Industrially, China was a country of enormous contradictions. For example, railways had developed rapidly after its defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war, as the military saw their enormous strategic advantage, but as late as 1925 there was still only about 12,300 km (7,500 miles) of track. Nearly all railways were in the eastern half of the country and used for military purposes or by foreign imperialist interests to service industrial and mining complexes. Five provinces had no railways at all and many only a few miles.
Goods produced by the world’s most developed technologies flooded into China and pauperised many of the rural population, creating a pool of cheap labour, ideal for exploitation by industry. After 1905, Chinese cities grew rapidly. By 1919 the population of Shanghai had reached over 1.9 million. In the four years from 1919 to 1923 Beijing grew from around 600,000 to over one million. Other cities such as Canton and the Wuhan complex grew into major urban centres.
The new working class was composed largely of peasant immigrants. Industrialisation offered the peasant not only additional income but the chance for an independent existence outside of a large family unit. This separate existence undermined the absolute authority of the head of the family and with it obedience to officialdom, leading to greater receptiveness towards new and revolutionary ideas – a process that had much in common with the growth and radicalisation of the Russian working class some fifty years before.[30]
The Great War of 1914-1918 had an enormous and sudden impact on China; Chinese-owned factories, mills and shipyards based on the latest capitalist technology and methods developed in places like Shanghai and Canton – a modern working class was being created. Nationally, industrial workers grew rapidly to two million in 1922 with another two million miners, railway workers and seamen, and an additional ten million or so handicraft workers. In Shanghai in 1923, 57 factories employed between 500 and 1,000 workers each, and another 49 employed over 1,000 workers each – by 1927 the number of factory workers in Shanghai was estimated to be about a quarter of a million.[31] Of the 12 million non-agricultural workers in China, around three-quarters worked in large enterprises employing more than 500 workers.
Nearly half of Shanghai’s workers were women, in silk, yarn, and cigarette factories but at this time the CCP tended to see them as a factor lowering the militancy of the workforce, rather than as an ally in the liberation struggle.[32] In the Shanghai cotton mills women between 14 and 19 years of age made up over half the work force. These women were, if possible, treated worse than the men, gang masters took 40% of their earnings, they slept 30-40 in a room, they could be beaten for errors in their work, they could be locked in cages on public display for infringements of discipline. This was the alternative to forced marriages or being sold into slavery by starving parents. It is understandable that the major complaints of these workers were not about pay but the conditions in which they worked and lived.[33]
The rise of Chinese production brought aspiring Chinese capitalists into collision with entrenched foreign interests. The national bourgeoisie faced serious problems due to the domination of foreign capital made worse by the concession whereby foreign goods paid no duty while Chinese goods did. Foreign capital owned nearly all the railways (either outright or as mortgages), more than half of the shipping in Chinese waters, and almost all merchant shipping. Foreign capitalists had a stranglehold on Chinese industry, sucking it dry. In such a situation the more entrepreneurial sections of the national bourgeoisie were prepared to support anti-imperialist parties which called for revolution.[34]
Once above a certain minimum number, the specific weight of the working class in a social revolution is the dominant factor and there was a general equivalence between Russia in 1917 and China in 1927. Although relatively small proportionally – a few million in a population of over 400 million – these concentrations of proletarians had two qualities that, given the correct political leadership, would be decisive in national democratic and socialist revolutionary struggles; they were located in the cities and they were the only social group which could offer the peasants a solution to the land question.[35]
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Franke, W. A Century of Chinese Revolution, 1851-1949, 1970, Blackwell, p95-99.
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Ho Kan-chih, A History of the Modern Chinese Revolution. 1960, PFLP, p12-15.
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Saich, T. The Origins of the First United Front in China, Brill, 1991, p116-117, p87.
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Conway, F. Women in the Chinese Revolution, Fourth International, 1951, 12(4)109-113).
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Basin, A. The Failure of the Chinese Communist Party 1921-27, MA Thesis. Montreal University, 1973.
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Morley, Op cit.