In Shanghai the workers had responded to the victorious advance of the Northern Expedition with a strike wave of unexampled depth and militancy. During 1926 in Shanghai there were, according to one official survey, 169 strikes affecting 165 factories and companies and involving 202,297 workers. Of these, 82, or 49.64 per cent, were wholly or partially successful. Another official survey listed 257 strikes, of which 53.89 per cent were wholly or partially successful.[1]
A steady depreciation in the valne of copper coins during the year had caused a sharp rise in the cost of living. Conditions for the workers worsened accordingly. In most cases the strike demands centred on wage increases, recall of discharged employees, dismissal of offensive foremen, dismissals without reason, strike pay, payment or increase of food allowances, reduction or limitation of working hours, improvements in factory equipment, living quarters, eating-rooms and general working conditions, abolition of corporal punishment of workers, bonuses, release of arrested or detained workers, and compensation for injuries sustained while at work. Other constantly recurring demands, like those for medical service, sick-leave pay, wages for apprentices, six-day week, prompt payment of wages, one month’s salary for women workers during confinement, non-replacement of adults by children, and pensions, were eloquent of conditions prevailing in Shanghai industry.
These strike battles were fought and more than half of them won under conditions of the most savage repression by the militarist and foreign authorities. The Shanghai General Labour Union functioned illegally. Few strikes were unaccompanied by arrests and the use of force against the workers. Such measures, however, made little impression on the strike wave. With the Nationalist occupation of Wuhan and Kiukiang, the Shanghai mass movement took on a more directly political coloration. The workers were preparing to intervene in their own way to achieve a political solution of their problems.
An abortive revolt of one of Sun Chuang-fang’s subordinates in Chekiang in October was made the signal for an attempted uprising in Shanghai on October 24. The Chekiang revolt failed. The uprising, in which the Communists left the initiative to a Kuomintang committee headed by Niu Yungchien, was put down with comparative ease by the minions of Sun Chuang-fang. No general strike was called nor were the masses as a whole mobilized for action. Niu, who held a mandate from the Central Kuomintang headquarters in Canton and who was an adherent of Chiang Kai-shek, had the double task of disturbing Sun’s rear in Chiang’s favour and limiting the influence and activities of the Communists. On the night of October 23 news of the defeat of the Chekiang revolt reached Shanghai. Niu did not pass the word along, but simply held himself aloof from the uprising scheduled for the next day. A few small bands of Communist workers attacked police stations during the night but were quickly overpowered. The workers did not fail to draw lessons from this experience and prepared themselves for more effective future action. Huge mass meetings on November 28 and December 12 at which anti-militarist and anti-imperialist feeling ran high proved the heralds of approaching insurrection.
In these months the political situation in Shanghai became exceedingly complex. It revolved around a movement which began as an attempt to agitate for the autonomy of the Shanghai area and which soon developed into agitation for the autonomy of Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhwei provinces. This movement became the rallying point for the political activities of all groups and classes. It was the focus for the banking and compradoring bourgeoisie led by Yu Ya-ching and the Chekiang-Kiangsu banking group, the Right-wing Kuomintang politicians, led by Wu Chih-hui, Chang Chi, and others, professional intriguers and negotiators like Huang Fu and C. T. Wang, the gangsters under Hwang Ching-yung, Tu Yueh-sen, and Chang Siao-ling, the Kuomintang committee headed by Niu Yung-chien, and the usual host of small fry, hangers-on, go-betweens, job-holders, and job-seekers. Even Sun Chuang-fang, the local war lord against whom the autonomy movement was presumably directed, began poking his finger in the autonomy pie. Hovering in the vicinity was Yang Yu-ting, the special envoy of Mukden, fishing for a deal between Chang Tso-lin and the Kuomintang. Dragging at the tail of all these bourgeois politicians and manipulators were the Chinese Communist Party and the Shanghai General Labour Union to whom the mass of the workers and the city poor looked for leadership.[2]
The worsening of Sun’s military position in December helped precipitate this curious and ill-mixed solution. Sun turned in desperation to an erstwhile ally, Chang Tsung-chang, war lord of Shantung and the most notoriously rapacious of his breed. Chang’s troops began moving south along the Tientsin-Pukow Railway. Shanghai capitalists heard with consternation reports that Chang was going to force on them ten millions in worthless military paper with a demand for specie payment. The threat of dislocation which accompanied the prospect of the occupation of Shanghai by the Fengtien-Shantung troops of Chang Tsung-chang helped turn the attention of the big banking interests towards Chiang Kai-shek, seemingly the most likely candidate capable of rescuing them from the offensive of the workers and city poor from below and the depredations of the Shantung war lord from above.
The imperialist authorities, the British and American more so than the Japanese, seemed to have found the complexities of the situation somewhat beyond them for the moment. The prevailing attitude among them during those early weeks of 1927 seemed to be to hear and protect the evils they had rather than fly to others they knew not of. For to your foreign business man, banker, soldier, consul, and missionary, this incomprehensible unrest, these endless slings and arrows for which they were the quivering targets, seemed the blows of a universally outrageous fortune. They could not make out who were the hares and who the hounds. So they barricaded their settlements behind gates and barbed wire. From overseas came regiment after regiment and whole fleets to protect them against all contingencies. Only the keenest among them* understood from the beginning that their bread was buttered on the same side as that of the Shanghai bankers and oriented themselves accordingly. They knew Chiang Kai-shek as a politically-minded militarist who wore a coat of many colours. If the Shanghai bankers were ready to back him, they knew they could follow suit. Only the workers of Shanghai stood between them and the consummation of the deal. Chiang’s coming would remove this obstacle. Thus by February when Chiang’s troops advanced into Chekiang, the situation was vastly clarified for all concerned except the workers and the Communist leaders for whom Chiang still remained the hero-general of the revolution.
* Men like Ferral, the banker in Andre Malraux’s Mans’ Fate.
The Nationalist troops occupied Hangchow on February 17 and next day advanced to Kashing, less than fifty miles from Shanghai. The vanguard moved up the railway as far as Sungkiang, only twenty-five miles away. In Shanghai all grew taut. The General Labour Union issued orders for a general strike effective the morning of the 19th in expectation of a farther Nationalist advance. The workers answered the call with machine-like precision. Within forty-eight hours more than three hundred and fifty thousand workers were out on the streets.[3] “Pompous Shanghai became like a graveyard. The tram-cars stopped running. Steamships were unable to leave the port. The Post Office closed down. The department stores ceased business and all the big factories were silent. The sirens could not call a single worker back to work.”[4]
The workers carried their fight into the streets. Clashes with the police began to occur. The Communist leadership, instead of placing itself at the head of the workers, looked to the representatives of the bourgeoisie for political direction. The slogans of the general strike were confined to: “Support the Northern Expeditionary Army!”, “Overthrow Sun Chuangfang!”, “Hail Chiang Kai-shek!” Even the slogans against imperialism disappeared. Here is the Communist Central Committee functioning, as told by Chiu Chiu-pei, one of its leading members:
... The proclamation of the strike was not an official decision of the Party. After the strike broke, it was not regarded as the first step toward an uprising. Not only among the petty bourgeois masses was there no kind of political propaganda, but even among the workers few were clear on the aims and purposes of the general strike ...
“Although the slogan ‘For a Citizens’ Delegates’ Assembly!’ was decided upon, it was not looked upon as a slogan of action which required calling upon all the workers in the factories and unions to elect delegates and inviting the small merchants to send their own representatives. There was no attempt to make this assembly a sort of Soviet of the national revolution, to transform it into an organ of action where issues of the workers’ strike, the merchants’ strike, and the passage from armed defence to armed uprising could be discussed. In other words, there was no effort to turn it into a de facto provisional revolutionary Government.
“The Party simply organized a provisional revolutionary committee composed of top delegates of the workers and representatives of the big bourgeoisie. Consequently the masses out on the streets had no chance to join in the ‘class struggle’ between the workers’ delegates and the bourgeois representatives ... The natural result was that the workers’ delegates yielded to the big bourgeoisie on every question ... Our Party sent the masses out into the streets and left them there for three days without paying any attention to them. We did not lead them forward, ordering an offensive along the path of the uprising. We did not even put up any defensive struggle. The workers’ capture of rifles and the executions of traitors were mostly spontaneous acts ...
“What we did was to bend all our efforts to negotiate with Niu Yung-chien, Yang Hsin-fu, Yu Ya-ching, Wang Shiao-laisimply to negotiate trying to utilize the conflicts among these various (bourgeois) groups. Such tactics amounted to this: The workers were on strike but were waiting for the permission of the big bourgeoisie before going any further. The petty bourgeoisie was left out in the cold, without leadership, without directives. We hoped that after conditions guaranteeing the victory were created (i.e. the successful outcome of negotiations between Niu Yung-chien and Li Pao-chang, the Shanghai garrison commander, on the one hand, and the big merchants, on the other), we hoped after all this to begin preparations for an uprising. This amounted objectively to betraying the working class!” [5]
Li Pao-chang and the police of the International Settlement and the French Concession did not wait for the outcome of the Communist negotiations with the bourgeoisie to take reprisals against the workers. Students and strikers caught distributing leaflets in the streets were beheaded or shot on the spot. On the very first day of the strike Li sent his execution squads into the streets with their great broadswords. Strike leaders arrested by the foreign police were sent out into Chinese territory for execution. In the Concessions and in Chinese territory alike police squads searched pedestrians and shops and created such a reign of terror in the streets that most shops, especially in Chapei and Nantao, boarded up. Hua Kang tells of a peddler in Pootung, the industrial area across the Whangpoo River, who cried his wares, “Mai ta ping!” (”I sell big cakes!”) Soldiers shot him dead, claiming he had cried “Ta pai ping!” (”Beat a retreat!”) Two metal workers and a tram conductor distributing leaflets were beheaded where they stood. At the West Gate the dread squads grabbed people reading some of the small coloured sheets and executed them. Three students caught speaking to crowds in Jessfield, a town on the outskirts of the Settlement, were similarly done brutally to death. The exact number killed was never known. Estimates ran up to two hundred. A foreign correspondent watched the killings:
“After the heads of the victims were severed by swordsmen, they were displayed on the top of poles or placed upon platters and carried through the streets. This sight in a parade through crowded thoroughfares had the effect of creating a veritable reign of terror, because the victims were denied the semblance of a trial. The executions occurred in the densest quarters. The executioners, bearing broadswords and accompanied by a squad of soldiers, marched their victims to a prominent corner, where the strike leaders were forced to bend over while their heads were cut off. Thousands fled in horror when the heads were stuck on sharp-pointed bamboo poles and were hoisted aloft and carried to the scene of the next execution.”[6]
Street fighting between the workers and the soldiers and police began on the 21st. The workers had already begun to take arms wherever they found them to put up a defence against the terror in the streets. Skirmishing was already under way when the Communist leaders finally fixed 6 p.m. on February 22 as the time for an uprising, which was supposed to coincide with the arrival of the Nationalist troops, who everyone believed were advancing up the Shanghai-Hangchow Railway. Three days of the general strike had already passed. Workers’ heads fell and blood flowed freely in the streets. The Communist leadership continued negotiating with Niu Yung-chien and the other representatives of the bourgeoisie. All this time the Nationalist forces never budged from Sungkiang. There was no military obstacle in the way of their advance on Shanghai. Between them and the metropolis, only twenty-five miles distant, there were only handfuls of demoralized northern soldiers, looting the villages as they fell back in disorder toward the city.
The failure of the Nationalist troops to march was no accident. Following the receipt of a wire from Niu Yung-chien advising “cessation of the advance for the time being,”[7] Chiang Kaishek had issued sudden orders for the suspension of all operations along the Kashing-Sungkiang front pending the drive on Nanking and the Shanghai-Nanking Railway. Military conditions entirely favoured the occupation of Shanghai, but Chiang did not mind giving Li Pao-chang time to slaughter the leaders of the Shanghai workers. This was specifically understood on both sides. “General Li has been trying to get into the Nationalist Party,” reported the well-informed China Weekly Review, “and, according to report, General Chiang Kai-shek has agreed to take him in ... It is even rumoured that conservative Kuomintangists were not altogether displeased at General Li’s bloody rampage, because it struck at the power, as well as the heads, of the radical or Communist wing of the Party.”[8] Confirmation came a few weeks later when Li was rewarded with the command of the Eighth Nationalist Army.[9]
The attempted uprising was suppressed with bloody slaughter. Fighting continued in the streets until the 24th, growing more sporadic, finally dying out altogether. Meanwhile the strike front had dissipated. Most of the workers, bewildered by the turn of events, had gone back to work. Arrests and executions continued. The foreign eye-witness adds the final touch: “... Many persons were arrested because they carried handbills which read: ‘Welcome, Chiang Kaishek, gallant commander of the Cantonese.’ These were found guilty and executed on the spot.”[10]
Despite the depth and extent of the general strike, despite the savage measures used to suppress the uprising that followed it, despite the continued confusion and vacillation of the Communist leadership, the events of February 19 to 24 proved to be only the prelude to a mightier spectacle still. Casualties had been heavy, but the workers’ organizations were still intact, and the workers had learned how to fight. Yesterday’s failure, far from crushing them, tempered them for to-morrow’s battles. But had their leaders learned from these fresh experiences?
The general strike of February 19 had squarely posed the issue of power. The Communist leadership, guided by the Comintern through Voitinsky, “debated whether or not to make an insurrection while the insurrection was already taking place,” and, while the workers fought, sought top combinations with the bourgeoisie. “The result was that we passed up an exceptionally favourable historical moment, an exceptional combination of circumstances. When the power was there in the streets, the Party did not know how to take it. Worse, it did not want to take it, it feared to take it,” wrote Voitinsky’s subordinates in their letter to the Comintern.[11] They compared the failure to the failure of the German insurrection in 1923, adding: “Only there was this difference—that at Shanghai the proletariat had notably greater forces at its disposal and chances on its side. Had it intervened in a determined manner, it could have conquered Shanghai for the revolution and transformed the relationship of forces within the Kuomintang.” If these three Russian delegates believed this to be the case in February, one may be permitted to wonder what they thought of the events that now followed. The February insurrection had failed, but four days after they dispatched their letter to Moscow the workers were going to seize upon a still more exceptionally favourable moment, and this time they would show they had learned how to fight and win their own battles. The Communist leadership, bound fast by its bloc with Chiang Kai-shek, would know only how to turn victory into defeat.
During the two weeks following the crushing of the insurrection, Chang Tsung-chang’s Fengtien-Shantung troops came down the Shanghai-Nanking Railway and took over the Shanghai area, Sun Chuang-fang retiring northward out of the picture. In the foreign settlements the imperialists increased their garrisons and fortified their gates and sandbag barricades. By the end of February there were 7,000 British troops, 1,500 American marines, 600 Japanese marines, in addition to landing parties from the growing fleet of foreign warships at anchor in the Whangpoo. Still more troops were en route . On February 25, the diplomatic body issued a bristling statement in which it proclaimed “the necessary steps to ensure the safety of the Settlement and the protection of its nationals.”[12]
Meanwhile military operations spread along three fronts. Nationalist forces moved down the Yangtze, occupying Anking and Wuhu and preparing to march on Nanking. A second force fated the Shanghai-Nanking Railway along a Chinkiang-Soochow line. The third point of Nationalist concentration was at Sungkiang, south-west of Shanghai on the Shanghai-Hangchow Railway. This front, quiet after the initial advance that had inspired the uprising of February 19-24, came to life again in March. Pai Chung-hsi, a Kwangsi general subordinate to Chiang Kai-shek, moved slowly down the line toward Shanghai. On the night of March 20 he reached Lunghua on the outskirts of the city. There he stopped. Negotiations were begun with Pi Shu-cheng, the Shantung garrison commander, for the “peaceful occupation” of the city by the Nationalists. The Fengtien-Shantung troops were completely demoralized, and many were already in flight. Their main body, reinforced by White Russian mercenaries, still held strategic positions, however, within the city.
Lunghua became the focal point for a thousand intrigues. Niu Yung-chien rushed to see General Pai. “Delay your entry a day,” he advised, “Pi Shu-cheng will surrender.”.[13] Orders came down the line from Chiang Kai-shek: “Do not attack Shanghai. Do not come into conflict with the imperialists. Wait.”[14]
In the city the workers were not interested in waiting. The General Labour Union issued the call for a general strike and insurrection to break simultaneously at noon on March 21. Delegates rushed to Lunghua to ask Pai Chung-hsi to march his troops in to help the workers’ offensive. He refused to move. They were still trying to persuade him when the workers struck out for themselves. The echoes of the noon whistles had barely died away before the firing began.[15]
The strike was complete. Practically every worker in Shanghai came out on to the streets. Their ranks were swelled when they were joined by shop employees and the hordes of the city poor. Between 500,000 and 800,000 people were directly involved.[16] Carefully laid plans for the insurrection were based upon a trained workers’ militia composed of 5,000 picked men, broken up into squads of twenty and thirty. For arms to begin with they had only a hundred and fifty Mauser pistols.[17] That meant less than one to a squad. The others came to grips with the police and the Shantung soldiery armed only with clubs, axes, and knives.
Fighting began simultaneously in seven parts of the city: Nantao, including the whole section south of the French Concession; Hongkew, the narrow strip surrounded on three sides by the International Settlement; Woosung, the fortified area near the confluence of the Whangpoo and the Yangtze rivers; East Shanghai, including the vast industrial district known as Yangtzepoo; West Shanghai, another industrial area adjacent to the Settlement; and Chapei, the most densely populated proletarian district in Shanghai.
Everywhere except in Chapei the fight for control of the police stations and local military posts was won by the workers before nightfall. Many soldiers and policemen tore off their uniforms and surrendered their arms and ammunition. Arms were taken everywhere, and by evening the attacking force of pickets was comparatively well armed. Furniture, boxes, and benches were dragged out into the streets. Doors were torn off hinges to build barricades around the police stations. Hundreds of tiny, smoky restaurants raced the preparation of food which women carried in steaming bowls up to the fightingline. Workers, men and women, bound strips of red rag around their right arms. These were the badges of the new proletarian army. By dark all police stations were occupied. The telephone and telegraph offices were taken. Electric power lines were cut.
“In Nantao ...” records Hua Kang,” the uprising began with an attack on the police station, which was entered shortly after 2 p.m. The telephone building and all the branch police stations were taken over in short order. Policemen were all disarmed. Arms were also taken at all the occupied stations. Shortly before four o’clock the workers believed themselves strongly enough armed to march on the arsenal at Kiangnan, at the south end of the city. There the soldiers surrendered without a fight. Exactly at four o’clock the workers came into possession of the rich stock of rifles and machine-guns. By that time the soldiers guarding South Station had fled, so it was a simple matter for the railway workers to take over and use the locomotives for the purposes of the battle. At five o’clock, less than five hours after the attack began, the workers massed in the yards of the Chinese Tramway Company. All Nantao was in their hands.
“In Hongkew no soldiers had been stationed. The workers had simply to deal with the police. Almost immediately after the uprising had begun, the police station surrendered and Hongkew belonged to the workers. But after the police had been driven out, they instigated gangsters to attack the labour unions and the occupied police stations ... The workers not only had to fight the organized enemy but they had to use their armed power to suppress the gangsters too ...”[18]
Ho Sen’s record illuminates this particular incident in Hongkew: “ ... The dispersed police discovered that the attackers were Communists, not members of the Kuomintang. They reassembled, and under the leadership of Niu Yungchien they counter-attacked ... So once more barricade fighting broke out. But eventually the workers won ...”[19]
In Pootung the workers formed ranks military fashion and marched on the Third Branch police station. It fell into their hands almost painlessly. Soldiers caught in flight were disarmed. Many of them joined the pickets in setting up a Provisional Workers’ Bureau of Public Safety, and together they took over the municipal offices of the whole district. Representatives of the Kuomintang crossed the river accompanied by armed gangsters and demanded control of the area. They were forcibly put back on their launches and ordered to return to Shanghai.
At Woosung the workers had put the soldiery to flight, and one detachment, not knowing the situation in the city, headed for town along the narrow-gauge railway that links Woosung to Shanghai. At Kiangwan they found the rails torn up by workers who had foreseen just such a retreat. The soldiers thereupon entrenched themselves in and around the Tientungan station, the point where the Kiangwan-Hongkew-Chapei districts meet along a contiguous boundary. Meanwhile, in Woosung the workers’ pickets assumed full control.
Vanguard detachments of about 50,000 workers marching toward Chapei after successfully taking over Yangtzepoo effected a junction with the fighters in Chapei, and units from both areas joined in an attack on Tientungan station.
Matters took a similar course in West Shanghai, where, after occupying police stations and seizing arms, the workers crossed the creek, joined the pickets at the Pootoo Road police station and forced its surrender after a sharp fight in which the picket leader and several policemen were killed. Then the workers gathered their forces, and from all directions marched toward North Station, in the heart of Chapei, where the fighting was the fiercest.
Resistance everywhere had crumpled quickly and the armed workers triumphed with comparatively little difficulty. At nightfall, however, the battle still raged in all the main streets of working-class Chapei. Chang Tsung-chang’s White Russian mercenaries cruised the main streets in armoured tars, raking the workers’ lines with machine-gun fire. An armoured train just back of North Station, also manned by White Russians, dropped shells on the workers’ position. From behind the North Chekiang Road gate of the Settlement, which commanded a full view of Paoshan Road, across which the workers surged to attack the station, British troops fired whenever the approach of any of the attackers gave them the pretext of “defending” the Settlement. Hundreds of Shantung soldiers were admitted to refuge and were later actually repatriated to Shantung by the foreign authorities.
With their ranks swelling during the afternoon as workers poured into Chapei from east and west, the pickets settled down to a siege of the six main strongholds of the enemy in Chapei—North Station, the Huchow Guild, the Commercial Press, the Fifth Police Station, the branch police station on Canton Road, and the branch police station on Chung Hwa Road. The seventh and last enemy position was at the other end of Paoshan Road, at Tientungan station. By late afternoon all the police stations and the Huchow Guild had fallen. The remaining three centres, North Station, the Commercial Press, and Tientungan station were strung out along a single line bisecting Chapei. The armed pickets massed between them. The Commercial Press, garrisoned by several hundred soldiers well armed with machine-guns and grenades, was entirely surrounded. At all three points fighting continued throughout the night.
“Fiercest fighting of all took place at North Station. Here, in order to drive back the workers, the enemy set fire to near-by houses, over a hundred of which were razed to the ground before the fire could be brought under control ... Pickets left the lines to get water and to haul in disabled fire-engines. The people were so enraged at the soldiers and so grateful to the workers that they joined in the uprising on their own. Old and young, working together, emptied their houses to build up the breastworks ... The soldiers cooped up in the station did not dare sally out, but satisfied themselves with random volleys at the workers. The White Russians opened fire again and once in a while a British shot would come whistling from across the Settlement border.
“On the morning of March 22, the enemy was obviously tired, but the workers continued the attack with spirit on all sides ... At noon the soldiers at Tientungan surrendered ... At 4.30 that afternoon some of the soldiers at the Commercial Press tried to escape, but were captured. The rest, seeing that their situation was hopeless, surrendered. The picket command moved in from the Fifth Police Station and from then on all forces were concentrated on capturing the last stronghold of the enemy, North Station.
“Since morning many other houses in that vicinity had been burned by the enemy. With water-pipes broken and no fire-fighting apparatus now available, the picket lines had been forced to fall back five times. Still the enemy did not dare move forward. But by this time stores of thousands of workers were massed behind the attack. Within an hour after the fall of the Commercial Press the White Russians fled into the Settlement, where they were admitted, and the Shantung soldiers dispersed in wild disorder.”;[20]
A white flag fluttered above North Station at six o’clock.
Such was the position when Nationalist troops of the First Division arrived at Markham Road after coming down from Lunghua. Hsueh Yoh, the division commander, had finally come, under the pressure of his own men, to help the workers despite orders to the contrary. By the time he arrived, the workers had done their job. All of Shanghai, with the exception of the International Settlement and the French Concession, which huddled in hate and fear behind their steel and barbed wire, was in their hands. Along Paoshan, Paotung, and Chingyung Roads, the sound of rifle-fire gave way to the joyous crackle of fireworks and the shouts of workers celebrating their victory. The railway union issued orders for the repair of destroyed rail sections. The team of three hundred workers organized to carry out these orders were the first in all Shanghai to resume work after the victory of the insurrection.
1 Chinese Economic Journal, March, 1927; Strikes and Lockouts in Shanghai since 1918, published by the Bureau of Social Affairs, Shanghai, 1933.
2 “The Fight for Shanghai,” International Press Correspondence, January 13, 1927.
3 Sources differ on the exact figure. Official foreign reports, which understated strike figures as a matter of policy, gave 106,000 ( China Year Book, 1928, p. 996). La Lettre de Shanghai gives 300,000. Hua Kang in The Great Chinese Revolution gives 360,000 with a list of factories and shops to support his figure. Hostile Chinese sources quote much higher totals. The Shanghai Bureau of Social Affairs lists 425,795 ( Strikes and Lockouts, p. 62). Ho Sen gives 500,000 ( Materials of Modern History, Shanghai, 1933, v. III).
4 Hua Kang, Great Chinese Revolution, Chap. V, Section 2.
5 Chiu Chiu-pei, Controversial Questions in the Chinese Revolution, Wuhan, 1927, Appendix I.
6 New York Herald-Tribune, February 21, 1927.
7 Ho Sen, “The Three Shanghai Uprisings,” Materials of Modern History, v. III, p. 170.
8 China Weekly Review, Shanghai, March 12, 1927.
9 China Weekly North China Herald, April 16, 1927
10 New York Herald Tribune, February 21, 1927.
11 La Lettre de Shanghai, pp. 0-11.
12 China Year Book,1928, p. 1266.
13 Hua Kang, Great Chinese Revolution, Chap. V, Section 3.
14 Ibid.
15 For striking vignettes of the Shanghai insurrection, see Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate .
16 Hua Kang and other Communist sources usually give 800,000 as the total involved. Strikes and Lockouts gives the number of actual strikers as 329,000.
17 A. Neuberg (Heinz Neumann), L’Insurrection Armée, Paris, 1931, P. 141.
18 Hua Kang, Great Chinese Revolution, Chap. V, Section 3.
19 Ho Sen, Materials, v. III.
20 Hua Kang, Great Chinese Revolution, Chap. V, Section 3.