents. It was still ‘not much more than the barest living wage, [on which] no man could support a family of two adults and two children’, the missionary noted.62 But for Mao, for the Party, and for all the city's workers it was a resounding success, and next day some 20,000 of them marched through a cannonade of firecrackers to the yamen to celebrate. ‘Organised Labour's Victory’, the Herald's headline proclaimed:
The government capitulated completely to the express wish of the strikers’ delegates … It is the first encounter of the new form of Workmen's Union with the officials … They gained all they asked; the officials gained nothing in their attempts to compromise. In as much as the workmen's demands were moderate, that is all to the good, but the precedent gives the workmen an enormous power of leverage.63