Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (review)

This volume is an insightful account of working-class activism as an integral part of the rise of modern Chinese nationalism in a major urban center. Its temporal scope of one-third of a century delineates key events and breakthrough developments from the immediate aftermath of the 1894/95 Sino-Japanese War, when foreign interests began to set up factories on Chinese soil as permitted by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, to the kmt purge of Chinese Communist elements during the 1927 White Terror. By focusing on the intertwined development of labor-class consciousness and nationalistic outbursts against foreign imperialism, the story unfolded in Shanghai, China's premier commercial and industrial hub, where foreign economic dominance was most blatant to Chinese eyes.

In a sense, this volume is complementary to Smith's earlier book, A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920-1927 (Honolulu, 2000), as well as his work on the Russian labor movement in St. Petersburg, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (New York, 1983). By adopting a longer time span for his coverage of Shanghai labor, the author has provided a much-needed modification of the persistent stereotypical idea that the modern Chinese labor movement began with, or was even a by-product of, the May Fourth Movement in 1919. This impression was indirectly fostered by the work of Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927 (Stanford, 1968), whose title and scope helped to perpetuate this impression, as well as the impression that it reached its climax during the mid-1920s kmt-ccp United Front and was decimated by the 1927 White Terror.

This reviewer has argued for the need to place the Chinese labor movement in a broader historical context with emphasis on the pre-May Fourth decades of labor's late Qing collective actions for patriotic causes and socioeconomic gains, as well as the post-1927 labor struggles for survival under the kmt dictatorship and the impact of world depression and Japanese aggression.¹ My own study of the Guangdong-Hong Kong labor movement since the late Qing suggests that economism and nationalism had been the twin motivating forces that propelled and shaped labor activism in the Pearl River Delta. Elisabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, 1993) has contributed to a more encompassing historical evolution of the Chinese labor movement in Shanghai both before 1919 and after 1927.

Smith's current volume is a delightful reinforcement to academic appreciation of the Chinese labor movement, which was definitely neither a Communist creation nor a leftist monopoly. As vividly described and cogently analyzed in the twelve substantive chapters of this book, Shanghai workers' class identity often co-existed with, was stimulated by, and was articulated through their nationalistic sentiments. Indeed, workers' collective identity in late Qing and Republican Shanghai (as well as elsewhere in urban China) was often the result of popular mobilization and multi-class collective protests against foreign imperialism. To paraphrase the title of Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Parties: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 (Stanford, 1962), Shanghai evinced a clear phenomenon of "labor nationalism." Six chapters in the Smith volume are case studies of labor's major collective actions from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the 1911 revolution, the labor protest of the 1910s, the 1919 May Fourth events, the 1925 May 30th Movement, and the Spring of 1927 high tide of labor mobilization as part of the United Fronts' National Revolution. All of these landmark events that constitute milestones in the upsurge of militancy and consciousness among Shanghai workers were also key events in China's anti-imperialist struggle.

By emphasizing labor nationalism in the making of the Shanghai working class, the author does not downplay the role of partisan ideological forces. Chapters...