The task of the new generation, proclaimed Chen Tu-hsiu, was "to fight Confucianism, the old tradition of virtue and rituals, the old ethics and the old politics . . . the old learning and the old literature." In their place he would put the fresh materials of modern democratic political thought and natural science.

We must break down the old prejudices, the old way of believing in things as they are, before we can begin to hope for social progress [wrote Ch'en in 1915 in his magazine, New Youth]. We must discard our old ways. We must merge the ideas of the great thinkers of history, old and new, with our own experience, build up new ideas in politics, morality, and economic life. We must build the spirit of the new age to fit it to new environmental conditions and a new society. Our ideal society ~s honest, progressive, positive, free, equalitarian, creative, beautiful, good, Peaceful, cooperative, toilsome, but happy for the many. We look for the world that is false, conservative, negative, restricted, inequitable, hidebound, ugly, evil, war-torn, cruel, indolent, miserable for the many and felicitous for the few, to crumble until it disappears from sight.

I hope those of you who are young will be self-conscious and that you will struggle. By self-consciousness I mean that you are to be conscious of the power and responsibility of your youth and that you are to respect it. Why do I think you should struggle? Because it is necessary for you to use all the intelligence you have to get rid of those who are decaying, who have lost their youth. Regard them as enemies and beasts; do not be influenced by them, do not associate with them.

Oh, young men of China! Will you be able to understand me ? Five out of every ten whom I see are young in age, but old in spirit.... When this happens to a body, the body is dying. When it happens to a society, the society is perishing. Such a sickness cannot be cured by sighing in words; it can only be cured by those who are young, and in addition to being young, are courageous.... We must have youth if we are to survive, we must have youth if we are to get rid of corruption. Here lies the hope for our society.

This memorable call was really the opening manifesto of the era of the second Chinese revolution. Ch'en Tu-hsiu was a professor at the time at Peking National University, where new ideas and new impulses were stirring and where a new spirit was germinating. Ch'en's magazine was eagerly snatched up by students in every school and college in the country. When it was published, wrote one student, "it came to us like a clap of thunder which awakened us in the midst of a restless dream.... Orders for more copies were sent posthaste to Peking. I do not know how many times this first issue was reprinted, but I am sure that more than 200,000 copies were sold.''1 It nourished the impulsive iconoclasm of the young people. It gave direction to the mood of unease and unsettlement that pervaded all classes in the population. It was a call to action that awakened immediate response. An outlet was not long in offering itself.

Japan had taken advantage of the wartime circumstances in 1915 to impose upon China its Twenty-one Demands, which would have reduced China to a virtual Japanese colony. Japanese troops had also occupied the province of Shantung. Woodrow Wilson's promises of self-determination and social justice for all peoples had bred the hope that in the general postwar settlement, China would be relieved of Japanese and Western overlordship. When, at Versailles, these illusions were cynically spiked by horse-trading politicians,2 the student youth in China rose in fury against the treachery of the Japanophile Peking Government. On May 4, 1919, huge student demonstrations took place in the old capital. The homes of pro-Japanese ministers were attacked and wrecked. The movement spread across the country. In it a new note sounded when workers in factories struck in support of the student demands for a new regime.

At the end of 1916 there were already nearly 1,000,000 industrial workers in China and their number nearly doubled by 1922. An army of nearly 200,000 Chinese laborers had been sent to Europe during the war. Many of them learned to read and write and, even more significantly, came in contact with European workers and the higher European standard of living. They returned with new ideas about man's struggle to better his estate. Nationalist sentiment had taken strong hold among them. Many on their way back from Europe had refused to step ashore at Japanese ports during the furor over Shantung. When strikes in factories began to deepen the roar of the May 4 movement, the returned laborer was already regarded as "the stormy petrel of the Chinese labor world."3 These workers played a key role in the creation of new labor organizations, in which they formed a solid and energetic, nucleus. Just as old family firms and partnerships were beginning to give way to modern corporations, the guilds were beginning to break up and to divide into labor unions and chambers of commerce. Chinese workers, new to their machines and new to the ideas and techniques of labor organization, were thrust at once into the political turmoil that rose around them. Their strikes in Shanghai and other cities in 1919 more than anything else forced the release of student demonstrators arrested in Peking and hastened the resignation of the offending government officials.

The tide of May 4 engulfed the entire country. It ushered in the second Chinese revolution. It seemed to touch off waiting impulses of astonishing vigor. Traditional ideas and modes of conduct were crumbling and the echo of their fall sounded from one end of the country to the other. Young men and women in towns and villages began to break with the old authority of the family and the village elders. A fissure opened between the generations that was never again closed. The old ways of doing and thinking still governed much Of Chinese life but they were now being mortally assailed. In the colleges and universities there was a great churning. The disillusionment with the West after the Versailles Conference turned popular attention among the students to the Russian revolution. This new current brought with it to China belated tributaries of all the main streams of European social thought, democracy, anarchism, syndicalism, and Marxism, opening up new horizons and stimulating a veritable revolution in thought, morals, and literature, and rapidly deepening the channels of political change and social conflict. All classes of society entered the political arena. Old political organizations took on fresh life. New organizations came into being.

When these fresh political currents began to flow in 1919, the Kuomintang, heir to the party of the 1911 revolution, had fallen into sterile impotence. Its "right" elements, conservative bourgeois intellectuals, had become helpless dependents of the war lords. Sun Yat-sen, leader of the more radical wing of the intelligentsia, was pursuing his schemes for revolution by military conspiracy, by attempting to use the lesser against the greater militarists. He had evolved his own political philosophy, summed up in his "Three People's Principles." These were not distinguished by their clarity or boldness, or even by any consistent radicalism. His principle of Nationalism, which concerned the liberation of China from foreign control, was heavily diluted by Sun's own naive illusions. As first president of the Republic, Sun had promised the Powers that their perquisites and privileges, extracted by force from the overthrown dynasty, would remain intact and that payments due them on their loans would be assumed by the Republic.4 After the war of 191~18, he counted on the benevolent co-operation of the Powers. He submitted to the various foreign offices a plan for "sincere" collaboration among the different nations in the development of China's resources. He envisaged an idyll in which the foreign holders of privilege would join with the Chinese in a "socialistic scheme" from which all would benefit. "It is my hope," he wrote, "that as a result of this, the present spheres of influence can be abolished, international and commercial war done away with, internecine capitalistic competition can be got rid of, and last but not least, the class struggle between capital and labor can be avoided."5 Sun's "nationalism" also included the prospect of Chinese domination over minority nationalities within the former Empire. He looked for the "assimilation" of the Manchus, Mongols, Mohammedans, and Tibetans, in a Greater China ruled by the Han. The idea of the self-determination of nations, like that of a vigorous struggle against imperialism, entered his thinking somewhat later.

Sun's second principle, Democracy, provided mainly for a period of "political tutelage" during which enlightened leaders would gradually guide the dark and miserable masses toward self-government. Conceived by Sun as a kind of benevolent paternalism, this doctrine became in the hands of his heirs and successors a justification for the most despotic kind of tyranny. There was, in fact, little in common between Sun Yat-sen's concept of democracy and the idea of the direct conquest of political rights and liberties by the people.

The third principle of the People's Livelihood expressed Sun's thinking on future Chinese economic organization and the all-pervading question of the land and the peasantry. He advocated "restriction of capital" and "equalization of rights in the land," two formulas broadly and variously interpreted by Sun himself and by his disciples in subsequent years. By "restriction of capital" Sun hoped to save China from the blights of capitalism, although it was never clearly shown how this was to be done. By "equalization of rights in the land," Sun meant a plan to correct inequalities in such a way that "those who have had property in the past will not suffer by it."6 His plan was to have land values fixed by agreement with the landlords and for all future increment in these values to revert to the State. By the power of purchase, the State would then proceed to create better conditions for the landless or land-hungry peasant population. Sun Yat-sen never ventured for years, however, to propagate even these plans for fear of alienating his military allies and many of his own followers. Sun totally rejected the idea of a class struggle, and the participation of the masses in political life was quite outside his ken. His hope was to bring about the peaceful and benevolent transformation of Chinese society after first securing power for himself and his followers by purely military means. This was the aim of his long series of invariably fruitless military adventures and alliances.7

The renewal of political activity in the country in 1919, however, energized Sun Yat-sen's declining party. Sun himself began appearing before student gatherings, and when General Ch'en Ch'iung-ming permitted him the next year to establish a government in Canton, he made contact there with the newly organized trade-unions. The labor movement had already begun to make headway. Railroad workers had established a union at Ch'anghsintien, near Peking, and students went there nightly to teach the union members. Unions had also begun to spring up along the seaboard and in Canton and Hongkong in the south. Marxist journals appeared in the schools and universities. Marxist study groups formed in 1918 and 1919 expanded into Socialist societies and from these it was but a step, in 1920, to the foundation of the Chinese Communist party. Its founders included some of the leading figures of the May 4 movement, chief among them Ch’en Tu-hsiu. The party's first national conference took place in Shanghai in July 1921. Most of the delegates were young intellectuals. It was a mixed group destined to break into many parts. Some, drawn by adolescent sentiment or quickly stifled anarchist leanings, soon dropped away into obscurity or found their way to opposing political camps. Among the founders, for example, was Tai Chi-t'ao, who in a short time became the leading ideologist and spokesman for the Right Wing of the Kuomintang. Others who began their careers as Communists included Ch'en Kung-po, Shao Li-tzu, and Chou Fu-hai, all later luminaries in the Kuomintang regime. Ch'en Kung-po ended up as a puppet of the Japanese. Others, like the famous Li Ta-chao, librarian of Peking National University, were destined to lose their lives in the coming battles. Also among the founders was Li's young assistant, a Hunanese named Mao Tse-tung.

The new Communist party soon had to face the problem of its relation to other burgeoning political groups. At its second national conference, in 1922, it was decided to propose a two-party alliance to the Kuomintang. When this plan was laid before Sun Yat-sen, he rejected it. He said he might permit Communists to join the Kuomintang but would countenance no two-party alliance. Shortly afterward, Maring, the first delegate of the Comintern in China who had already been in contact with Sun in the south, met with the Communist Central Committee at West Lake, Hangchow. He proposed that the Communists simply enter the Kuomintang and use its loose organizational structure as a means for developing their own propaganda and contacts among the masses.* Maring based his proposal in the first place on his own prewar experience in Java. There he had been associated with Left-Wing Social Democrats who joined the Saraket Islam, a mixed political-religious movement opposing Dutch colonial rule. Within the Saraket Islam this group had begun to organize workers' groups and during the war had succeeded in developing a substantial Left-Wing political movement in the colony. Maring also was convinced that in Sun Yat-sen's group in Canton there was the nucleus of the kind of national-revolutionary movement to which Lenin had referred at the Second Congress of the Comintern. He cited Sun's connections with the growing labor movement in the south.

* This information is based on notes of a conversation with Maring in Amsterdam in 1935. Maring, whose real name was Sneevliet, was a Dutch Communist who later broke with the Comintern and headed a Left-Wing Socialist group in Holland. He was killed by the Nazis during the second World War.

According to Maring, the majority of the Chinese Communist Central Committee accepted his views Those who opposed his plan did so on the grounds that they doubted the weight of the Kuomintang as a political force and did not believe it would or could develop into a mass movement. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, listed by Maring as among those who agreed readily to enter the Kuomintang, has written an account of the Hangchow conference which differs on this point.8 He says that all the Central Committee members opposed Maring, claiming that even at that time the Chinese Communist leaders believed such a step "would confuse class organizations and curb our independent policy." This was written, however, after the event. In 1922, Ch'en had written: "Co-operation with the revolutionary bourgeoisie is the necessary road for the Chinese proletariat"8 and it was obviously in this spirit that he approached the Kuomintang issue when it arose. It seems fairer to assume that the opposition to Maring was based on the belief that the Kuomintang was defunct and not worth considering, a view which he remembers was most strongly expressed by Chang Kuo-t'ao, another of the founding leaders of the Communist organization. In the end the proposal was adopted, although there was considerable doubt whether the Kuomintang, and especially Sun himself, would welcome it.*

The Communists entered the Kuomintang as individuals in hopes of winning over to their influence the Southern workers who had already affiliated with the Kuomintang.10 At the same time they pressed Sun Yat-sen to reorganize his party on the basis of a new program capable of attracting popular support. Sun remained cool to these proposals. Only when he was forced once more to flee for his life, following a revolt by General Chten Ch'iung-ming in Canton in June 1922, did he grow more receptive to the arguments of Maring, supported by Liao Chung-k'ai, the most radical of Sun's immediate entourage. Sun was still unattracted by the role of a mass movement as a political weapon, but he had begun to be attracted by the prospects of direct and concrete aid from Russia.

Several factors combined to start Sun thinking about a Russian alliance. His plan for the international development of China had been rebuffed by all the foreign governments who received it.1l The Powers had set about regulating their relations in the Far East at the Washington Conference of 1921-22. But while that conference produced the Nine Power Treaty guaranteeing the territorial integrity of China, the main issue settled there had more to do with Anglo-American relations with Japan than with the needs of China. That conference, to borrow Wang Ching-wei's summary, "freed China from the Japanese policy of independent violent encroachment" only to leave it victim "to the cooperative slow encroachment" of all the Powers.13 Sun and his followers began to lose some of their faith in Western good intentions. Simultaneously, they began to see in Russia not only a source of material aid but a lever for extracting concessions from the Western Powers.

The Moscow government had already indicated its readiness to put Chinese-Russian relations on a radically new basis. On July 4, 1918, Chicherin, then Commissar for Foreign Affairs, declared that Bolshevik Russia had unilaterally renounced all Czarist "unequal" treaties with China and its agreements with Japan and other countries relating to China. This policy was again set forth in a manifesto issued on July 25, 1919, over the signature of Leo Karakhan, deputy commissar for foreign affairs. This manifesto said that the Soviet government annulled and repudiated "all the secret treaties concluded with Japan, China, and the former Allies; treaties by which the Czar's government, together with its allies, through force and corruption, enslaved the peoples of the Orient, and especially the Chinese nation, in order to profit the Russian capitalists, the Russian landlords, and the Russian generals." Again, on September 27, 1920, in a formal note to China, the Soviet government reiterated its denunciation of all previous treaties, renounced all Czarist annexations of Chinese territory, and returned to China "free of charge and forever all that was ravenously taken from her by the Czar's government and by the Russian bourgeoisie.''13 Early Soviet missions to Peking, under M. I. Yurin and A. K. Paikes, tried from 1920 to 1922 to negotiate a new treaty on this basis but were blocked, mainly by Western and Japanese pressure on the Peking government.

These first contacts between Bolshevik Russia and China illustrate how, even at this early date, contradictions arose between Russian national purposes and Communist international revolutionary purposes. The declarations from Moscow in 1919 and 1920 had breathed a note of change new in the annals of international diplomacy. The offer of this new revolutionary government to deal with China on a basis of equality nettled the Western Powers and won a delighted and sympathetic hearing for Russia among all classes of Chinese. But there were some significant equivocations, relating to the Chinese Eastern Railway in particular, which strongly suggested second thinking by at least some Russians in policy-making positions at the time.*

But even more striking is the fact that the first Soviet agents to reach China, sent by the Chita government and by the Irkutsk Bureau of the Comintern, came looking not for new revolutionary currents to swim in but for a deal with any likely looking band of militarists and politicians who might serve Russian diplomatic interests. The government at Peking was then in the hands of the notoriously pro-Japanese Anfu clique and the Russians scanned the field for promising opponents. The puny nationalist movement led by Sun Yat-sen in the south did not impress them as a point of support for Soviet interests. They were more attracted by the military strength of the war lord Wu P'ei-fu, who was interested in overthrowing and replacing the Anfu regime in power. When Wu did seize the government in Peking in 1920 and set up a puppet civilian cabinet of his own, the Far Eastern expert V. Vilensky wrote in Izvestia: "Wu P'ei-fu has hung out his flag over the events which are taking place in China and it is clear that under this flag the new Chinese cabinet must take an orientation in favor of Soviet Russia.''1 But Wu's orientation was toward the British; the Rising Sun had merely been replaced by the Union Jack at the back door of the Peking government. That was why, in the final analysis, the 1921 negotiations were without result.

* There is evidence, for example, that the Manifesto of July 25, 1919, originally Contained a specific Russian offer to return the Chinese Eastern Railway to China Without compensation. This sentence appeared in one version published in Moscow was deleted in other published versions, and then was left in by mistake in a text officially communicated to Peking the following March. It was the source of much dispute in subsequent Soviet-Chinese negotiations. The history of this interestingly e9~sive sentence is traced in a graduate thesis prepared at Columbia University in 0 by Allen S. Whiting, "Sing-Soviet Relations, 1917-1924."

When Maring came to China in the spring of 1921 and established connections with Sun Yat-sen, whom he first visited in Kwangsi, he decided that the main stream of Chinese nationalism flowed through Sun's Kuomintang. This belief was strengthened when in Canton and Hongkong in January 1922 a major seaman's strike took place and Maring found that the Kuomintang already had substantial links to the young Chinese labor movement. Maring's proposal to the Chinese Communists to enter the Kuomintang marked a reversal of the so-called "Irkutsk line" of the Comintern. When Sun Yat-sen, expelled from Canton by the militarist Ch'en Chtiung-ming, arrived in Shanghai in August 1922, Maring met him again and urged him to substitute a campaign of mass propaganda and organization for any attempt to recapture Canton by purely military means. This time he found his views more welcome. Sun, dismayed by the outcome of the Washington Conference, had begun to think in terms of seeking Soviet assistance. This was the report that Maring took back with him to Moscow the next month. On the basis of his findings, the Comintern abandoned the "Irkutsk line" of trying to establish links with Northern militarists and turned its attention instead to Sun Yat-sen. Maring's views were published in the Communist press and became the starting point of an entirely new orientation of Soviet policy.16 The Soviet government sent Adolph Joffe, one of its top diplomats, to establish formal contact with Sun Yat-sen.

Joffe met Sun in Shanghai. On January 26, 1923, they issued a joint statement in which Joffe agreed that "conditions do not exist here for the successful establishment of Communism or Socialism," that "the chief and immediate aim of China is the achievement of national union and national independence." Joffe assured Sun that, in seeking these aims, the nationalist movement "could depend on the aid of Russia.''l6 This diplomatic formula inaugurated the formal entente with Sun. The Russians at the same time pressed their treaty negotiations in Peking and the next year Leo Karakhan, as Soviet envoy, triumphantly concluded the Sino-Soviet Treaty of May 1924. By that time, however, the whole emphasis had shifted to the south. Arms, money, and advisers were beginning to move in to implement the deal with Sun and the Kuomintang.

From the outset, it was automatically assumed that the Chinese Communists would henceforth devote themselves solely to the job of helping to make the Kuomintang a worthy ally. All the elaborate formulations and explanations came later. In the beginning it was a "practical" and obvious outcome of the new turn in Soviet policy. The Russians had entered into an arrangement with the Kuomintang. It became the duty of the Chinese Communists to facilitate and fructify that arrangement. When Michael Borodin took his post as adviser to Sun Yat-sen in the fall of 1923, he came not as a delegate of the Communist International to the Chinese Communist party, but as adviser to the Kuomintang delegated by the Politbureau of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. This distinction was far from purely formal. It reflected the underlying political realities. Borodin's job was to reorganize and pump new life into the Kuomintang. All efforts, especially those of the Chinese Communists, had to be concentrated now to that end. The Executive Committee of the Comintern had ruled, on January 12, 1923: "Insofar as the working class . . . is not yet sufficiently differentiated as an absolutely independent force, the E.C.C.I. considers that it is necessary to coordinate the activities of the Kuomintang and of the young Communist Party of China.''17 The party was "not to merge" with the Kuomintang nor "furl its own banner" but, on the other hand, the "central task" became co-ordination with the Kuomintang and recognition that it could not be an "absolutely independent force." Some of the members of the Chinese party may have found these formulas a little tricky but the third conference of the Chinese Communist party in June 1923 silenced all internal opposition to the Kuomintang entry and raised the slogan: "All work to the Kuomintang!" The conference manifesto declared that "the Kuomintang should be the central force of the national revolution and should stand in the leading position.''18

Borodin set out to convince Sun Yat-sen that what the Kuomintang needed was a disciplined party organization with a powerful mass movement behind it. Sun had managed to re-establish himself in Canton and in November was again threatened there by Ch'en Ch'iung ming’s army. Borodin, with the help of the Chinese Communists' managed to demonstrate that the militarist forces could be easily repelled by a show of popular strength. The ease with which this was done finally convinced the Kuomintang leader. With his support, Borodin drafted a new program for the Kuomintang. It was based upon co-operation between the Kuomintang and Soviet Russia as well as the Chinese Communist party, the idea of a militant anti-imperialist struggle mounted on a mass basis, and a platform of liberal reforms for the workers and peasants. Borodin took over Sun's formulas, "restriction of capital" and "equalization of rights in the land." He translated them into planks for a 25 percent reduction in land rents and a promise of a labor code. 19 This new program was adopted and the reorganization of the Kuomintang approved at the first national congress of the party, which met in Canton in January 1924, on the day that Lenin died.

The Kuomintang was transformed into a rough copy of the Russian Bolshevik party. 13olshevik methods of agitation and propaganda were introduced. To create the basis of an army imbued with Kuomintang ideas and to put an end to the previous dependence on old-style militarists, the Russians in May 1924 founded the Whampoa Military Academy. This academy was supplied and operated with Russian funds, staffed by Russian military advisers. Before long, shiploads of Russian arms were coming into Canton harbor to supply the armies which rallied to the new banner as soon as the Kuomintang began to display the new strength with which all these activities endowed it. The Chinese Communist party, chief organizer of the new movement, confined itself religiously to building the Kuomintang and propagating its program. Its members were the most indefatigable party workers, but they never appeared as Communists nor presented any program of their own. The Communist party became in fact and in essence, in its work and in the manner in which it educated its own members, the Left-Wing appendage of the Kuomintang. In the initial stages, however, the ultimate significance of this fact was overshadowed by the spectacular growth of the mass movement. For neither the tactics of the Communists nor the requirements of the Kuomintang brought the mass movement into being. Its sources were imbedded, like ore in rock, in the conditions of Chinese life.

In foreign-owned and Chinese factories in Canton, Shanghai. Hankow, Tientsin, and other cities, factory workers lived and toiled in conditions comparable only to the worst helotry of the early stages of the industrial revolution in England. Aqen, women, and children worked, as they still do, for twelve, fourteen, and sixteen hours a day for wages as low as eight cents a day, without the most elementary provisions for their safety or hygiene. An apprentice system provided small producers and shopkeepers with an inexhaustible supply of child labor working daily up to eighteen and twenty hours in return for a bowl of rice and a board to sleep on. What these conditions cost in poverty was visible to the eye. What they cost in human life no one could know because no one knows the mortality rate in China.20 Against these conditions of chronic hunger, the workers, their ranks swelling with the growth of industry, began to rebel as soon as they realized that they did not have to submit docilely to their fate. Small strikes had begun to occur even before the political events of 1919. In 1920 the Mechanics' Union in Canton won a major strike and in 1922 the Hongkong seamen wrote a historic first chapter in the newstyle fight against imperialism by winning a strike victory over the British, securing recognition of their union and sizable wage increases.21 These strikes stimulated the rapid flow of workers into unions. In May 1922 the first national labor conference met in Canton under the leadership of the triumphant seamen. The conference was attended by delegates of 230,000 union members. Under the direct pressure of this strong new group, Sun Yat-sen's Kwangtung government revised the penal code to legalize union organization and the path was cleared for further growth.22

In Central and North China the fight for higher wages, the right to organize and to bargain collectively, was also getting under way. Chief of these struggles affected the Peking-Hankow Railway workers. An organization conference of the union was called at Chengchow, in Honan. Wu P'ei-fu ordered his troops to break up the meeting. The result was the massacre of sixty workers on February 7, 1923. This repression only briefly checked the organization of the railway workers. A year later almost to the day, the National Conference of Railway Workers was held and a national committee formed to carry on the fight for "improvement of our conditions, respect for our fate, education for us and our children, the right to form individual unions, to forge solidarity among all railway workers."23 In Shanghai, by the beginning of 1923, there were already 40,000 workers organized into twenty-four unions.

In 1918, according to incomplete records, there were twenty-five recorded strikes in the country, involving fewer than 10,000 workers. In 1922 there were ninety-one strikes, involving 150,000 workers.24

The labor movement grew with astonishing speed and militancy. On May Day 1924, in Shanghai, 100,000 workers marched through the streets and twice that number marched in Canton. Contemporary reports describe how in Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankow, despite rigid martial law, red flags appeared over working-class quarters. The traditional May Day slogan, the eight-hour day, must have sounded millennial to workers who had just begun to dream of working fourteen instead of sixteen, twelve instead of fourteen, ten instead of twelve hours a day.

"Eight hours of work, eight hours of education and recreation, eight hours of rest—how reasonable this program is!" ran the leaflets of the day. "For forty years the working class has poured out its blood for its realization. The time is past when the workers are but fodder for the bosses. They will not cede but to revolution? Then they shall have it!"

"Remember today, fellow workers, that you are men, just as the bosses are. Demand then that you be treated as men. Organize! Numbers give strength. Comrades will extend to you their hand!" They marched through the streets singing new songs: "Work shall be a pleasure, our offering to brotherhood. We shall be called to it by the bells of liberty!"25

It is obvious that by the time the Kuomintang was reorganized in 1924, workers in China had already begun to organize themselves in a movement marked by its independent spirit and militancy. There is also evidence that they were skeptical and suspicious of the new "allies" who were springing up in Canton. There on May Day, Sun Yat-sen told a workers' audience: "The difference between the Chinese workers and foreign workers lies in the fact that the latter are oppressed only by their own capitalists and not by those of other countries.... The Chinese workers are as yet not oppressed by Chinese capitalists.... They are oppressed by foreign capitalists.''26 Similar statements were made by a Kuomintang speaker at the first conference of transport workers, held at Canton the next month. G. Voitinsky, a Comintern representative who was destined to play a large role in overcoming this skepticism, reported at the time that the delegates "gave a cold and dubious reception to the declaration of the responsible representative of the Kuomintang, who called upon the workers to form a united front with the peasants and intellectuals, but not under the hegemony of the proletariat."2 This mood and this impulse were soon submerged by the demands of the KuomintangCommunist alliance.

Similarly, the peasants had also begun to stir and group themselves into organizations before the revived Kuomintang made its appearance in 1924. The modern Chinese peasant movement was cradled in Haifeng, in the East River districts of Kwangtung, by pteng Pai, one of the most appealing figures of the Chinese revolution. Son of a wealthy Haifeng landlord, P'eng Pai became a schoolteacher in his native village. He was one of the first in the district to join the Communist party and he was soon engaged in trying to organize the peasants. Dismissed from his school job for leading a May Day demonstration of his pupils in 1921, P'eng went out into the countryside to devote himself entirely to the business of rousing the peasants. The story of his early rebuffs, his first successes, and the initial successes of the Haifeng Peasant Association, he has himself left behind in a small pamphlet of personal notes and reminiscences.28 As a landlord's son he was first received with mistrust and hostility. He finally fired the imagination of a few peasant lads. With conjuring tricks and a gramophone, he drew village audiences and was soon convincing them that they had to form an organization to fight for their own interests. The first Peasant Association was formed, grew swiftly, and was almost immediately baptized under the fire of Ch'en Ch'iung-ming's soldiers.

The Kuomintang had still to make itself the gover.ning pow not only in the province of Kwangtung but in the city of Cant' itself. In the summer of 1924, the Kuomintang in Canton was ch; lenged by the Merchants' Volunteers, an armed organization suppli and financed by the British and by the wealthy compradores Hongkong and Canton. It was organized by Ch'en Lien-po, chi compradore for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporatio leading British financial institution in the Far East. On August 1 Sun Yat-sen seized a boatload of arms consigned to Ch'en and prepared, after considerable vacillation and delay, to suppress the arm corps that threatened his rule in the city. On August 26, the Briti Consul General issued a virtual ultimatum, threatening British nav intervention in case of an attack on the Merchants' Volunteers. S protested, vainly, to Britain's Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay Ma Donald. Sun also appealed to the League of Nations but received reply. Finally, in October, a force composed of Whampoa cede workers' battalions, and peasant guards descended on the Merchan1 Volunteers and after a brief but sharp battle defeated and disarm them. The British river gunboats did not intervene after all.30

A few weeks later, the budding Kuomintang regime finally established its own power in the city of Canton. The city had been under the military control of two Yunnanese generals, Yang Hsi-min, and Liu Chen-huan, who hoped, like so many others, to benefit from cooperating with the Kuomintang. But a struggle for power in the city was inevitable. Once more the Whampoa cadets and armed workers fought side by side. The result was a foregone conclusion. The Yunnanese troops were demoralized, scattered, and expelled from the city. Peasants in the West River districts completed the job by cutting off the retreating remnants and destroying them after a brief but sharp engagement at Kiangtun.34 Meanwhile a new wave was sweep'ng out of Shanghai. The high tide of the new mass movement was only just coming in.

A boycott of British goods and a general strike were immediately declared. Hongkong, fortress of Britain in China, was totally immobilized. Not a wheel turned. Not a bale of cargo moved. Not ship left anchorage. More than 100,000 Hongkong workers took the unprecedented action of evacuating the city. They moved en mass to Canton. The strike halted all foreign commercial and industrial activity. It drew 250,000 workers out of all principal trades and industries in Hongkong and Shameen.38 In Canton workers cleaned out gambling and opium dens and converted them into strikers' dormitories and kitchens. An army of 2,000 pickets was recruited from among the strikers and a solid barrier was thrown around Hongkong and Shameen. The movement was, by all accounts, superbly organized. Every fifty strikers named a representative to a Strikers' Delegates' Conference, which in turn named thirteen men to serve as an executive committee. Under the auspices of this body, actually the first embryo of workers' power in China, a hospital and seventeen schools for men and women workers and for their children were established and maintained. Special committees handled funds and contributions, the auctioning of confiscated goods, and the keeping of records. A strikers' court was set up which tried violators of the boycott and other offenders against the public order.39

Police functions were almost wholly assumed by the striker-pickets. The picketing was thorough. "The boycott against British goods in Canton," wrote a foreign observer, "is controlled by a strike committee which operates through pickets, whose work it is to prevent breaches.... Wherever in Kwangtung there is a highway for the transfer of goods, the pickets are present, ready to examine cargo, to open packages, to search individuals.... Foreigners as well as Chinese are subject to search.... The strikers' rule is that no goods, not even foodstuffs, are to be taken to and from the Shameen. . . . If there is an infraction of the boycott, the guilty person is brought before the strikers' tribunal for punishment.... The boycott is complete . . . [and it] must be regarded as a war on Hongkong and Great Britain and the pickets as the soldiers in that war. There is no other possible interpretation of the completeness and ruthlessness with which it is carried out." 40 The task of covering all lines of communications along the Kwangtung coast and at all ports was carried out in co-operation with the peasant associations. Peasant pickets patrolled the coast at Swatow, Haifeng, P'ingshan, and other points, to make the blockade complete.

Shameen, with its marooned little colony of bitter and fuming foreigners, was cut off from all contact with the rest of Canton. All entrances to the concessions were guarded. Only occasional ships coming up from Hongkong, mainly warships or British vessels manned by volunteer foreign crews, kept it supplied with the bare necessities of life. British communities in other cities suffered the same fate. "More food must come from Hongkong—no fresh milk here. The Club is empty, servants gone," complained a Swatow Briton in a communication to the North China Daily News. The strike in Hongkong also affected the removal of refuse. Among themselves, the strikers changed the Chinese name of Hongkong from Hsiangkang (fragrant harbor) to Ch'oukang (stinking harbor) and finally, as the strike throttled the rich British colony, to Szukang (dead harbor ) .41

"An attack has been made upon us, as representing the existing standards of civilization, by the agents of disorder and anarchy!" cried the governor of Hongkong. The strike was costing the standard-bearers of civilization about f250,000 a day. "The number of British steamers which entered the harbor of Canton . . . from August to December, 1924, varied between 240 and 160 each month," reported an official of the British Chamber of Commerce. "During the corresponding period of 1925, the number varied between 27 and 2 ,,42 Demands for armed intervention in defense of civilization in Hongkong were raised from the city's forsaken housetops. "Responsible British and Chinese residents of Hongkong are convinced that intervention by the British government and local action is imperative...." Otherwise "it is hopeless to expect the Canton anti-Reds to succeed without British assistance." Prompt military action, it was urged, could "easily place alternative and friendly Chinese authorities in power at Canton."43 But Whitehall saw more wisely than the frantic gentlemen in Hongkong and other ports that "alternative and friendly Chinese" would not be won in these circumstances by direct use of military force. Every effort was made to harry the Canton regime. There was probably not a militarist or bandit leader in Kwangtung province who did not in this period get his price for raids on the picket lines or promises to organize military opposition to the Canton government. But the more astute Britons probably realized that the best hope for the rise of alternative and friendly Chinese lay within the new Kuomintang movement itself.

The strike and boycott enabled the Kuomintang to consolidate its power in Kwangtung. At the end of June 1925 it organized and proclaimed a new National Government of China. In September its troops finally cleared hostile militarists' forces from the East River districts and by the end of the year all enemy forces in the province had been dispersed or defeated. With Kwangtung unified and under its control, the Kuomintang could begin to look northward toward the sources of real national power in Central and North China. It had achieved this position as a direct result of the mass movement that had risen so spectacularly in less than two years' time. A weapon of immense power had been forged. How it was to be wielded and who would wield it were the questions that now pushed themselves forward onto the order of the day.