1928-1949, (Ann Arbor, 1983).
Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin-, Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers. Both had introduced their approach in a "Symposium on Chinese Labor History" in Modern China (Oct. 1983) Vol. 9 No. 4, "Flying Hammers, Walking Chisels: The Workers of Santiaoshi" (pp. 387-419) and "The
Historians and the Chinese working class
Their construction of the experiences of Chinese workers lead them to conclude, in general, that an identity of class did not exist or was very weak because the workers were fragmented by native-place, dialect and traditional forms of associations. These were studies grounded firmly in the disappointment of intellectuals with the failure of the working class to live up to its mission. In seeking answers, new knowledge was produced about the everyday experience and cultures of a working class divided by vertical bonds and multiple loyalties.
Honig undertook her study of Shanghai women millhands to explore the applicability of Thompson's observation for 19th century England that industry was the agent of both industrial and social revolutions: past social relations were dissolved and a new class produced along with the new manufactures. Instead of finding a dissolution of the past in the transition from peasant to proletarian, Honig found that the millhands maintained ties with the village and that the place of origin divided the women and inhibited allegiances based on class.''^ She equivocates, though. Perhaps class did gain a place in consciousness of her millhands. The "working class consciousness ... must be able to embrace multiple loyalties," she says.'*^ This sidesteps the question of how "multiple loyalties" — the ties bound up with native place, sisterhoods and secret society labor bosses which she describes — were mediated and the way they shaped the character of class identity.
Hershatter's The Workers of Tianjin is a more nuanced study if only for the reason that she had to accommodate a diversity of workers, from lumpenproletariat carriers through to proto-capitalist jobbing machine shop owners. Her approach benefits from a firmer comparative understanding of working class history, especially that derived from studies of pre-revolution Russia which look at the connections with the village. The connections between consciousness, organisation and action, she says, "in turn leads us backward in time and place, to the villages from which most twentieth century Chinese workers came" and prompts the question: "How permanent was this working class?" Hershatter points to the circulatory migrations of workers between country and city and back again, and the persistence of links with the countryside. This "mobility, transience and rural conservatism might have made workers less committed to an urban situation and less militant", but it could also have increased militancy "if rural networks were brought into the factory and reshaped to suit new survival strategies. What is important is the use workers made of their rural ties in historically specific times and places."^" From this premise, Hershatter develops her themes, showing the intertwining of the past and present in the lives of
Contract Labor System and Women Workers: Pre-Liberation Cotton Mills of Shanghai" (pp. 421-454) respectively. Thompson is cited by Yiu-Chung Ko as an influence in his 1981 dissertation, "The Labor Movement in North China, 1900-1937", University of California, Santa Barbara, pp. 6-7, but the structure of the study is largely derivative of the questions which inform the political-institutional and dangshi approach.
Honig, Sisters and Strangers, pp. \-6 passim. ' ' ibid., pp. 249.
^^ Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, pp. 6.
Chapter 1
workers, the new organisations formed to meet the new ways of factory life, such as those of the millhands in Tianjin. New as many of these types of association might be, they were "not discontinuous with the old" — they were "built upon older ties, and were both strengthened and limited by them."^' These peasants or former rural artisans brought with them an inherited tradition, one which informed their associations and struggles in the new urban industrial world.
Political scientist Elizabeth Perry's Shanghai on Strike has built on these previous studies, bringing out the complexities and divisions of intra-class relations.^^ Perry moves beyond dwelling on "the centrifugal forces" which divide the working class to examine whether fragmentation could be a source for working class action and for new types of class solidarities that have their roots in the "heritage of protest" brought from the countryside. The traditions of the past persist, she suggests, not as archaic remnants but as the "central organising principles" of working class life in a milieu in which capitalist transformation sits side-by-side with precapitalist practices."
Perry's study draws on the materials that have become available in the 1980s — worker interviews, factory and government archives, police reports and cadre memoirs — to write a "new labor history" which joins workers' culture and shopfloor conditions with the more conventional focus on strikes and labor militancy.^'* Conceived in three parts — "The politics of place", "The politics of partisanship" and "The politics of production — it analyses the way popular culture, political strategies and the labor process played out in collective action (strikes) among different parts of the Shanghai working class. And in so far as "the formation of modem states are constructed from the cultural origins and working experiences of ordinary citizens", Shanghai on Strike lays the foundation for the study of "the role of labor in the formation of the modem Chinese state" to which Perry intends to tum in a plarmed volume on the Shanghai working class.^^
' ' ibid., pp. 169.
" Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, 1993).
" ibid., p. 11. The formulation is a rejection o f Chesneaux's argument that premodem associations and practices were irrelevant to the new working class, and at the same embodies Shaffer's argument that the wellspring of working class action in early 20th century China is to be found in the intersection o f precapitalist relations with the new mode of industrial capitalism.
^^ ibid., pp. vii-ix, 6-9, 239.
ibid., p. 8. M y original dissertation plan, conceived in 1990-91, proposed a chapter titled 'Class and its discontents' (apologies to Freud) which would examine the role o f labor in formation of the state in Republican China. A little is retained, in chapter 4 and 7, where 1 discuss industrial legislation and the G M D conception o f workers as citizens. Although Perry's focus on strikes might g o against recent labor history, such exceptional activity enables an insight into the mentality o f labor, the intersection o f culture and politico-economic demands. Strikes are always political, firstly, in challenging the authority o f management to control the labor process, and secondly, as Perry notes, due to "the clear relationship between industry and the m o d e m state ..." ( P - 7 ) .
Historians and the Chinese woricing class
Meanwhile, Alain Roux's Le Shanghai ouvrier des annees trente is a study fixed on the centrifugal forces at play which divide the working class or which even deny the emergence of a class identity.^^ The first major study of Chinese labor in French since Chesneaux's Mouvement ouvrier chinois, 1919-1927 of 1962, the work published in 1993 is a huge study of detailed scholarship in battle with the ghost of
Mouvement ouvrier chinois. The initial question Roux posed is: could class relationships emerge from the network of native place, secret society and work place relations? Roux concluded in the negative." The Chinese workers of Shanghai were not a cohesive class, self conscious and able to articulate its interests, but "an inchoate assembly of strata of workers" unable to rise to the historical mission of the
58
working class. This argument, in part at least, can be read as an inversion of Chesneaux's dismissal of secret societies and traditional forms of popular association among as "medieval" survivors "irrelevanf to Chinese society of the 1920s which 59 were doomed to "redundancy" with the emergence of a CCP-led labor movement.
As with the studies of Honig and Hershatter, Roux has taken us deep into the real stuff of working class social and cultural relations. The workers were not simply waiting for the student CCP activists to "kindle" the fires of revolution, to use the words of Nym Wales.^° They may not have had a tradition of trade unionism, but neither were they without organised social structures within the working class communities and the workplace. It was from these structures that Perry suggests class action might emerge. Roux is seemingly certain that a class identity was missing from among the operatives of the tobacco, cotton and silk plants. Not so, though, among the "labor aristocracy" who are said to possess a certain degree of social reality as a class which was denied others divided by wages, gender, age, native place and occupation.^' Yet those "traditional microstructures"^^ which divided the mass of Shanghai workers were the same structures which shaped the recruitment process of skilled workers and the construction of that skill. This is addressed in part one of Perry's study^^, and I examine the same issues in my discussion of recruitment and wage differentials for skill.
My argument with Roux, Honig and Hershatter, is that the stress on how the past persists in the material and cultural reality of Chinese workers neglects what was very different in their work experience. The workers brought with them an inherited
Alain Roux, Le Shanghai ouvrier des annees trente (Paris, 1993). I wish to thank fellow student Josephine Fox for help reading the French, but hasten to add that the interpretations and errors are all of my own doing. The book is based on his dissertation of 1991.
" ibid., p. 301. '' ibid., p. 305.
" Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, p. 18; Chesneaux, Secret Societies in China, p. 163. Wales, The Chinese Labor Movement, p. 11.
Roux, Le Shanghai ouvrier, p. 114 ^^ ibid., p. 310.
" Perry, Shanghai on Strike, the chapters "South China artisans" and "North China proletarians". 33
Chapter 1
tradition of organisation and social relations, but they had entered into a factory regime of labor and lived in urban quarters. A class identity emerges not ready formed but as part of a dynamic process of the interaction between the remembered pasts of village and town, and the real present of the industrial city. Multiple identities is part of that present. It might emphasise past — the sisterhood of Subei millhands; it might appear modem — a trade union. Both are working class responses to the new reality. An historian cannot say that one form of organisation is any less working class than another at a particular moment in time, or somehow represents a true expression of class self interest, without the historian falling into step with the elitism of the party vanguard.
Chinese writing on the labor movement is far less complex. It is informed mostly by the imperialism paradigm and the dangshi model. Industrial workers are painted as exploited wage slaves of rapacious foreign factory owners backed up by gunboats of the imperialist power. Into the drama steps the courageous party activist. The purpose of the dangshi model is to illuminate the correctness of party leadership, whether the CCP or the GMD. Although this description might be somewhat of a caricature, it highlights the gulf between the scholarship of the 1950s and that which has held sway for most of period since, and still does as evidenced in the recent publishing of a series on the Shanghai labor movement. In contrast, the early studies of Zhao Qin and Liu Mingkui sought to illuminate, analyse and reconstruct the experience of the Chinese working class.^^ They had the advantage of being able to interview many of the participants. Some interviews were published at the time.^^ Many interviews with old workers were collected in the late-1950s and early-1960s as part of the factory history movement. The individual or collective interviews
(zuotanhui) were edited into histories written usually in the style of novels, the original transcripts rarely available.^^ Despite the novel-like style and tendentious use
^ The series, Shanghai gongchang qiye dangshi gongyunshi congshu (Series on the party and labor history in Shanghai industrial enterprises), (Beijing, 1991), has 19 volumes including one on the railway labor movement in Shanghai.
Liu Mingkui, "1911-21 nian Zhongguo gongren bagong douzheng he zuzhi qingkuang ziliao huibian" (Compilations o f materials on the strikes and organisations o f Chinese workers, 1911- 21), Zhongguo gongyun shiliao (Historical Materials of the Chinese Labor Movement), No. 2-4 (1960); Zhao Qin, "Xinhai geming qianhou de Zhongguo gongren yundong" (The Chinese labor movement around the time of the 1911 revolution), Lishi yanjiu (Historical research), No. 2 (1959), reprinted in Zhongguo jindai shilun wenji (Collected essays on Chinese m o d e m history), (Beijing, 1979), Vol. 2, pp. 1046-1082.
^ S o m e o f the interviews were published in Zhongguo gongyun shiliao (Historical Materials o f the Chinese Labor Movement), many though had to wait until the early 1980s when they finally appeared in specially edited volumes of party materials or memoirs.
Perry obtained access to some of these transcripts held at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and 1 was allowed to read some of those held in the archives o f the Qinshuyan Locomotive and Rolling Stock Plant, the successor to the Wusong Works. However, all transcripts containing accounts o f the Green Gang bosses at Wusong w h o controlled early recruiting were, I was told, destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-69). Factory histories used in the writing of this dissertation include Baofengyuzhong de huochetou: Qinshuyan jiche cheliang gongchang
gongren douzhengshi, 1898-1949 (Locomotives in tempest: the history o f workers struggles at
Historians and the Chinese working class
of the materials, these histories are a valuable source for workers' thoughts on their lives in the Republican period.
The 1980s saw a revival in historical scholarship on labor, Chinese industry and entrepreneurs, markets and economic growth. A flood of documents, interviews, and other resource materials appeared, some of which were referred to earlier in the
68
chapter. The archives were opened to western scholars, at least in part. Studies such as that on the Jiangnan shipyards followed the de rigeur practice of old with several chapters wholly devoted to describing the exploitation of workers and their struggles, whereas a late 1980s textbook on modem Chinese industry gave scant attention to workers, with only a dozen pages which reiterated data compiled in the 1950s or earlier.^^ Few of the publications on labor have pioneered new sources or new methods, such as the application of quantitative methods used in the studies of wages at the Kailuan coal mine.^° Many young Chinese historians see labor as the preserve of old party hacks and its study hardly relevant to understanding the origin of 'market socialism' at the end of 20th century. By the later half of the 1980s, the economic reforms which had allowed a freer intellectual environment began to affect publishers who needed to turn a profit. Publishing historical works or resource materials is not a money earner and manuscripts now languish in the drawers of scholars.^'
Taiwan scholars shared the same historiographical values as their mairJand counterparts, despite the formal party political difference. The imperialism paradigm and dangshi model prevailed. The main difference between the CCP view and major works by Ma Chaojun, Wang Jianmin and others, was the identity of "the bad guy" in the narrative.^^ This view of the Republican period scholarship is not alone:^^
Scholars in Taiwan ... though they place a different dang (the Nationalist party rather than the C C P ) at the centre of their shi, have likewise until quite recently tended to share many of the same assumptions as their PRC counterparts when it
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70
the Qinshuyan locomotive and rolling stock plant, 1898-1949), (Nanjing, 1962); Beifang de hongxing — Changxindian jiche cheliang gongchang liushi nian (Red star of the north — 60 years of the Changxindian locomotive and rolling stock plant), (Beijing, 1960).
See notes 4 and 5.
Shanghai shehui kexueyuan jingji yanjiusuo (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Economics), ed., Jiangnan zaochuanchang changshi, 1865-1949 (A history of the Jiangnan shipyards), (Nanjing, 1983); Zhu Cishou, ed, Zhongguo jindai gongye shi (A history of modem Chinese industry), (Chongxing, 1989).
Yan Guanghua and Ding Changqing, "Jiu Kailuan meikuang gongren gongzi shuiping poxi" (Analysis of workers' wages at Old Kailuan Coal Mine), Nankai jingji yanjiusuo niankan, 1981- 1982 (Tianjin, 1983), pp. 315-34.
For example, Liu Mingkui, Zhongguo gongren jieji lishi zhuangkuang. The first volume was published in 1985, though Liu told me in mid-1992 he hoped that funds would soon be available for the publishing of the other volumes.
Ma Chaojun et al., ed, Zhongguo laogong yundongshi (A history of the Chinese labor movement), 5 vols, (Taibei, 1959); Wang Jianmin [Wang Chien-min], Zhongguo gongchandang shigao (A draft history of the Chinese Communist Party), (Taibei, 1965).
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "Towards a social history of the Chinese Revolution: a review", Social History, Vol 17, No. 1 (Jan. 1992), p. 7.
Chapter 1
came to the Repubhcan era. For both sets of Chinese scholars, party orthodoxy demanded that the story of the Revolution be treated in largely personal and ideological terms, as a battle between light and darkness in which heroic soldiers, guided by great generals and inspirational theoreticians, saved China from
imperialists and domestic tyrants.
Younger scholars in Taiwan, though, are open to new perspectives and largely free of the battles of past generations. Although limited access is available to the Guomindang archives and more generally to other materials, nevertheless the writing on labor is sparse and usually set in the context of a wider issue.^"^
Conclusion
The study of Chinese labor has not been a fashionable topic for Western scholars, nor one on which data were readily available. Access to data has not been the only inhibiting factor. Western historians have focussed on other topics which have, in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party wresting control from Guomindang in the late 1940s, seemed more important, such as the role of the peasantry and the question of land reform. For Chinese historians the study of labor is politically charged, the growth of the Chinese labor movement and the role of the working class intimately bound up with the legitimacy of the CCP's revolutionary tradition. Labor history was a 'department' of party history. In general, labor history served to demonstrate the CCP's leadership of the proletarian masses rather than articulate any understanding of the experience of the Chinese working class in its own right.
The opening up of China since 1978 has transformed the possibilities for the study of the development of the Chinese working class and the labor movement. Archives formerly closed to Western and most Chinese scholars other than privileged party historians were opened. New materials became available: the transcripts of