JennyChan.PhDThesis.2014.FINAL

Class Consciousness and Collective Actions
Capitalist industrialization has greatly transformed labor relations in the European
countries since the late 18 th century. Large factories amassed peasants turned workers
in a specific mode of production, of which the primary goal is to maximize profits.
Karl Marx distinguishes between “class in itself” and “class for itself” of nascent
industrial workers:
Economic conditions first transformed the mass of the people of the
country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this
mass a common situation, common interests. The mass is thus already
a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle…the
mass bedcomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The
interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class
against class is a political struggle. 72
At the end of the 19 th century, foreign-owned factories began moving into coastal
China. With the inflow of industrial capital, local businessmen and compradors
gained more share in the emerging domestic and international markets. Port cities
such as Shanghai, Tianjin, and Guangzhou were magnets of young adults, peasants
and locals, to find new jobs.
In the 1920s, despite the small number of factory workers, miners, rickshaw pullers,
seamen, dockers, railway workers, and postal workers — an estimated 4 million
throughout urban China 73 — the militancy of labor in major economic sectors
should not be underestimated. The maturity of the first-generation proletarians in
early Chinese industrial capitalism was evident in their broad demand for humane
treatment and social and economic rights. French historian Jean Chesneaux 74
highlighted the significant contributions of Chinese workers in the nationalist
revolutions during the eight years of struggles between 1919 75 and 1927, when the
72 Karl Marx, [1847] 1995, Poverty of Philosophy, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 188-89.
73 Lynda Norene Shaffer, 1983, “The Chinese Working Class: Comments on Two Articles,” Modern
China 9(4), p. 461.
74 Jean Chesneaux’s monumental research findings in The Chinese Labor Movement 1919-1927 was
first published in French in 1962. The English translation by H. M. Wright appeared in 1968 (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press).
75 Chow Tse-tsung’s The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), now more than half a century, is still one of the
most important studies of the 1919 May Fourth period. Chow defined the Movement from 1917 to
1921, while some scholars extended it from 1915 (when the ew Youth magazine was published) to
1925 (when the May Thirtieth tragedy happened in Shanghai).
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