'Liberating' Asia: Strikes and Protest in Sydney and Shanghai, 1920-39

Fig. 1.

Portrait taken for the child labour campaign run by the YWCA in Shanghai in 1925. Facing title page in Threads: the Story of the Industrial Work of the YWCA in China.

'When we change from day to night shift we have to work sixteen hours . . . Ah! When shall we be treated as the European workers? We may be called the factory animals of the world of darkness.'

Petition addressed to Dame Adelaide Anderson from factory workers at the Lungwa Cement Works, Shanghai, 1925.¹

Testimony from Shanghai's Lungwa factory, like that quoted above, and from workers in China and India made its way into the Australian trade-union literature in the 1920s. Australian missionary and socialist groups working in Asia sent pamphlets, petitions and letters as well as factory photographs and inspection reports from Asian factories into trade-union offices in Australian cities. Australian Labor Party (ALP) leaders with union connections quoted extracts from these documents in Australia's Federal Parliament.² They were also read aloud at trade-union halls in Sydney and Brisbane, and reprinted in pamphlets and newspapers for tradesmen around Australia. In this way voices from colonial factories infiltrated Australian labour media at a time when working conditions were worsening there following the First World War. Australian union leaders used petitions from Asian factory workers to compare the conditions of Australian workplaces to those in places like Calcutta, Shanghai and Hong Kong. By so doing they incorporated the localized demands of Australian unionists for better wages and working conditions into a world-wide campaign for Asian workers' rights and the 'liberation of Asia' from European imperialisms. The letters that followed these petitions (from Li Hung Ling in Shanghai, Gopal Singh in Delhi) lie in the scrapbooks of Australian union leaders like George Waite, head of the Australian Seafarers Union in the 1920s. By articulating points of shared labour principle (a basic wage, a pension scheme) their Asian authors avoided making explicit racial divides along the Empire colour line.³ For example factory worker Li Hung Ling from Shanghai's Lungwa cement works reminded readers of Australia's Labor Daily and One Big Union newspapers that Australian workers needed to join Asian workers in their fight against capitalism despite their divergent positions in the imperial hierarchy of races.⁴ Without 'union solidarity' against the forces of capital, all would become 'factory animals of the world of darkness'.

Having battled for and won improved conditions for workers in the years before 1916, at the end of the First World War unions in Australia watched these achievements erode.⁵ In response workplace leaders organized increasingly desperate and violent strike action - including bread riots in Melbourne in 1919; coal strikes in Queensland; police strikes in Victoria in 1923; a seamen's strike across imperial ports (from South Africa to Perth and Hong Kong) in 1925.⁶ Unlike in Britain, where unions made headway in a wave of militancy from 1916-21, Australian unions lost membership after the war. Returned soldiers sought new lines of work and often failed to rejoin their pre-war unions, and from 1923 a conservative government legislated against unionism.⁷ At the same time inflation and the cost of living rose.⁸ Strikes increased in number but the political influence of the labour movement waned. The peak of Australian strike activity was in 1917, with five million workdays lost to industrial action, nearly ten times the figure for 1913. While strikes tapered off in 1918 they surged again in 1919 and 1920. This level of industrial action was not experienced again in Australia until the mid 1940s.⁹

National liberation movements in Asia ran parallel with these industrial conflicts in Australia. In 1919 British troops killed four-hundred Indian protesters at Amritsar; and in 1925 British-officered police shot into a crowd of Chinese unionists in Shanghai.¹⁰ One unexpected result of the Shanghai shootings was the reaction of some Australian factory workers in Sydney, who quickly likened their own struggle against 'imperial capitalism' to...