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Working class politics in early twentieth century China experienced a drastic change after
1927. Before 1927, due to the facts about the development of class consciousness,
involvement of a large number of worker’s participants, a great amount of losses of may-
days and wages, and political demands about anti-warlords and anti-imperialism, the
pattern of working class politics was radical; whereas after 1927 the pattern of working
class movement politics became conservative in terms of the sectionalist performance,
decrease in the number of strikers and in amount of losses of man-days and wages, and
economic demands. By focusing on the 1927 historical shift in Shanghai labor
movements, this study aims to explain the drastic change in patterns of working class
politics before and after 1927.
This study has theoretical and empirical purposes. Theoretically, instead of a universal
rise of working class consciousness in the world as Karl Marx had predicted, the recent
scholarship about state-centered theory generally agrees that the nature of working class
politics in each country is determined by way how the state in that country treats working
class, which in turn is somehow shaped by the nature of state, such as control strategy, or
state capacity. Although the scholarship is generally convincing and has generated a
number of very fruit findings (Lipset 1983; Kritschelt 1986; Marks 1989; Mann 1993, chs
15, 17 and 18, 1995; Rueschemeyer et al 1992; Kriesi et al 1995; Kriesi 1996; Meyer and
Tarrow 1998, Collier 1999, and Goodwin 2001), the research, at this stage, still suffers
from two drawbacks. First, most studies along this tradition have mainly focused on
Western democracies. Secondly, they have concentrated on multiple nations at once, not
effectively controlling for the many other factors that might cause change. From an
empirical perspective, previous studies on this topic have neglected to examine the data
from a chronological perspective. In order to overcome these drawbacks, first and
foremost, in comparison with the mainstream studies, the focus of this study is China, a
Nationalist authoritarian regime 1927-1937. Secondly, by comparison with different
patterns of labor movements in Shanghai before and after 1927, this study actually keeps
almost all factors in control except for one major difference – new Nationalist regime
drastically adopted a distinctive measure to orchestrate labor movements after it reunified
most part of China in 1927. Before 1927, warlord regime lacked a systematic policy to
Convention