A century ago, workers in Hong Kong and Canton waged one of the longest continuous general strikes in history — sixteen months that shut down a central British commercial outpost and made Chinese workers, for a time, regional governors. Promise Li’s Jacobin essay on the centennial reconstructs both the strike’s machinery of self-government and why its memory has been flattened into patriotism.

The strike ran from June 1925 to October 1926, sparked by the May 30 Shanghai massacre:

  • British and Japanese imperialism had carved China into spheres of influence; police fired on students protesting the murder of a Chinese worker at a Japanese-owned mill
  • Hong Kong dockers, seamen, tram workers, and typesetters walked out; a British massacre of marchers at Shaji on June 23 widened the strike into a mass movement
  • At its peak the strikers’ congress represented over 150,000 workers and paralyzed Hong Kong — ship traffic fell to 16 percent of pre-strike levels

The remarkable part is how the strikers organized:

  • A Strikers’ Delegates Congress of 800 delegates, one per hundred workers, met every two days for over a year, publishing minutes in the magazine Workers’ Road
  • An elected strike committee ran patrols, a workers’ militia, and even a strikers’ court — which a correspondent for The Nation called “the only court in China where civil cases were properly tried”
  • Workers passed nearly three hundred political resolutions, democratizing Canton’s conservative union movement along the way
  • The demands included Hong Kong’s first mass struggle for universal suffrage, an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and a 40 percent rent cut

The strike’s tragedy is instructive. The young Communist Party never numbered more than a few hundred among 150,000 strikers and couldn’t build organizations independent of the Kuomintang umbrella — an opening Chiang Kai-shek exploited in his 1927 purge, which severed the party from the urban working class for two decades.

Li’s point is that the PRC’s official history has converted this workers’ revolt into patriotic myth, when its real legacy — workers’ democracy and Hong Kong’s unfinished fight for suffrage — points somewhere more radical: nationalism was never enough to dismantle capitalism, and independent workers’ organization remains the alternative to great-power chauvinism.