Grèves et Politique à Shanghai: Les Désillusions (1927-1932) (review)

Reviews 523 introduced in the eight essays found in this volume. This superb work has set a high standard by which any future book on American-Chinese, Smo-Soviet, and Soviet-U.S. relations will be measured. Also, any reader who is interested in the triangular relations among China, the United States, and Taiwan in the 1990s will also find this an excellent, well-written book worth reading. Chen-kuan Chuang The University ofSouth Alabama Chen-kuan Chuang is an associateprofessor ofhistory specializing in studies ofthe liberal movement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Alain Roux. Grèves et Politique à Shanghai: Les Désillusions (1927-1932). Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1994. 408 pp. Paperback Fr 250, isbn 2-7132-1022-4. This is the second work published byAlain Roux on the subject ofthe Shanghai working class: the first one dealt with Shanghai ofthe 1930s, and the current one deals with the period preceding, which witnessed the dramatic collapse ofthe revolutionary tide led by the Shanghai-based Chinese Communist Party. That tide rose with the May Thirtieth Movement of1925 and was drowned in blood by Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) on April 12, 1927. It thereafter seemed as ifthe CCP had snatched defeat from the very mouth ofvictory, and passionate partisans like Leon Trotsky and Harold Isaacs blamed the catastrophe on criminal bungling by Stalin's agents in China. Once lost, the initiative was never regained: the would-be "party ofthe proletariat" forever lost its ascendancy among the workers. What happened in 1949 was no victorious repeat of1927. It seems to this reviewer that no one, until now, has so clearly and convincingly established the reasons for the failure ofthe Chinese Communist venture into "proletarian revolution" as Roux has done. His research draws upon a stunningly wide assortment ofsources: union documents, reports ofconsular and police officers, leaflets and fliers, and Communist and Guomindang literature. He unravels a panoramic view ofthe Shanghai proletariat ofthe time—its history, cultural milieu, aspirations, and struggles—that is truly masterful. His laborious documentation makes it evident that the collapse ofthe Communist enterprise should by no means be attributed to the single combination ofbungling by Stalin 524 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 and violent repression conducted by the Guomindang in collaboration with the "imperialist" authorities ofthe French Concession and the International Settlement. Roux dispels many a myth. His analysis of the composition of the Shanghai proletariat of the 1920s is inspired by E. P. Thompson's masterpiece The Making ofthe English Working Class. Following Thompson and also Michelle Perrot, author of Les Ouvriers en grève: France, 1878-1890, Roux demonstrates the analytical hollowness ofstudies ofthe working class produced by "Marxist" scholars such as sinologist Jean Chesneaux in his pioneering work Le Mouvement Ouvrier Chinois de 1919 à 1927. He deplores the "mechanistic" character of their definition of the "proletariat," which consists oflittle more than a mathematical addition ofpeople who occupy the same position in relation to the "means ofproduction" and must, as a result, develop under the direction of an intellectual "vanguard," class consciousness , and an awareness of the historical mission assigned by Marx to the proletariat: that of emancipating mankind from "exploitation ofman by man." Perhaps Roux should have described Chesneaux et al. as Marxist-Leninists, rather than "Marxists," since modern Marxist scholars, notably Thompson and Perrot, are sufficiently sophisticated to encompass in their analyses of class such intangible factors as culture, religion, and enduring attitudes ofmind. Roux's study of the workers of Shanghai reveals that their activities, notably strikes, related more readily to "class experience" than to "class consciousness." What sense ofbrotherhood existed was based on shared interest and social ties ofpremodern kinds. The Shanghai working class of the 1920s was no more homogeneous than its English counterpart at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Even though workers and students formed the shock troops of the CCP at the time, large numbers of organized workers shied away from or even opposed the CCP. This is because Shanghai workers were a heterogeneous lot: they were men and women ofdifferent social, geographic, and cultural backgrounds, and motivated in their conduct by traditional ties to regions...