This chapter is a study of patterns of industrial conflict in diverse handcraft industries in Suzhou and Tianjin. The industries studied are those which existed in the pre-modem period (before the treaty ports) in a form little different, if at all, from the form in which they existed in the 1920s and 1930s, in which the introduction of imported technology was either gradual (as in the silk filatures discussed above) or absent. The major sources, as in the studies of factory industries above, are Bureau of Social Affairs work reports and Chamber of Commerce files.
The issues which will be examined are: the question of the uniformity of wages in the handcraft industries, and whether the workers' wage demands reflect a normal state of affairs in which wages were uniform? Were disputes and strikes in handcraft industries normally confined to one shop, or did they spread? To what extent did handcraft workers agitate for security of employment? To what extent did employers use lockouts? Did handcraft workers ever take industrial action in protest against the sacking of one or a few of their colleagues, as occasionally happened in the Tianjin cotton mills? If handcraft workers, and employers, can be shown to have acted differently from workers and employers in the factory industries in each of these respects, I consider that there is a good case for the abrupt introducdon to China of the new industries as the major factor in creating a new and distinctive type of labour- capital relations in Chinese factories.
1. Security of employment versus wages as a cause of contention
Chinese social scientists of the time and members of the Guomindang
administration concerned with labour issues, when explaining conflict between workers and employers, tended to classify industrial disputes and strikes into broad but distinct categories based on cause of conflict, that is, on what the observer considered the dispute or strike to be about. By this means they meant to illustrate the comparadve importance to factory workers of the various possible causes of conflict. The basic
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concepts used in the contemporary sociology of Chinese industry by the first generation of Chinese social scientists to have received higher education in Western traditions of social science were those used by European and American sociologists and economists. Scholars such as Chen Da and Fang Xianting were not naive about the existence of important differences between the social setting of industry in China and in the states of western Europe and north America. However, they did not seem to consider that these differences affected the universal explaining power of the received conceptual
framework of Western industrial sociology. It was understood that there was a small and finite number of things that an industrial dispute or strike could be about.
The annual work reports of the Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, established by the Guomindang in 1928, ordered industrial disputes and strikes into "those caused by dismissals" [youyu wanquan jiegu], "those caused by demands for better treatment" \youyu yaoqiu gailiang daiyu] and "those caused by working conditions, wages and other factors" \youyu gongzuo, gongziji qi ta\, the initial 1928-1929 work report rendered this last category as "those caused by working conditions, wages, factories closing and other factors" [youyu gongzuo, gongzi, ting ye ji qi to]} At first sight the Bureau's classification of industrial disputes was extremely rough and ready. Some of those in the category of "demands for better treatment" involved wage claims, and the exact logic of the distinction between the second and third categories is hard to perceive from the titles given to these categories. In fact the Bureau appears to have
distinguished two categories of industrial dispute according to whether they apparently began with a set of demands for better wages and conditions presented by the workers (usually, though not always, through the Guomindang union), without reference to any action by the management, or whether they began in response to an identifiable action by the management, such as cutting wages or discriminating against union members. That is, there were offensive disputes and strikes, defensive ones, and sacking disputes, which were in a separate category from defensive disputes. All three categories were mutually exclusive.
Fang Xianting, in Cotton industry and trade in China, divides disputes and strikes in the Tianjin cotton mills into two broad categories, "disputes related to collective bargaining" and "disputes not related to collective bargaining". Within the "collective bargaining" category, there are those "concerning trade unions or collective agreements" and those "concerning conditions of work", divided further into "wages", 1. Tianjin shi shehuiju yi zhou nian gongzuo baogao (First annual work report of the
Bureau of Social Affairs of Tianjin), Bureau of Social Affairs, Tianjin, 1929, pp.294, 302, 317; Tianjin shehuiju minguo shiba nian gongzuo baogao (1929 work report of the Bureau of Social Affairs of Tianjin), Bureau of Social Affairs, Tianjin, pp.59, 65 69.
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"hours of labour", "engagement or dismissal of workers", "treatment", "factory regulation", "system of work" and "others". "Disputes not related to collective
bargaining" included "sympathetic disputes", "political disputes" and "others". Again, all categories were mutually exclusive.^
The sociologist Chen Da, in Problems of Chinese labour, expresses a greater awareness of the conceptual difficulties associated with trying to impose order on industrial conflict by categorising strikes and disputes. "What are the standards by which we should classify strikes?" Chen wrote. "Our classification is based, generally speaking, on the nature of the strike [bagong de xingzhi], but there are several
difficulties with it. (A) The distinctions between causes for strikes are not clear. It is easy to confuse 'strikes caused by low standards of Hving' with 'strikes caused by demands for higher wages".' Some strikes can be put into both categories. (B) The distinctions between ways that strikes proceed are not clear. Some strikes can be put into many categories at once. But for the sake of simplicity and clarity, we have used the following two methods: when classified by causes, strikes are put into a single category according to what is the most important cause, and when classified by results, because the results of industrial action are often complex, one strike may be put into more than one category."
Chen gives the possible causes of strikes as "economic pressure", which is subdivided into "impoverishment" (divided further into "increase in the price of rice", "general price increase", "currency fluctuations", "rising living costs" and
"competition", by which he appears to mean competition for goods and services used by workers), "wage claims", "opposition to rent increases", and "opposition to increased charges" (such as superannuation); "working conditions", subdivided into "working hours", "opposition to mistreatment or injustice by the employer", "claims for, or opposition to, production reforms", "opposition to particular decisions by the employer or a branch of govemment", "opposition to a member of management" (not necessarily the same as opposition to mistreatment or injustice), and "demands for bonus
payments"; "popular movements", subdivided into "patriotic or anti-foreign movements" and "movements caused by the influence of new political ideas or agitators" (presumably any strike involving Communist Party members); "union organisation", subdivided into "demands for the establishment of a union", "demands for the recognition of a union", "demands for the union to recommend workers for employment", and "demands for the union to be authorised to negotiate with
management"; "conflict with outside parties", subdivided into "conflict with the army or 2. H.D. Fong, Zhongguo zhi mianfang zhi ye (Cotton industry and trade in China),
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the police", "conflict with a branch of government" and "chance conflict"; "sympathy strikes", and "others". All categories are mutually exclusive.^
One shortcoming of the schemes outlined above is the unproductively rigid distinction they impose between one category of industrial dispute and another. They obscure the complexities of industrial conflicts which begin as wage demands but turn into sacking protests after the workers identified as ringleaders are sacked, or begin as wage demands and turn into closing down protests when the management meets the wage demand with a lockout, or begin when a newly organised Guomindang union presents a detailed log of claims to the management, including both wage claims and claims concerning rights to employment, and the management reacts by sacking the bad elements and giving everyone else a wage rise. Not all of the disputes and strikes which I have information on are "ambiguous" in this way. Subject to the amount of
information on each strike, nearly all of them can be put into one category or another under each of the above schemes according to what appears to be the original or most important cause. However, the effect of the separation of disputes and strikes into discrete categories, with the intention of sorting out the order of importance of causes or results, is always to obscure or lose a certain amount of information. These are some "ambiguous" instances.
Suzhou, October 1926. Over 300 cotton carders struck after a colleague was handed over to the police by his employer for asking for a wage rise. The police called a conciliation meeting between representatives of labour and management. The
employers granted a rise in the piece rate of 2.5c per jin of cotton and offered to supply food. The First yearbook of Chinese labour, from which this account is taken, does not specify how many cotton carding shops were involved, what demands the cotton carders put forward at the conciliation meeting or what happened to the one who was arrested."^ This could be treated as a wage claim, though it could also be regarded as a solidarity or sympathy strike.
Suzhou, March 1919. This was a rather more complex series of events. Over 1,000 tailors struck for ten days in protest against the imposition of a work pass \yingye zhizhao] system, according to which all tailors seeking work would have to bring their guarantee (a guarantee had been required before the yingye zhizhao was introduced) to a police station and have it signed by the police at a cost of 1 yuan. The Wuxian daoyin [ ] said that the system had been introduced on the instructions of the civil governor of 3. Chen Da, Zhongguo laodong wenti (Problems of Chinese labour), Commercial Press,
Shanghai, 1929, pp.144, 151-155.